Language and Dialogue - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2017

The call centre conversation is a telephonic exchange of voices between the customer and the customer service representative (CSR). Both lexicogrammatical and prosodic features are used to construe emotional and attitudinal recognition. Studying these features can investigate how the call centre discourse is construed, and how the interpersonal meaning takes shape through the text. The spoken data are constructed by Filipino CSRs and American English-speaking customers. The findings show that participants tend to make specific paralinguistic voice quality choices to express their emotions in dialogue. This article first discusses the voice quality framework for its semiotic features in relation to interpersonal meaning, reviews previous voice quality studies and later delineates how voice quality relates to interpersonal meaning in the calls.

This paper is the first to explore the development of Iranian rhetoric from former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the current president Hassan Rouhani, in messages delivered to the international community. The study compares eight speeches given by Ahmadinejad at the UN, to two speeches given on the same platform by Rouhani. The speeches were explored by qualitative research of the prominent rhetorical strategies employed by each president, as well as by quantitative research of the frequently used words in each president’s speeches. The findings reveal a radical change in Iran’s rhetoric since Rouhani succeeded Ahmadinejad in 2013. The newly elected president adopted a moderate, modern and rational discourse regarding both Iran’s attitude to the West and the Iranian nuclear program. The findings suggest that this change made the new president and the “new” Iran possible partners to negotiating with the West, and eventually enabled the historic nuclear deal in 2015.

Focusing on the Aubry – Hollande debate that took place in the context of the 2011 French socialist party primaries, we observe a possible reversal of gender stereotypes and examine word choices as well as more subtle cues such as interruptions, hedges, etc. If the debate could be described as a stereotypical gender role-reversal, we suggest that these cues point to a more complex picture than a gender reversal, and that the pragmatics structuring the dialogue might be interpreted as a pattern of challenger/champion. Moreover contrasting press articles and comment in online forums on the same debate we invoke a ‘peri-performativity concept’ to explain the differences in interpretations of the politicians’ performances, and conclude that perlocutionary dimensions can be reinterpreted by dominant discourses, (de)/(re)-constructing the performativity of speech acts.

This article analyzes political interviews, focusing on the corrections made by the interviewees in their answers, from a comparative perspective. The data included both Romanian and Italian language interviews, published in print and online media. Two criteria for the classification of corrections have been identified, one regarding the target of the correction and one regarding the form in which the correction is made. The results show that content-oriented corrections are the most frequent type in both corpora, while mitigated corrections appeared more often in the Italian corpus than in the Romanian one. The politicians interviewed use corrections in order to reject the interviewer’s stance and to demonstrate a better understanding or knowledge of the topic discussed.

Studies about dialogue are conducted in a descriptive perspective, but also in a so-called normative approach or tradition. Taking Bakhtin’s case, I consider this tension and show how it can be treated as a question of disciplines and interdisciplinarity, which permits us to understand how they are both necessary and complement each other. This disciplinary angle can be relevant to understand Bakhtin’s own work but also other research paths. Showing then how this way of structuring research is lacking certain elements notably the evaluative aspect of any discourse and discourse study, I develop the hypothesis according to which a triad of terms might be more useful to reflect and study dialogue than just the descriptive/normative dyad, suggesting the introduction of Peircian categories.

Am I responsible for what I say and how I say it? Or is what I say just a random transformation of what I have heard so far? Is my agency as a discourse participant perhaps borrowed from the agency of discourse? This ties in with another dimension: Is the reality confronting us, a reality that surely includes the notion of agency, a mere discourse construct? For the cognitive and neural sciences, individual agency is only an epiphenomenon of the real world, while it is endorsed by folk psychology and cultural anthropology, having long been a cherished tradition of western discourse. Obviously, selfhood in some form is part of our nature, though we only have discourse to talk about it. Thus it appears as a phenomenon of our contingent culture.