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Dialogue Studies
The series "Dialogue Studies" takes the notion of <em>dialogicity</em> as central; it starts from the classical view of ‘<em>language as dialogically directed</em>’ and encompasses every type of language use, workaday, institutional and literary.<br /> <br />By covering the whole range of language use, the growing field of dialogue studies comes close to pragmatics and studies in discourse or conversation. The concept of dialogicity, however, provides a clear methodological profile and allows us to structure the pragmatic ‘perspective’ and the ‘pan-discipline’ of discourse. It focuses on methodological premises such as: action and reaction; the integration of the human abilities of speaking, thinking and perceiving; dialogic interaction as the intentional effort to pursue definable goals and interests.<br /> <br />The series aims to cross disciplinary boundaries and considers a genuinely interdisciplinary approach necessary for addressing the complex phenomenon of dialogic language use. All disciplines that deal with the human ability of dialogic interaction from different perspectives, in everyday interaction as well as in institutional contexts, are addressed: linguistics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, rhetoric, anthropology, applied linguistics, culture sciences, the media sciences, economics, jurisprudence.<br /> <br />The current state of research in science in general is characterized by a turning point from closed rule-governed models to open models of probability. In this sense, <em>Dialogue Studies </em>aims to support new ways of theorizing and opens up innovative cross-disciplinary advances in the complex. The series will be of interest to existing theoretical approaches to competence as well as empirical approaches to performance, bridging the gap between competence and performance by focusing on human beings and their competence-in-performance.<br /> <br />This peer reviewed series will include monographs, thematic collections of articles, and introductory textbooks in the relevant areas.
33 results
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Action and Agency in Dialogue
Author(s): François Cooren and Bruno LatourPublication Date June 2010More LessWhat happens when people communicate or dialogue with each other? This is the daunting question that this book proposes to address by starting from a controversial hypothesis: What if human interactants were not the only ones to be considered, paraphrasing Austin (1962), as “doing things with words”? That is, what if other “things” could also be granted the status of agents in a dialogical situation? Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, incarnation, and ventriloquism proposes to explore this unique hypothesis by mobilizing metaphorically the notion of ventriloquism. According to this ventriloqual perspective, interactions are never purely local, but dislocal, that is, they constantly mobilize figures (collectives, principles, values, emotions, etc.) that incarnate themselves in people’s discussions. This highly original book, which develops the analytical, practical and ethical dimensions of such a theoretical positioning, may be of interest to communication scholars, linguists, sociologists, conversation analysts, management and organizational scholars, as well as philosophers interested in language, action and ethics.
This book won the prestigious NCA LSI 'Old Chestnut' Award 2019!
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Approaches to Slavic Interaction
Editor(s): Nadine Thielemann and Peter KostaPublication Date August 2013More LessThis volume provides an overview of current research priorities in the analysis of face-to-face-interaction in Slavic speaking language communities. The core of this volume ranges from discourse analysis in the tradition of interactional linguistics and conversation analysis to newer methods of politeness research. A further field includes empirical and interpretive methods of modern sociolinguistics and statistical analysis of spoken language in casual and institutional talks. Several papers focus on a semantic or syntactic analysis of talk-in-interaction by trying to show how interlocutors use certain lexical, grammatical, syntactic and multimodal or prosodic means for the management of interaction in performing specific actions, genres and displaying negotiations of epistemic, evidential or evaluative stances. The volume is rounded out by contributions to the theory of politeness where strategies of face-work in casual as well as institutional discourse are analyzed, or in which social tasks entertained by code-switching and language alternation within the interaction of bilinguals are discussed.
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Authoring the Dialogic Self
Author(s): Gergana VitanovaPublication Date July 2010More LessThis book offers a truly interdisciplinary perspective on key socio-cultural aspects of second language learning. Building on Bakhtin’s philosophy of language and the self, it examines the complex intersections among gender, culture, and agency in the everyday discursive practices of immigrants. Bakhtin’s dialogic framework still remains on the periphery of second language acquisition research. The book embraces not only Bakhtin’s well-known notion of dialogue but also his core concepts of responsibility and ethics in the analysis of immigrants’ narrative samples. The significance of narratives is underscored throughout the book, and a dialogic, discourse-centered approach to narrative as a genre is suggested.
