Language and Dialogue - Volume 6, Issue 3, 2016

In recent decades the term ‘theory’ has pervasively been used in the literature without any reflection upon the conditions of its legitimate use. The paper focuses on the issue of what makes up a theory. Constitutive components are the object-of-study and the methodology. The object of a theory has to be the minimal autonomous unit. The object ‘dialogue’ is a human affair, language used by human beings in the dialogic action game. Any approach which claims to be a theory needs to justify its hypotheses. A theory about human actions and behaviour in the end relates to anthropological insights which can eventually be verified by neuroscience. It is sociobiology which unites the different disciplines in their search for the unity of knowledge.

The study explores verbal conflict in an institutional context and examines how the election debate format and the moderators’ actions contribute to the emergence of confrontation between themselves and the debaters, what communicative practices the debaters use to resist an institutionally preferred form of interactivity, and how the moderators manage this situation. The findings show that conflict arises around face concerns and violations of the institutional order. The debaters make a number of moves to challenge the moderators and the debate format, such as addressing questions to the moderators, criticizing the moderators, disagreeing with them, refusing to respond to their questions, explicitly questioning the rules of the debate, and aligning with other candidates. The moderators manage conflict by giving the floor to another candidate, minimally acknowledging a candidate’s move, providing an account for their action, agreeing with a candidate, indicating a violation of institutional rules, and not responding to a candidate’s move.

Contemporary research on the communicative constitution of organization conceives organization as made up of multiple voices embodied in and enacted by the different actors inhabiting this social world. This paper illustrates the inner polyphony at play in the complex and sensitive workplace of an Intensive Care Unit. The study focuses on the diagnostic talk concerning infectious disease and on the communicative resources deployed by physicians to pursue or resist their often conflicting diagnostic trajectories and professional stances toward the use of antibiotics. Adopting a conversation analytical approach to video-recorded morning briefings, we will illustrate how polyphony characterises the team members’ conduct during this communicative event and the consequences this polyphony has on the decision-making process. As we will illustrate, in this as in most cases, the members of the community appear to be active users of their professional culture, yet are also — and unavoidably — its carriers.

This paper aims to investigate the pragmatic features and strategies of disagreement in contemporary spoken Romanian, on the basis of authentic data. Disagreement will be regarded in its cooperative dimension, considering that all types of genuine, bona fide communication involve various stages in establishing an intellectual consensus. Special attention will be given to the main causes which generate communicative divergence: metalinguistic/metadiscursive (the dispute on the semantic/pragmatic use of language), dialectical (the debate of general ideas and principles) or factual (contradictory interpretation of facts). We shall try to formulate some general conclusions, in order to configure the profile of intellectual disagreement in Romanian society and to integrate it into an intercultural and anthropological perspective.

The paper approaches silence as a pragmatically relevant component of the dialogue. My aim is to illustrate the diversity of meanings and functions silence can discursively actualize, depending on the communicative situation. As a collectivistic, relationship oriented culture, Romanian culture is characterized by a preference for positive politeness strategies and accordingly by silence avoidance. Special attention will be given to the social, cultural, and individual parameters which determine the speaker to prefer silence to speech, as well as to the receiver’s position towards silence (accepted, rejected, or requested silences). I shall also have in view the relationship between the influence of individual factors and the socio-cultural tradition in actualizing silence. The data are excerpted from some corpora of spoken Romanian, as well as from a number of literary texts, given the fact that usually the latter reflect the prototypical behaviour of certain social groups or of some representatives of these groups.