This issue includes four papers: (1) "Context in Children's Speech," by Jenny Cook-Gumperz and John J. Gumperz, demonstrates how context is used as a framing device for semantic interpretation of messages. It is suggested that context is not simply background information but part of the total message, entering into the information communicated, and unavailable outside linguistic and semantic communication. (2) "Socio-Ecological Constraints on Children's Communicative Strategies," by Jenny Cook-Gumperz and William A. Corsaro, expands the notion of context to the entire social-physical setting. The study's setting was a nursery school, in which different locations take on a specific social character and enter into children's choices of communicative strategies. (3) "The Sociolinguistic Significance of Conversational Code-Switching," by John J. Gumperz, treats code-switching as a communicative phenomenon, in which speakers build on others' knowledge of alternative grammatical systems, and the social assumptions these imply, to generate indirect conversational inferences. (4) "Social Network and Language Shift," by John J. Gumperz, reports on an ethnographic study which seeks to provide insights into the social and linguistic causes of language shift by intensive analysis of communication in face-to-face groups. (CHK)