Authoring the Dialogical Self targets a range of disciplines. Scholars in applied linguistics, narrative studies, cultural psychology, and communication studies will find the discussed concepts relevant. The rich data samples and detailed analysis make the book appropriate for graduate courses in TESOL, language and identity, or language and gender.
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Communicating Certainty and Uncertainty in Medical, Supportive and Scientific Contexts
Editor(s): Andrzej Zuczkowski, Ramona Bongelli, Ilaria Riccioni and Carla CanestrariPublication Date November 2014More LessThis volume is a collection of 18 papers on the communication of certainty and uncertainty. The first part introduces recent theoretical developments and general models on the topic and its relations with modality, subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, epistemicity, evidentiality, hedging, mitigation and speech acts. In the second part, results from empirical studies in medical and supportive contexts are presented, all of which are based on a conversational analysis approach. These papers report on professional dialogues including advice giving in gynecological consultations, breaking diagnostic bad news to patients, emergency calls, addiction therapeutic community meetings and bureaucratic-institutional interactions. The final part concerns the qualitative and quantitative analysis of corpora, addressing scientific writing (both research and popular articles) and academic communication in English, German, Spanish and Romanian. The collection is addressed to scholars concerned with the topical issues from a theoretical and analytical perspective and to health professionals interested in the practical implications of communicating certainty or uncertainty.
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Communicational Criticism
Author(s): Roger D. SellPublication Date August 2011More LessFurther developing the line of argument put forward in his Literature as Communication (2000) and Mediating Criticism (2001), Roger D. Sell now suggests that when so-called literary texts stand the test of time and appeal to a large and heterogeneous circle of admirers, this is because they are genuinely dialogical in spirit. Their writers, rather than telling other people what to do or think or feel, invite them to compare notes, and about topics which take on different nuances as seen from different points of view. So while such texts obviously reflect the taste and values of their widely various provenances, they also channel a certain respect for the human other to whom they are addressed. So much so, that they win a reciprocal respect from members of their audience. In Sell’s new book, this ethical interplay becomes the focus of a post-postmodern critique, which sees literary dialogicality as a possible catalyst to new, non-hegemonic kinds of globalization. The argument is illustrated with major reassessments of Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, Dickens, Churchill, Orwell, and Pinter, and there are also studies of trauma literature for children, and of ethically oriented criticism itself.
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Dialogic Ethics
Editor(s): Ronald C. Arnett and François CoorenPublication Date June 2018More LessDialogic Ethics offers an impressionistic picture of the diversity of perspectives on this topic. Daily we witness local, regional, national, and international disputes, each propelled by contention over what is and should be the good propelling communicative direction and action. Communication ethics understood as an answer to problems often creates them. If we understand communication ethics as a good protected and promoted by a given set of communicators, we can understand how acts of colonialism and totalitarianism could move forward, legitimized by the assumption that “I am right.” This volume eschews such a presupposition, recognizing that we live in a time of narrative and virtue contention. We dwell in an era where the one answer is more often dangerous than correct.
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Dialogicity in Written Specialised Genres
Editor(s): Luz Gil-Salom and Carmen Soler-MonrealPublication Date July 2014More LessDialogicity in Written Specialised Genres analyses how human beings intentionally establish a network of relations that contribute to the construction of discourse in different genres in academic, promotional and professional domains in English, Spanish and Italian. The chapters in the present volume investigate individual voices, both those assumed by the writer and those attributed to others, and how they act interpersonally and become explicit in the discourse. From a number of different research approaches, contributing authors focus on various textual components: self-mention, impersonation, attribution markers, engagement markers, attitude markers, boosters, hedges, reporting verbs, politeness strategies and citations. The collection is unusual in that it addresses these issues not only from the perspective of English, but also from that of Spanish and Italian. It thus represents a refreshing reassessment of the contrastive dimension in the study of voice and dialogic relations, taking into consideration language, specialised fields and genre. The volume will appeal to researchers interested in language as multidimensional dialogue, particularly with regard to different written specialised texts from different linguistic backgrounds. Novice writers may also find it of help in order to attain a greater understanding of the dialogic nature of writing.
