An inquiry into the pragmatics of speaker- and hearer-reference. The theoretical part covers three topics: (i) the category of speaker and hearer as opposed to the category of nonparticipants in the speech act, (ii) the interactional roles of speaker and hearer as defined by the illocutionary point of the speech act and the preconditions underlying its successful performance, and (iii) the decomposition of the speech act as a model for describing strategies in verbal interaction. (iii) is used in the descriptive part, aimed at surveying the different linguistic realizations of standard, focalizing, and defocalizing reference to the speaker and the hearer in a language-specific analysis of Spanish.