Language and Dialogue - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2013

Communication requires a considerable effort in order to facilitate and indeed reach shared understanding between interlocutors. This is even more important in intercultural communication, where our normal cues fail to function and shared background may be incomplete or altogether absent. Seeing as we can no longer rely on our usual meaning construction tools, we have to work harder than in intracultural communication to derive and deliver meaning. As a consequence, it is not sufficient to carry out the usual speaker and listener roles, in which the speaker holds a more active and the listener a more receptive participative role. Instead, both speaker and listener have to work together in a joint, collaborative and contemporaneous effort to create mutual understanding. This paper explores why there is a need in intercultural communication to fulfil a dual role relationship in the meaning creation process, how this can be achieved in intercultural discourse and how it can benefit interlocutors.

This article brings together the concept of dialogue in the Bakhtinian sense and the concept of irony with the aim to show how irony emerges in texts as a result of the dialogic interaction of voices. Two issues are discussed: first, evaluation as a regular and ubiquitous component of discourse. The polyphonic structure of a text or an utterance can signal evaluative meaning; multivoicedness functions as a marker of the narrator’s stance, especially if the voices juxtapose or incohere with each other. Second, incoherence as the trigger of ironic interpretation. Incoherence can emerge as a result of the confrontation of voices in the texts. To create a misaligned polyphonic structure, writers employ various techniques, from direct quotation to free indirect discourse. My intention is to show that ironic evaluation can be a reasonable explanation for the cacophonic interaction of voices in the polyphonic structure of the text.

This paper discusses the potential of semantic, pragmatic and grammatical devices used in the Israeli television news coverage of a dispute to promote one agenda, negate a contradictory one and position the correspondent as a participant in the dispute. Moreover, I argue that viewers of news identify at least some of these devices and attribute an argumentative role to them. To support this, I analyze questionnaires in which native speakers relate to a specific news item, focusing on the three most common devices interpreted: implicatures, emotionality and textual planning. The discussion sheds light on dialogical interactions between, first, correspondents and their addressees; second, between the correspondents’ words and their co-texts, contexts and other occurrences of these words or their synonyms in public discourse. The corpus includes 19 items on a struggle between ultra-Orthodox and secular Jews in Israel broadcast in 2009 on Israel’s Channel 2 television news.

This study investigates the journalistic construction of news from a focus group of eleven Philadelphia-area voters. The journalists not only represent the participants’ voices, they also present themselves as keen observers — they attempt to display expertise as journalists. The written stories use the participants’ voices more than was found in the journalists’ oral discussion about the focus group. In both the oral and written stories, the journalists ventriloquise participants’ voices within the genre, the news-feature story of how the dire political economy affects ordinary people. The journalists represent the participants’ opinions while simultaneously recontextualizing participants’ voices within their own storyline.

The focus of this study is on the role played by adversarial questioning in political opposition. As an illustrative example, a detailed analysis is presented of two sessions of Prime Minister’s Questions in the UK House of Commons (6 and13 July, 2011), in which the Leader of the Opposition (Ed Miliband) challenged the Prime Minister (David Cameron) regarding his handling of the British phone-hacking scandal. The study is conceptualized in terms of theories of politeness (Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987) and impoliteness (Culpeper 1996), also in terms of the concept of follow-ups (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975). It is argued that this analysis has implications for all three linguistic conceptualizations, furthermore that PMQs, despite its many detractors and deficiencies, can play an important role in sustaining political dialogue and political accountability through adversarial questioning.

Knowledge represents things as they are. But how are things? Traditionally, epistemology has based knowledge on experience. To accept a proposition means to find it consistent with one’s experience. But can we trust experience to give us the ‘facts’ in an unadulterated way? There are scholars who claim just that, for instance Roy Harris in his new book After Epistemology, and Martin Heidegger in his Being and Time, now almost a century old. While I agree with both of them that Cartesian rationality is not a sound basis for making epistemological claims, I take issue with their argument that knowledge can be generated by a prelinguistic interpretation of authentic experience. I argue that there is no interpretable experience without participation in discourse, and that therefore the discursive construction of the category ‘cat’ is prior to any cat experience. Instead of viewing ourselves as solitary knowing minds, we should assign intentionality (‘aboutness’) to discourse as a collective mind. Knowledge that can be represented in the form of arbitrary signs only exists in discourse, of which we, the selves, are a part.