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Dialogue across Media
Editor(s): Jarmila Mildorf and Bronwen ThomasPublication Date January 2017More LessWith chapters on social media, videogames and human-machine communication, Dialogue across Media provides a comprehensive overview of the role of dialogue in contemporary media. Drawing on the expertise of scholars and practitioners from multiple fields and disciplines, including screenwriters, literary critics, linguists and new media theorists, each chapter provides an in-depth analysis of dialogue in action. Together, these chapters demonstrate the unique energy and versatility that dialogic forms can offer artists and readers alike, and the special role that dialogue plays in helping us to understand the complexities and contradictions of human interaction.
Dialogue across Media provides an essential resource for students and specialists in many fields concerned with dialogue, including language and literature, media and cultural studies, narratology and rhetoric.
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Dialogue and Culture
Editor(s): Marion Grein and Edda WeigandPublication Date December 2007More LessThe volume deals with the relationship between language, dialogue, human nature and culture by focusing on an approach that considers culture to be a crucial component of dialogic interaction. Part I refers to the so-called ‘language instinct debate’ between nativists and empiricists and introduces a mediating position that regards language and dialogue as determined by both human nature and culture. This sets the framework for the contributions of Part II which propose varying theoretical positions on how to address the ways in which culture influences dialogue. Part III presents more empirically oriented studies which demonstrate the interaction of components in the ‘mixed game’ and focus, in particular, on specific action games, politeness and selected verbal means of communication.
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Dialogue and Rhetoric
Editor(s): Edda WeigandPublication Date October 2008More LessThe volume deals with the relationship between dialogue and rhetoric. The actual state of the art in dialogue analysis is characterized by a tendency to overcome the distinction between competence and performance and to combine components from both sides of the dichotomy, in a way which includes rules as well as inferences. The same is true of rhetoric: the guidelines proposed here no longer state that rationality and persuasion are mutually exclusive but suggest that they interact in what might be called the ‘mixed game’. The concept of a dialogic rhetoric thus poses the question of how to integrate the different voices. Part I of the volume assembles several ‘rhetorical paradigms’ which are applied to real-life performance. Part II on ‘rhetoric in the mixed game’ contains a selection of papers which illustrate the interaction of various components. The Round Table discussion in Part III brings proponents of different paradigms face to face with each other and shows how they justify their own positions and present arguments against rival paradigms.
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Dialogue in Intercultural Communities
Editor(s): Claudio BaraldiPublication Date October 2009More LessThis book explores the meanings of educational interactions which aim to promote peace and positive relationships. This analysis is based on theories of communication and active participation in education systems, in particular in intercultural settings. The book investigates the cultural presuppositions of dialogues which can empower participants’ expressions in interactions through the management of discussions and conflicts. These presuppositions are observed in the use of language in participants’ narratives and interactions. The book draws on the fine-grained analysis of a large corpus of questionnaires, interviews and videotaped interactions collected in 12 camps promoted by CISV (Children’s International Summer Villages), an international organisation which is active in 70 countries. The analysis encompasses both organisational meetings and educational activities involving adults, children and adolescents of several nationalities, and shows the importance of the different ways in which the adults who coordinate these meetings and activities act and use language. These different ways of acting in interactions can promote both empowering dialogues and disempowering monologues, with important consequences for the fulfilment of educational purposes. For its contents, theoretical framework and methodology, the book may be of interest for educators, teachers, experts in mediation, scholars and students in cultural sociology, sociolinguistics, communication studies, discourse studies and dialogue studies.
