Language and Dialogue - Volume 2, Issue 3, 2012

This paper investigates Japanese apology expressions, particularly the co-occurrence of su(m)imasen and gomen nasai with various linguistic devices (i.e. adverbs, interjections, conjunctions, etc.) in social interactions. Differing from previous research, the present research focuses on (1) the linguistic devices co-occurring with the apology expression, (2) their relation to the interactional functions the expressions serve in situated contexts, (3) their roles within discourse and the effect they produce, and (4) the way the speaker expresses his or her emotional attitude through these linguistic devices. To this end, data was collected from Japanese television dramas, and the linguistic devices marking su(m)imasen and gomen nasai, adverbial forms and interjections that were most encountered were examined. The analysis revealed that the co-occurrences with the apology expressions do influence or change the entire meaning of the utterance.

The epistolary genre is considered to be an all-encompassing one insofar as it includes various epistemological approaches, thanks to the hybrid, nomadic, intricate and oxymoronic nature of the letter. This paper seeks to examine the relationship between letters and dialogue, a relationship based on the complicity and reciprocity that characterize dialogism in general. The topos of conversation is undoubtedly one of the most frequent and fruitful in epistolary writing. Letter writing has long been considered a reflection and prolongation or anticipation of face-to-face interaction. This study will try to show how conversation, as an underlying paradigm and a sort of presence-in-absence, represents a form of compensation, a consolation against the suffering stemming from distance in space and time.

Affiliative response invitations were analysed in 38 speeches delivered during the 2009 Japanese general election by 18 candidates for the House of Representatives (the lower house of the National Diet of Japan). The results clearly replicated those reported by Bull and Feldman (2011) in their analysis of the 2005 Japanese general election. Highly significant correlations were found between the two studies not only for the overall pattern of affiliative responses, but also for each type of response (applause, laughter and cheering). In both studies, over 70% of affiliative responses occurred in response to explicit invitations from the speaker. This contrasts with British political meetings, where applause occurs principally in response to implicit rhetorical devices. However, the candidates’ electoral success showed no significant correlations either with overall affiliative response rate, or with rates for applause, laughter or cheering. It is proposed that the prime function of affiliative response invitations at these meetings is not so much to win votes as to give the audience the opportunity to express their support both for the candidates and for the political parties they represent.

While mediation programs vary greatly in their procedures and philosophies, most programs expect the mediator to act as a neutral facilitator who empowers disputants to resolve the dispute themselves. Advice-giving by mediators is therefore typically not recommended. However, mediators often find ways to give advice, if only indirectly. In this paper I use conversation analytic techniques to examine how mediators give advice to disputants in videotaped mediation sessions between divorcing couples. I found that while mediators display an orientation to a norm of no advice-giving, they do often give advice. Advice is often formulated indirectly, for example as a suggestion rather than as prescriptive advice, or as general information rather than advice targeted to a specific individual. Mediators also often gave procedural rather than substantive advice. These findings are discussed in terms of how advice-giving can support or detract from the ability of mediators to empower mediation clients to resolve their own disputes.

This paper discusses the process through which cultural ideas, knowledge and beliefs mediating the encounter between an audience and a text are fabricated in and enacted by everyday naturally occurring dialogues. We contend that the cultural knowledge framing any hermeneutic dialogue is communicatively constituted in daily discourses, dialogues and interactions that often concern the texts and text-related practices. By taking a developmental perspective on the role of everyday talk in the making of media ideologies, this paper empirically illustrates how human beings become cultural beings inasmuch as they are inherently dialogic beings. Examples of adult-child interactions collected during ethnographic fieldwork are discussed to illustrate how dialogues occasioned by media use are organized by the worldviews of a given community. Yet, at one and the same time, they (re)produce the value system, moral order and the canonical versions of the world for those who engage in these talking activities.

The paper explores the structures and functions of follow-up questions in White House press briefings from the perspectives of both text linguistics and cognitive discourse analysis. On the one hand, I investigate the characteristic types of cohesion in follow-ups at the lexicogrammatical level in the terminological framework of Functional Grammar. On the other hand, the focus is on contextual framing, which results in the presentation of a biased world view. Special emphasis is put on metacommunication, since the interviewers frequently use metalinguistic prefaces to their follow-up questions (e.g. Can I follow on that?). The highly interactive and dialogic genre of press briefings, in which the press secretary acts as the mouthpiece of the administration, is closely related to the institutional talk of news interviews. Since these briefings form an integral part of US-American political culture, their transcripts are freely available in a comprehensive online archive. Hence, on this empirical basis, follow-up questions will be conceptualized as a process-oriented dialogic strategy of critical information retrieval at the micro level of conversational contributions.

In this article I critically discuss four studies in the area of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) research. The focus is on distinct dimensions of culture including both verbal and para-verbal behavior in communication. My discussion is grounded in Weigand’s (2010) theory of dialogic action games (DAG), a pragma-linguistic theory which is based on a view of language as language action. The main question is whether or not the presented research leads in a direction towards making computers believable dialog partners.