These are aspects of the spoken interaction between two or more people that may influence the way we subsequently talk. Micro-contextual factors include: ‘pairs’ of actions (such as question/answer, greeting/greeting, offer/acceptance or refusal), one person’s laughter generating laughter from others, generally only one person talking at any one time, one person starting to talk if another signals that they are coming to the end of what they want to say. Micro-contextual factors are also known as ‘local’ factors and get created during the interaction. Whether they actually influence a specific interaction will depend on the nature of the communicative task and, possibly, macro-contextual factors.