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Dialogue in Multilingual and Multimodal Communities
Editor(s): Dale Koike and Carl S. BlythPublication Date July 2015More LessDialogue in Multilingual and Multimodal Communities contains a collection of new articles that approach the study of dialogue through the construct of the ‘community’, that is, a group of people who come together for any number of reasons; e.g. geographical location, a common goal, a search for unity or bonding, or a particular set of circumstances. The authors address a wide range of topics such as dialogic skills as situated practice, the learning of culture, and the negotiation of identities between native speakers and L2 learners. This volume also investigates how native and non-native speakers learn various community-based aspects of dialogic interaction, such as how to interpret social contexts, stances, frames and gestures. Despite different methodologies and frameworks, the studies demonstrate that native speakers and L2 learners alike use multiple ‘vocalizations’ of a language.
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Dialogue in Politics
Editor(s): Lawrence N. Berlin and Anita FetzerPublication Date November 2012More LessThe volume considers politics as cooperative group action and takes the position that forms of government can be posited on a continuum with endpoints where governance is shared, and where hegemony dictates, ranging from politics as interaction to politics as imposition. Similarly, dialogue and dialogic action can be superimposed on the same continuum lying between truly collaborative where co-participants exchange ideas in a cooperative manner and dominated by an absolute position where dialogue proceeds along prescribed paths. The chapters address the continuum between these endpoints and present illuminating and persuasive analyses of dialogue in politics, covering motions of support, the relationship between politics and the press, interviews, debates, discussion forums and multimodal media analyses across different discourse domains and different cultural contexts from Africa to the Middle East, and from the United States to Europe.
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Dialogue in Spanish
Editor(s): Dale Koike and Lidia Rodríguez-AlfanoPublication Date June 2010More LessDialogue in Spanish provides a strong theoretical and empirical foundation for the study of dialogue. This edited collection of twelve original studies contributes to a broad comprehension of dialogue in two general contexts: personal interactions among friends and family; and public speech, such as political debates, medical interviews, court translations and service encounters. The studies, written by authors from Canada, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, the United States and Venezuela, present an in-depth look at issues and elements of dialogue such as irony, narrativity, discourse markers, coherence, conflict and expectations. Background research on dialogue grounds the articles in such areas as discourse analysis, pragmatics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and linguistics. The book will prove useful to those who study conversational interaction, pragmatics, and discourse analysis as applied to various functions and contexts, and it will be of particular interest to researchers and students of linguistics, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, communications and education.
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Dialogue – The Mixed Game
Author(s): Edda WeigandPublication Date December 2010More LessThe ‘Mixed Game Model’ represents a holistic theory of dialogue which starts from human beings’ competence-in-performance and describes how language is integrated in a general theory of human action and behaviour. Human beings are able to adapt to changing conditions and to pursue their interests by the integrated use of various communicative means, mainly verbal, perceptual and cognitive. The core unit is the dialogic action game or ‘the mixed game’ with human beings at the centre acting and reacting in cultural surroundings. The key to opening up the complex whole is human beings’ nature. The Mixed Game Model demonstrates how the different disciplines of the natural and social sciences and the humanities are mutually interconnected. After a detailed overview of the state of the art, the fundamentals of the theory are laid down. They include a typology of action games which ranges from minimal games to complex institutional games. The description is illustrated by analyses of authentic games.
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Dialogue, Science and Academic Writing
Author(s): Zohar LivnatPublication Date January 2012More LessThis book investigates the dialogic nature of research articles from the perspective of discourse analysis, based on theories of dialogicity. It proposes a theoretical and applied framework for the understanding and exploration of scientific dialogicity.
Focusing on some dialogic components, among them citations, concession, inclusive we and interrogatives, a combined model of scientific dialogicity is proposed, that reflects the place and role of various linguistic structures against the background of various theoretical approaches to dialogicity.
Taking this combined model as a basis, the analysis demonstrates how scientific dialogicity is realized in an actual scientific dispute and how a scientific project is constructed step by step by means of a dialogue with its readers and discourse community. A number of different patterns of scientific dialogicity are offered, characterized by the different levels of the polemic held with the research world and other specific researchers – from the “classic”, moderate and polite dialogicity to a direct and personal confrontation between scientists.
