This highly insightful and stimulating collection of relevant studies on verbal performance (artistic action and event), seen from the point of view of sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, folklore studies, and semiotics, represents a clear assembly of perspective and methodology. The initial essay is succinct and suggestive, and the scope of the theory is exemplified by four supplementary essays. The book provides students of folklore, anthropology, linguistics, or any field interested in performance and its verbal dimensions with excellent background material for a contrastive approach to narrative, ritual, and ceremonial forms of verbal behavior in different sociocultural settings.