Language and Dialogue - Volume 12, Issue 2, 2022

As an Introduction to the present issue, this article explores the workings of discourse and dialogue in communicating unity and diversity through language in vast social and cultural contexts. In what follows, discourse analysis is presented as a dialogue-oriented field that arose at the crossroads of linguistics and social sciences to overcome the limitations of traditional, autonomous linguistics. The dialogic profile of discourse analysis is demonstrated along three exploratory vectors that recognise dialogism as an inseparable criterion in the study of discourse. Accordingly, it will be shown that dialogicity is what lies at the core of discourse organization, discourse practice and discourse worlds. The discussion of the dialogic provenance and orientation of discourse (analysis) is closed by the volume presentation.

This essay demarcates between and among schools of dialogue, differentiating relational points of meaning origins. Contrasting dialogic roots constitute distinctions in social meaning and signification. Schools of dialogue embrace the relational interplay of address and response, with exchanges consisting of multiple simultaneous conversations. Their co-presence announces dialogic hypertextuality, which acknowledges and affirms multiple simultaneous conversations and meanings within a given encounter. No single interpreter or meaning captures dialogic existence; meanings push the boundaries of any exchange, before, during, and after. Dialogic exchanges embody multiple discourses that call forth distinctive dimensions of meaning. As one speaks, multiple conversations, inclusive of previous and anticipatory dialogues, shape us. Conversation between and among persons dwells within an existential reality of dialogic hypertextuality.

The paper presents the results of an empirical study on proximization approached as a dialogue between journalists and readers of Internet media texts and online comments. In this way the paper shows a practical application of the research programme, whose tenets I presented elsewhere (Kowalski 2018), in relation to Polish and Romanian reciprocal media coverage on the winter 2016/2017 protests in the two countries, and follow-up online comments. The analysis shows that participants used proximization for different communicative purposes (descriptive or evaluative), for which they employed different reportoires of proximization strategies (categorization, domestication, construing hybrid IDC/ODC worlds, historical analogies, and references to cultural stereotypes). As a result, there was no consensus on a shared Discourse Space, and alternative Discourse Spaces were negotiated in the online dialogue.

This study addresses positioning in dissention fragments in political interviews in the Argentine media. The aim is to disclose how participants position themselves and others, and the consequences this has on meaning making in the interaction. From a dialogic perspective and a discourse pragmatic approach, we use the tenets of Positioning Theory and the Appraisal framework in the analysis of the data. We base our research on an exploratory-interpretive paradigm that provides qualitative results. To examine the position of the interactants, our attention focuses on the interrelated components of positioning, and on the linguistic resources used by the participants. The results reveal the implications of positioning for the communication of diversity, the relationship between participants, and the building of tense or relaxed atmospheres.

The article discusses selected neologisms that Stanisław Lem, a Polish science-fiction writer, created for two of his numerous short stories featuring Ijon Tichy, a space traveler. It is not only their surprising and appealing structure that makes these creations and their English counterparts an interesting subject for analysis, but also, and more importantly, the fact that they carry specific allusions, which renders them humorous in their contextual appearance. All these characteristics contribute to a translation challenge present in the neologisms analyzed. The article focuses on how – and with what result – this challenge has been approached by the translators who handled it in an endeavor to expand the dialogic space between the author and his audience.

In dealing with recent migration-related phenomena, inclusion has become an increasingly common normative ethical imperative in socio-political discourse. Considering inclusion as a situated interactive accomplishment, this article reports findings from a study on medical visits, each one involving a physician, an unaccompanied foreign minor (UFM) and a professional educator. Adopting a Conversation Analysis-informed approach to a corpus of video-recorded visits, we analyze (a) the physician’s shifts in addressivity, which either foster or hinder UFM’s inclusion during the history-taking phase, and b) when and how these shifts occur. We contend that, by shifting addressivity, the physician navigates the locally incompatible goals of gaining reliable information on UFM patients and fostering their active participation. We contend that the micro-practice of shifting addressivity is consistent with the management of cultural-linguistic diversity proposed by the intercultural dialogue perspective.

The paper explores non-native children’s peer socialization to norms of literacy and appropriate language use in the classroom. Drawing on ethnographic research in a primary school in northern Italy, this study adopts a CA-informed approach to analyze an Italian L2 class attended by children aged 8 to 10. The study focuses on children’s enacting of correction sequences following peers’ problematic conduct. As the analysis illustrates, children creatively re-produce teachers’ ways of speaking to enforce normative uses of language. Through these practices, non-native children socialize their classmates into expected ways of speaking, reading, and writing, and negotiate the social hierarchy of the peer group. Risks and opportunities of such practices are considered in relation to children’s social inclusion and exclusion.