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Disability in Dialogue
Editor(s): Jessica M.F. Hughes and Mariaelena BartesaghiPublication Date September 2023More LessWhat would it mean to invite disability into dialogue? Disability in Dialogue attunes us to the dialogues of and about disability. In the pages of this book, we ask readers to consider the dialogic constitution of disability and to imagine its reformulation. We find the voices, bodies, social norms, visceral experiences, discourses, and acts of resistance that materialize disability in all its dialogic and enfleshed complexity: tensions, contradictions, provocations, frustrations and desires. This volume makes a unique contribution, bringing together authors from disciplines as diverse as communication, dialogue studies, psychology, sociology, design, rhetoric and activism. Because we take dialogue seriously, this book is designed to be brave as we examine the ways of being in the world that dialogic practices engender and allow, as well as beckon to continue. By way of a variety of frameworks, such as discourse analysis, dialogue studies, narrative analysis, and critical approaches to discourse, the chapters of this book take us through a polylogue of and about disability, demanding that we consider our own roles in bringing forth disabled ways of being and how we might, instead, choose ways that enable our common existence.
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Educating in Dialog
Editor(s): Sebastian Feller and Ilker YenginPublication Date November 2014More LessEducating in Dialog: Constructing meaning and building knowledge with dialogic technology contains a collection of new articles on the relationship of learning, dialog and technology. The articles combine different views of dialogic learning stemming from a multiplicity of discipline backgrounds and research interests including educational design, educational science, epistemology, cognitive linguistics, cultural studies, and mobile learning, to name a few. The authors discuss and explore a variety of topics that range from knowledge building over learning communities to dialogic technologies for knowledge co‐construction. Discussing technology and learning against this broad background is indispensable, as the gap between what learners actually need for successful learning and what current technology offers becomes increasingly wide. This book provides thought-provoking views of recent developments in the area of technology supported learning for everyone who is interested in educational technologies, collaborative learning, and dialog.
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Epistemic Stance in Dialogue
Author(s): Andrzej Zuczkowski, Ramona Bongelli and Ilaria RiccioniPublication Date March 2017More LessThis volume presents a theoretical and practical model for analysing epistemic stance in dialogues, i.e. the positions both epistemic (commitment) and evidential (source of information) which speakers take in the here and now of communication with regard to the information they are conveying and which they express through lexical and morphosyntactic means.
According to the results of our studies of different types of corpora, these positions can be reduced to three basic ones: Knowing, Unknowing, Believing (KUB).
In the first part of the book, we present the KUB model and its psychological and linguistic backgrounds. In the second part, we provide an exemplary application of the model, by presenting the qualitative and quantitative analysis of dialogues belonging to different genres and contexts.
The volume is addressed to scholars concerned with the topical issues from a theoretical and analytical perspective.
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The Ethics of Literary Communication
Editor(s): Roger D. Sell, Adam Borch and Inna LindgrenPublication Date September 2013More LessViewing literature as one among other forms of communication, Roger D. Sell and his colleagues evaluate writer-respondent relationships according to the same ethical criterion as applies for dialogue of any other kind. In a nutshell: Are writers and readers respecting each other’s human autonomy? If and when the answer here is “Yes!”, Sell’s team describe the communication that is going on as ‘genuine’. In this latest book, they offer new illustrations of what they mean by this, and ask whether genuineness is compatible with communicational directness and communicational indirectness. Is there a risk, for instance, that a very direct manner of writing could be unacceptably coercive, or that a more indirect manner could be irresponsible, or positively deceitful? The book’s overall conclusion is: “Not necessarily!” A directness which is truthful and stimulates free discussion does respect the integrity of the other person. And the same is true of an indirectness which encourages readers themselves to contribute to the construction and assessment of ideas, stories and experiences – sometimes literary indirectness may allow greater scope for genuineness than does the directness of a non-literary letter. By way of illustrating these points, the book opens up new lines of inquiry into a wide range of literary texts from Britain, Germany, France, Denmark, Poland, Romania, and the United States.
