Language and Dialogue - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2016

In this article, I discuss a particular (and little studied) action-reaction exchange in Spanish and Romanian, consisting of a dyadic exchange where an exploratory speech act (i.e., a question) is followed by a sequence-dependent reactive speech act, which repeats parts or all of the trigger’s structure in an interrogative form. Rather than being a canonical echo question, the reactive speech act under discussion represents what I call an Interrogative Echo Response (IER), by virtue of the fact that it provides an answer of opposite polarity to that of the initiative move put forward by the questioner (or Interrogative Echo Reply, when the response may or must be explicitly provided after the sequence-dependent interrogative utterance). In both languages, these IERs (and IERps) have a distinct syntactic structure, and the discourse function they fulfill is that of rhetorically challenging the validity of the initial move and providing (or implying) a response of opposite polarity with regard to the triggering question.

Our objective is to discover if metadialogic discussion by participants and researchers increases their understanding of the dialogue. We videotaped a native Spanish speaker and a fifth-semester Spanish learner from the U.S. as they discussed a conversational prompt. Next, a facilitator guided the participants in a videotaped retrospection to uncover what their thoughts and feelings had been during the original interaction. A third party then analyzed the original videotaped dialogue and compared it to the participants’ metadialogic commentary to determine accuracy and adequacy of the analysis. Results show that dialogic retrospection is an effective tool and should be incorporated into dialogue research methodology. Instead of analyzing solely a transcription of an audiotape or film, metadialogic retrospection can access hidden motivations underlying language use, leading to greater accuracy. We argue that such retrospection is necessary for understanding cognitive and psychological dimensions of co-constructing meaning in intercultural dialogue.

Research on linguistic identity and community membership negotiation in the fields of second language acquisition and heritage language has rightly focused on adolescents and older individuals. Aiming to fill a gap in the literature, this paper addresses this topic from the perspective of younger heritage speakers, focusing on what dialogue reveals about such negotiation by the young heritage speaker, and on what purposes the heritage language serves. By presenting data from a case study of a heritage learner, a child growing up in an English-Romanian bilingual home, this paper shows that dialogue reveals the child’s use of language to negotiate linguistic identity and community membership both for herself and her interlocutors. Recognizing the significance of developing a bilingual identity for heritage speakers, and the broader goal for our society to embrace multilingualism, the paper concludes with implications from this research for family, community, and public education.

The present study offers an underlying theoretical framework for examining political speeches from a rhetorical perspective. This framework is based on systemic functional linguistics developed by Halliday (most recently updated by Halliday and Matthiessen 2014), and includes discourse structures suggested by later authors. We suggest that the interpersonal stratum of meaning, through which we manage social relations, represents a powerful resource for creating a dialogue with the audience in order to recruit it to a politician’s call for action. To address this issue, we analyzed ten speeches delivered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to five different international audiences. We examined strategies that foster dialogic interaction with the audience, by directly addressing them, or otherwise acknowledging their presence. The interpersonal strategies we identified combine into larger domains which we term forming social bonds, building a consensus and revealing ideology. These strategies may be salient because they tap into various aspects of the audience’s experience and identity: the social, affective, and ideological spheres.

The paper focuses on arguing and reasoning processes occurring at dinnertime family conversations. Our goal is to highlight the interplay between two sides of argumentative practices: the justification as social need to provide evidences for an assertion; the dialogic function of argumentation that refers to the goals arguers want to achieve during discussions. Through the analysis of a case study we discuss a sequence in which a child resists his father’s directive by an elaborated argumentative strategy in order to achieve his goal. Results show how participants engage in opposing the other’s standpoint and are socialized to argumentative dialogues.