Language and Dialogue - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2023

Abstract

Dialogue is about forgoing control and possession when interacting with the Other. In comparison, the notion of instrumentality appears contrary to the very notion of dialogue. This paper suggests, however, that mutual instrumentalization is necessary for dialogue to be a space where participants express solicitude for each other and promote each other’s voice, action, and existence. Building on the work of French philosopher Étienne Souriau, we argue that promoting another’s existence requires taking their actions and speech into our own. This enables them to also exist through us as we allow them to instrumentalize us. Such a view better accounts for what goes on in tangible dialogue situations, as we show by revisiting an empirical case. Our proposal extends current research on the conditions of productive dialogue, invites being careful about who or what populates the dialogical scene, and turns our attention to what they may need to pursue their existence.

Abstract

The current state of the art in Dialogue Analysis represents a multitude of diverse models of dialogue, communication, pragmatics, discourse, interaction, organization, and management, which claim to be science or philosophy. Can we indeed expose science and philosophy to arbitrary decisions on issues and methodology? As soon as our object becomes ‘dialogue in the stream of life’, science faces the issue of complexity. The challenge is to develop a new type of science which is capable of grasping the complex whole and deriving the components from it. New Science as science of complexity also demonstrates how science and philosophy can be united by description and explanation in science and evaluation and recommendation in philosophy.

Abstract

English (an SVO language) and Korean (an SOV language) are polar opposites in terms of grammatical order. Studies show that rhetorical devices (RDs) are effective in generating collective audience responses in British political oratory. This article attempts to study the functions of RDs in Korean oratory and the importance of speech delivery. Through the analysis of the speaker-audience turn-taking systems, it is suggested that RDs do not function as cross-cultural universals in the invitation of audience responses but rather depend on the syntactic structure of a given language and the use of nonverbal factors. Thus, due to SOV language features, RDs do not play a predominant role in inviting audience responses in Korean oratory, whereas speech delivery is crucial.

Abstract

Dialogic interaction is a distinctive feature of Animal Crossing, a social simulation video game developed by Nintendo, yet, little attention has been paid to it from a discourse analytical perspective. This paper aims to explore how AC characters are characterised through language and which discourse strategies are applied to engage players. The analysis, based on a corpus of dialogues transcribed by fans of the game, relies on corpus-linguistics methodologies and can be framed within the context of ludolinguistics. The study shows that emotive language is used to create an active interaction between player and non-player characters (NPCs). Even though NPCs are minimally characterized in terms of gender, age, or social status, the collocational analysis of “I” and “you” highlights two opposite personalities interacting in the dialogues: type A, lexically represented as extroverted, dynamic, and active, and type B, represented as kind, hesitant, and passive.

Abstract

This paper looks at dialogicity in the Slow Art Day blog and focuses on the way the representation of participants encodes the complexity of the communicative action through a polyphony of textual voices. By focusing on posts from the pandemic years (2020 and 2021), and contrasting them with the previous period, we carry out a collocation analysis and a study of semantic preferences (Sinclair 2004) to explore how writers present themselves and how they interact with the reader and other textual voices in a context of cultural intermediation. By looking at forms of address and of self-mention, we trace how this blog enacts different forms of dialogic action with its readers and stakeholders in the extended situational context.

This article reviews Asking and Telling in Conversation978-0-190-92744-8

This article reviews The Acquisition of Referring Expressions. A dialogical approach978-90-272-08354

This article reviews Silence as Language. Verbal Silence as a Means of Expression978-1-108-47167-1