Language and Dialogue - Volume 4, Issue 3, 2014

In this paper, I will present a dialogic view of identity. I argue that identity is not a static description of who or what a person or thing is rather than the outcome of, what I call, a dialog of cultures. In a broad sense, identities are negotiated or, co-constructed, against the background of different perspectives between the dialog partners. From this point of view, identity construction is a joint activity with no one having full control over its outcome. In contrast, identities rather “happen” in dialog. The analysis of selected dialogs from a German talk show will illustrate how the co-construction of different identities works, giving rise to a re-definition of identity in genuinely dialogic terms.

Studies of gesture and language, multimodality, and embodied talk constitute a blooming domain that revisits our conceptions of language as well as of human action. However, research until now has focused on the upper part of the body — mainly on gesture, gaze, head movements and facial expressions. This paper contributes to and expands this line of research by looking at the lower part of the body — in practices of walking and talking — and by demonstrating how the entire body is crucially involved in the organisation of social interaction. Adopting a conversation analytic perspective, the paper is based on video recordings of people talking and walking in a garden. The study shows how the entire body moves in significant and systematic ways, within complex multimodal Gestalts. In particular it shows how walking both reflexively shapes and is shaped by emergent turn formatting, ongoing sequence organization and the dynamic organization of participant frameworks.

China is inviting foreigners into what was a closed society. Few are prepared for what they meet. This article hopes to help with an updated method of dialogue produced by Xiamen University’s doctoral class in Cultural Linguistics, using the “Dialogue Decalogue” of Dr. Leonard Swidler and the Harvard Negotiation Project as models developed in Mediterranean-based cultures.After re-defining ‘negotiate’ and ‘dialogue’, the group examined the five preconditions and found little that matched Chinese assumptions. They then restated Swidler’s ten steps to include Chinese assumptions using linguistics and historical precedent.The language barrier is formidable, and the habit of closing out ‘outsiders’ runs deep. The hermeneutic of suspicion must be applied to anything learned due to the tendency of a Chinese to say what s/he thinks the conversation partner wants to hear. This is viewed as non-productive by Mediterranean-based cultures.

This article explores the use of the body metaphor as a core communicative tool in times of economic crisis and national indebtedness, and the ways in which it thwarts political dialogue. It first traces the body metaphor in the manga version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, following Andreas Musolff’s theory of the ‘body politic’ in Nazi Germany. It then argues that the economic resurrection, or ‘miracles’, in postwar Germany and Japan replaced the discourse of the body nation with that of the body economy. Charles Forceville has shown how advertising uses pictorial metaphors to depict commodities and emphasise their qualities. My analysis of Japanese commercials reveals that their metaphors work to ‘incorporate’ consumers through the act of oral consumption, merging them with the commodities. An ‘oral fixation’ is presumed, rendering the relationship between the body economy and the consumer as one between mother and infant. Advertising functions as the wrapping, or ‘skin’, of this body economy, encouraging us to suckle at the mother’s breasts and at the same time to inject unlimited amounts of money into her veins.

In this review article the subject under consideration is the status of the biolinguistics program as presented in The Cambridge Handbook of Biolinguistics (2013). The discussion revolves around the problem of what its thematic coverage is and what the prospects of its expansion are according to this publication. The main challenges for biolinguistics are envisaged along the lines of the following three questions: Is it possible (and if yes under what conditions) for biolinguistics to broaden the spectrum of its program in terms of integration of theory, methods, and results from psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience? Is it capable of expanding in a sensible way beyond the set of questions included in its agenda within the generative grammar framework? Is it tenable for the biolinguistics program, as a result of this expansion, to undergo the metamorphosis of becoming the science of language out of life, or is this ‘mission impossible’?