Language and Dialogue - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2015

The paper considers dialogue from the point of view Wittgenstein has called ‘the stream of life’ and aims at describing analytically what happens in complex dialogues of performance. A short overview is given of approaches which use the term ‘communities’ to structure performance, e.g. ‘communities of practice’ or ‘speech communities’. Contrary to these approaches which are either oriented towards parts of the whole, such as speech, or address the whole only vaguely by terms of the social context, a genuinely holistic theory needs a solid constitutive basis which is considered to be the sequence of action and reaction in the complex whole of the action game. Language use means dialogic action. By analysing a complex authentic action game the methodology of such a holistic theory like the Mixed Game Model can be demonstrated in detail.

This article defends an intentionalist solution to cases of disagreement. Unlike conventionalist approaches, the paper shows that the truth-value of some sentences is shifted and relative to the concrete way the assertion is made. Unlike relativist accounts, it argues that cases of subjective meaning are just apparent, and really express normative content as included in embedded sentences. The paper advocates for a solution based on what I call the speaker’s point of view, which understands disagreement as expressing the speaker’s perspective in conversation about a particular matter without constraining the truth-value of the sentences of our natural language. Consequently, the speaker’s utterance is a speech act necessarily related to the interlocutor’s utterance, which is another speech act, since only by integrating the level of the communicative function into a dialogic interaction the real meaning of the utterances can completely show up.

The aim of this paper is to achieve a better understanding of the impact of bilingualism on children, considering the dimensions of languages, language use and identity. Since 2009, we have been observing German-Brazilian children in an institutional out-of-home-setting in Bonn, Germany, as a case study. Our main question is: “which role does bilingualism play in constructing children’s identities?” The research techniques are participant observation and informal interviews with families. The results show the need of an updated concept that enables us to understand interactions between languages, cultures and societies. This paper represents a work in progress and is submitted as a contribution to the wider ongoing project of developing the concept of “Mehrraum” as an added value space.

The present paper argues that the analysis of the functional spectrum of pragmatic markers (PMs) serves as a heuristic tool for studying the interactional dynamics of dialogues in a variety of genres and discourse types, whether naturally-occurring, scripted or literary. By way of arguing my point I will discuss the results of three of my previous case studies aimed at exploring the role of PMs. The case studies, by virtue of the types of discourse they are based on (mediatised political interviews, dramatised/televised conversations and literary texts) reveal different patterns of dialogicity, and complement the analyses of spontaneous everyday conversations, the type of data most of the current PM research draws on. In the course of my analyses I also hope to illustrate that the cross-fertilization between dialogue analysis, PM research and literary pragmatics has a lot to offer to all three disciplines.

In general, second language (L2) learners have limited vocabulary knowledge. In addition, they often have difficulty identifying, recognizing, or recalling the vocabulary necessary for a certain situation. This limitation and those three factors result in problematic talk where repair, improvement, and practice are merited. The purpose of the present study, following a conversation analytic (CA) perspective, explores how vocabulary-related communication problems are resolved when a low proficient learner (LPL) and a high proficient learner (HPL) communicate during their pair-work activities. In particular, this research studies the sequence of turns and repair in the talk. The study revealed that (1) the repair is mostly initiated by the LPL, (2) the HPL can be a crucial language source in the classroom, and (3) problems are caused by insufficient vocabulary knowledge and not comprehending a correctly-pronounced word. This study reveals the importance of students’ pair-work (especially pair-work activities when the students have disparate English proficiency) in the language classroom and suggests communication strategies.

The aim of this paper is to investigate alignment in L1–L2 dialogue. More specifically, I examine to what extent alignment in L1–L2 is different from alignment in L1–L1 dialogue. I investigate different variables that may affect linguistic alignment in the course of L1–L2 dialogue. As more variables, such as differences in language proficiency of interlocutors, affect the linguistic alignment in L1–L2 dialogue, it appears that linguistic alignment in L1–L2 dialogue is different from linguistic alignment in L1–L1 dialogue both quantitatively and quantitatively. I also discuss the mechanisms that permit lexical alignment during dialogue. This study interprets the alignment process in terms of the activation threshold hypothesis (Paradis 1993) and a link is made between the activation threshold hypothesis and Pickering and Garrods’ (2013) account that language production and language comprehension are interwoven. Based on Swiss multilingualism, language selection is proposed as the macro-linguistic alignment process.