Language and Dialogue - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2012

This article proposes a notion of “remembering for narration” based on Slobin’s (1987) concept of “thinking for speaking” to circumvent issues of autobiographical memory and focus on narrative practices. It suggests that we recognize a special cognitive mode of remembering for narration, which involves selecting from episodic memory those details that fit some conceptualization of the event for present purposes, and are readily encodable in the language and narrative format chosen for the current context. It seeks to demonstrate the value of this perspective in considering constraints on remembering in the storytelling performance in various contexts such as getting one’s story straight with input from recipients, filling in gaps in memory and conjuring up details, developing a personal narrative through co-narration, and producing appropriate personal stories in response to previous stories by other participants, and thereby sheds light on narrative processes and their significance for autobiographical memory and identity construction.

Combining ideas from different research directions and fields, the paper presents a multidimensional model of communication which enables to explain the risks of communication more comprehensively than before. The process of producing and interpreting speech is described through a message transfer circle. The model also includes the mental worlds of the speaker and the recipient, which substantially influence interaction. In addition, special attention is paid to recipient design, which plays a crucial role in interaction. One may even argue that such frequently mentioned factors as misreference or ambiguity are not causes of miscommunication but only risks for it; the real cause of miscommunication is incomplete recipient design. The common denominator is the egocentrism of the speaker: avoidance of cognitive effort, common ground fallacy, emotional overdrive, obstacles caused by physiological state or physical defects, and attaching greater importance to other things at the expense of recipient design.

In this paper, I will discuss and analyse two main resources for interaction in the context of bed and breakfast interactions: spatial and weather. Starting from the premise that guests in a bed and breakfast are from another geographical area, common background is first established by means of a spatial resource — requesting information on their hometown. Once they have some interactional history, they may start looking for other resources so that their dialogue may continue.

The translation of ancient Chinese Poetry into English is considered to be one of the most challenging tasks not only because of the different features between the two languages, especially as they belong to different linguistic families, but also the unique features of the ancient Chinese poetry itself.. This paper, by applying poetry dialogue analysis based on dialogism, explores the operation of its elements such as context, subject, sense, image, the reader and text form, and tries to seek out the mechanism for understanding the source text and reproducing what the source contains in the target language, thus shedding light on poetry translation studies.

This paper discusses two important issues of current pragmatics research as related to dialogue and discourse: interest in the hearer rather than the speaker, and focus on utterance rather than dialogue and discourse segment. These two issues are intertwined, and they are each other’s consequences. It will be argued that current pragmatic theories appear to be hearer-centered and utterance-centered and they consider communication recipient design and intention recognition. This explains why the main interest in these theories is in interpretation: recovery of speaker’s meaning by the hearer. The paper claims that hearer-centeredness is a direct consequence of the fact that pragmatics is an utterance-based inquiry. In order for us to get closer to what exactly the speaker has wanted to say we need to go beyond utterance to dialogue and discourse segment. This would require rethinking and reevaluating, to some extent, what current pragmatics is all about. In fact this process has already started. Several studies have been talking about “narrow pragmatics” and “wide pragmatics” discussing the relationship of pragmatics, dialogue (e.g. Weigand 2001, 2004, 2006, 2010, Cooren 2010) and discourse analysis (e.g. Puig 2003, Taboada and Mann 2006, De Saussure 2007).