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After attempting-and largely failing-to delimit a distinct field of interpersonal pragmatics, this paper explores what is distinctive about interpersonal pragmatic practice; that is, what makes it different from the scholarly tradition of pragmatics. Three facets of practice are discussed: its aims, its approach to data (what aspects are brought into relatively clear focus) and its analysis of data. The common thread running through what is found is a changed, more modest, place for language, the understanding of which is no longer the assumed goal of scholarship, the size of examples of which for analysis have become larger and the use of which is no longer the single focus of analysis. It is argued that this last development should point the way to a particular procedure for analysing interaction. Accordingly, the paper proceeds to an example analysis of one piece of data.

Imagine a world without public signs: no street names, airports and train stations without information boards, public buildings without signs directing us to different floors and services, "naked" roads and motorways, supermarkets without marked aisles and price tags. Public signage is one of the most useful features of modern life, which most of us take for granted.We live in an increasingly globalised multilingual world, which builds complicated spaces. To navigate through world cities, we rely on public signs. That is why "wayfinding", a term coined by the American urban planner Lynch (1960), has become a special professional field of wayfinding designers. It has grown exponentially since the 1960s, as businesses realised that well organised wayfinding systems can have financial benefits. The field has been expanded to include marketing and advertising, which are omnipresent in commercial signs. "Written language is an important part of these multimodal messages" (Gorter, 2012: 1) and it is not surprising that the development of wayfinding also attracted the attention of linguists interested in understanding how languages and images in public spaces can be interpreted as "maps of meaning" (Jackson, 1989) which represent our society and reflect the complex socio-cultural and political forces that create it. Their investigations extended beyond commercial public signage and included noncommercial, official and non-official signs. These are known as Linguistic Landscape studies, a rapidly developing multidisciplinary field, which is proving of interest to researchers from a variety of different backgrounds, including linguistics, sociology, anthropology, urban studies, politics, semiotics, education, and economics. The common interest of all is the understanding that LL is the scene where public space is symbolically constructed (Ben-Rafael, Shohamy, Hasan Amara, Trumper-Hecht, 2006;. The construction is created by the markings of objectsmaterial and immaterialwith linguistic tokens. These tokens may be analysed according to the languages used, their importance and prominence in the LL, as well as their syntactic and semantic aspects.The term "Linguistic Landscape" (LL) can be traced to an article published in 1997: "The language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration" (Landry & Bourhis, 1997: 25). But the interest in languages in public spaces has a longer history. The first sociolinguistic studies, which investigated public signage appeared in the 1970s (Masai, 1972;Tulp, 1978). Masai's study focused on language choices in what were perceived as monolingual areas of Tokyo. It discovered the presence of English in addition to Japanese. Tulp's research in the officailly bilingual Brussels uncovered the predominance of French. In the 1980s and 1990s, these projects were followed by a number of idiosyncratic studies of the ro...

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