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From Pragmatics to Dialogue
Editor(s): Edda Weigand and Istvan KecskesPublication Date September 2018More LessThis volume aims at building bridges from pragmatics to dialogue and overcoming the gap between two ‘circles’ which have cut themselves off from each other in recent decades even if both addressed the same object, ‘language use’. Pragmatics means the study of natural language use. There is however no clear answer as to what language use means. We are instead confronted with multiple and diverse models in an uncircumscribed field of language use. When trying to transform such a puzzle of pieces into a meaningful picture we are confronted with the complexity of language use which does not mean ‘language’ put to ‘use’ but represents the unity of a complex whole and calls for a total change in methodology towards a holistic theory. Human beings as dialogic individuals use language as dialogue which allows them to tackle the vicissitudes of their lives. Dialogue and its methodology of action and reaction can be traced back to human nature and provides the key to the unstructured field of pragmatics. The contributions to this volume share this common ground and address various perspectives in different types of action game.
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Language and Social Interaction at Home and School
Editor(s): Letizia CaroniaPublication Date October 2021More LessAs Ragnar Rommetveit put it forty years ago, dialogue is “the architecture of intersubjectivity”: a tool not only for maintaining yet also constantly transforming our life-worlds. The volume advances and empirically illustrates the role of talk-in-interaction in displaying, ratifying, creating yet also defying the crucial dimensions of the world we live in. This process is particularly noticeable in children’s primary social worlds, i.e. home and school where they are socialized to becoming competent members of the communities they (will) live in. Drawing on fifty years of research on children's socialization through language and social interaction, the volume provides new multidisciplinary insights and updated empirical data on the process through which cultures, identities, and knowledge are brought into being through the everyday dialogues that animate children’s life at home and school. The volume addresses a specialized readership and its interdisciplinary framework ensures that it will be of great interest to scholars from different academic fields, such as social and developmental psychology, anthropology, education, developmental linguistics, sociolinguistics and developmental pragmatics.
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Language as Dialogue
Author(s): Edda WeigandEditor(s): Sebastian FellerPublication Date December 2009More LessWith her theory of ‘Language as Dialogue’, Edda Weigand has opened up a new and promising perspective in linguistic research and its neighbouring disciplines. Her model of ‘competence-in-performance’ solved the problem of how to bridge the gap between competence and performance and thus substantially shaped the way in which people look at language today.
This book traces Weigand’s linguistic career from its beginning to today and comprises a selection of articles which take the reader on a vivid and fascinating journey through the most important stages of her theorizing. The initial stage when a model of communicative competence was developed is followed by a gradual transition period which finally resulted in the theory of the dialogic action game as a mixed game or the Mixed Game Model. The articles cover a wide range of linguistic topics including, among others, speech act theory, lexical semantics, utterance grammar, emotions, the media, rhetoric and institutional communication. Editorial introductions give further information on the origin and theoretical background of the articles included.
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Lexical Meaning in Dialogic Language Use
Author(s): Sebastian FellerPublication Date September 2010More LessLexical Meaning in Dialogic Language Use addresses a number of central issues in the field of lexical semantics. Starting off from an action-theoretical view of communication meaning is defined as something that speakers do in dialogic language use. Meaning as ‘meaning-in-use’ opens up a new perspective on a number of aspects: how can we define the lexical unit? What about the make-up of the meaning side? Does polysemy really exist? And is encyclopaedic information to be fully integrated into the lexicon?These questions are examined along the analyses of authentic lexical material from corpora. At the end exemplary lexical entries represent both the expression and meaning side of the analyzed material, providing incentive not only for theory but also for practical applications like foreign language teaching, lexicography, translational studies, and so forth.
This book will appeal to anyone interested in language use and meaning and understanding especially.
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Literary Community-Making
Editor(s): Roger D. SellPublication Date June 2012More LessThe writing and reading of so-called literary texts can be seen as processes which are genuinely communicational. They lead, that is to say, to the growth of communities within which individuals acknowledge not only each other’s similarities but differences as well. In this new book, Roger D. Sell and his colleagues apply the communicational perspective to the past four centuries of literary activity in English. Paying detailed attention to texts – both canonical and non-canonical – by Amelia Lanyer, Thomas Coryate, John Boys, Pope, Coleridge, Arnold, Kipling, William Plomer, Auden, Walter Macken, Robert Kroetsch, Rudy Wiebe and Lyn Hejinian, the book shows how the communicational issues of addressivity, commonality, dialogicality and ethics have arisen in widely different historical contexts. At a metascholarly level, it suggests that the communicational criticism of literary texts has significant cultural, social and political roles to play in the post-postmodern era of rampant globalization.
