Language permeates our daily lives: when we ask for a coffee at the bar, when we are discussing with our friends, when we greet someone or introduce ourselves for a job interview, we communicate using words and expressions of a certain language. Conversating is a spontaneous and apparently elementary activity, but in fact it involves highly complex and sophisticated mechanisms. Through numerous examples and illustrating the most recent linguistic and philosophical theories, this book provides the reader with a useful "toolbox" to understand and analyze the functioning of that particular type of action that is the linguistic act.