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Literature as Dialogue
Editor(s): Roger D. SellPublication Date August 2014More LessHow is it that some texts achieve the status of literature? Partly, at least, because the relationship they allow between their writers and the people who respond to them is fundamentally egalitarian. This is the insight explored by members of the Åbo literary communication network, who in this new book develop fresh approaches to literary works of widely varied provenance. The authors examined have written in Ancient Greek, Táng Dynasty Chinese, Middle, Modern and Contemporary English, German, Romanian, Polish, Russian and Hebrew. But each and every one of them is shown as having offered their human fellows something which, despite some striking appearances to the contrary, amounts to a welcoming invitation. This their audiences have then been able to negotiate in a spirit of dialogical interchange.
Part I of the book poses the question: How, in offering their invitation, have writers respected their audiences’ human autonomy? This is the province of what Åbo scholars call "communicational criticism". Part II asks how an audience negotiating a literary invitation can be encouraged to respect the human autonomy of the writer who has offered it. In Åbo parlance, such encouragement is the task of "mediating criticism". These two modes of criticism naturally complement each other, and in their shared concern for communicational ethics ultimately seek to further a post-postmodern world that would be global without being hegemonic.
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Persuasive Games in Political and Professional Dialogue
Editor(s): Răzvan Săftoiu, Maria-Ionela Neagu and Stanca MădaPublication Date October 2015More LessPersuasive Games in Political and Professional Dialogue is about the rediscovery of humans as proficient users of language in the sense that – while involved in a dialogue – they listen, observe, discuss, reason, evaluate and conclude; in other words, speakers are no longer interested in defeating the other and proving him/her wrong, but in learning from the other.
The volume comprises 12 articles, distributed in two sections – Persuasion in Political Dialogue and Persuasive Strategies in Professional Dialogue – which approach the topic of persuasion as it unfolds from political and professional communication. The articles in the proposed volume depict relevant theoretical and practical issues related to persuasion in two communication sites: politics and workplace, and they are results of consistent research conducted by the contributors in various settings. The contributions provide critical, valuable insights into the dynamic process of creating and maintaining relationships at an individual and at a professional level.
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Positioning in Media Dialogue
Author(s): Elda WeizmanPublication Date December 2008More LessThis book proposes a socio-pragmatic exploration of the discursive practices used to construe and dynamically negotiate positions in news interviews. It starts with a discursive interpretation of ‘positioning’, ‘role’ and ‘challenge’, puts forward the relevance of a distinction between social and interactional roles, demonstrates how challenges bring to the fore the relevant roles and role-components of the participants, and shows that in news interviews speakers constantly position and re-position themselves and each other through discourse.The discussion draws on an empirical fine-grained analysis of a 24-hour corpus of news interviews on Israeli television and a corpus of media references. The author postulates a discrepancy between interlocutors’ normative expectations, which presuppose an asymmetrical division of labor, on the one hand, and real-life practice, which exhibits partial symmetry in speakers’ selection of discourse patterns as well as reciprocity in the use of challenge strategies, on the other. Special attention is given to irony and terms of address, which are shown to act as the center-points of satellite challenge strategies, geared as an ensemble toward the co-construction of reciprocal positioning. The analysis of three case studies further sheds light on the negotiations of intertwined positionings in context.
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Professional Communication across Languages and Cultures
Editor(s): Stanca Măda and Răzvan SăftoiuPublication Date November 2012More LessProfessional Communication across Languages and Cultures aims at developing an integrative linguistic perspective on talk at work. Professional communication allows multi- and interdisciplinary explorations on how workplace relationships and mechanisms are influenced by the use of certain linguistic patterns. The book approaches the topic of professional communication from multiple levels, providing critical, valuable insights into the dynamics of creating and maintaining professional relationships at work.
After outlining the theoretical and analytical frameworks, the eleven chapters uncover and develop integrative themes that emerge within the three parts of the book: Dialogue and identity in professional settings, Functions and strategies in professional communication and Specific issues in professional communication.
Scholars and students who are interested in research based on authentic data and case studies of efficient communication at work, as well as those teaching courses on interpersonal communication, discourse analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics will find useful insights in this volume.
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The Promise of Dialogue
Author(s): Louise PhillipsPublication Date October 2011More LessIt has become commonplace to employ dialogue-based approaches in producing and communicating knowledge in diverse fields. Here, “dialogue” has become a buzzword that promises democratic, participatory processes of mutual learning and knowledge co-production. But what does “dialogue” actually entail in the fields in which it is practised and how can we analyse those practices in ways that take account of their complexities?
The Promise of Dialogue presents a novel theoretical framework for analysing the dialogic turn in the production and communication of knowledge that builds bridges across three research traditions - dialogic communication theory, action research, and science and technology studies.
It also provides an empirically rich account of the dialogic turn through case studies of how dialogue is enacted in the fields of planned communication, public engagement with science and collaborative research. A critical, reflexive approach is taken that interrogates the complexities, tensions and dilemmas inherent in the enactment of “dialogue” and is oriented towards further developing dialogic practices from a position normatively supportive of the dialogic turn.
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(Re)presentations and Dialogue
Editor(s): François Cooren and Alain LétourneauPublication Date November 2012More LessThis edited volume proposes key contributions addressing the connections between two important themes: dialogue and representation. These connections were approached or interpreted in three possible ways: 1. Dialogue as representation, 2. Normative perspectives on dialogue/representation issues, and 3. Representations of dialogue. The first interpretation -- Dialogue as representation -- consists of exploring dialogue as an activity where many things, beings or voices can be made present, whether we think in terms of ideologies, cultures, situations, collectives, roles, etc. The second interpretation – Normative perspectives on dialogue/representation issues – leads scholars to explore questions of normativity, which are often associated with the notion of dialogue, when conceived as a morally stronger form of conversation. Finally, the third interpretation – Representations of dialogue – invites us to address methodological questions related to the representation of this type of conversation. Echoing Bakhtin, contributors were invited to explore the polyphonic, heteroglot, or dialogic character of any text, discourse or interaction.
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Spaces of Polyphony
Editor(s): Clara Ubaldina Lorda and Patrick ZabalbeascoaPublication Date August 2012More LessSpaces of Polyphony covers a lot of ground. It echoes the voices of researchers and their informants from many different places and backgrounds. Among the variety of languages under study and methodological approaches there is also a common ground and narrative thread underpinning the polyphonic chorus of the contributors. From a shared starting point of discourse analysis and inspiration from Bakhtin, the various authors span from East to West, from Moscow to Texas, from Romania and Czech Republic to Mexico. They look into all ages, starting from early childhood, and many walks of life, ranging from casual chatting among relatives to parliamentary speeches and TV shows, including formal education, literary inner monologue and translation. Irony, humour and self-awareness are recurrent themes. The array of voices and dialogism studied in this book is such that it even includes the silent (silenced) voices of people forced to express their heritage by weaving their discourse.
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Variation and Change in Spoken and Written Discourse
Editor(s): Julia Bamford, Silvia Cavalieri and Giuliana DianiPublication Date October 2013More LessThis book focuses on aspects of variation and change in language use in spoken and written discourse on the basis of corpus analyses, providing new descriptive insights, and new methods of utilising small specialized corpora for the description of language variation and change. The sixteen contributions included in this volume represent a variety of diverse views and approaches, but all share the common goal of throwing light on a crucial dimension of discourse: the dialogic interactivity between the spoken and written. Their foci range from papers addressing general issues related to corpus analysis of spoken dialogue to papers focusing on specific cases employing a variety of analytical tools, including qualitative and quantitative analysis of small and large corpora. The present volume constitutes a highly valuable tool for applied linguists and discourse analysts as well as for students, instructors and language teachers.
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