Language and Dialogue - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2018

Modern language teaching is no longer grammar based, but based on authentic real life dialogues (dialogic speech acts) which enable learners to communicate or rather to interact verbally and nonverbally competent with native speakers. The conception of language teaching curricula, especially with regard to the development of textbooks, is in need of an applicable model of communication, based on regularities or principles of language-usage. Both, Integrationism and the Mixed Game Model (MGM) opt against segregational static approaches of linguistic analysis and – at first glance – could be considered suitable approaches within the field of language teaching. Yet, I will argue that the Integrational approach is hardly applicable here, whereas the MGM perfectly suits the needs of foreign language textbook authors and editors.

Action games of election campaigns are one of the best venues for politicians to team up with specialists in communication studies in order to build, review, construct or deconstruct their own or their opponent’s image with the purpose of persuading the electorate to vote for a certain political group. Various action games of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign are analysed with regard to different dialogic means used by the speaker in order to persuade the audience to vote for him. For instance, he evokes nationalistic views in his speeches and skilfully uses pronouns in order to establish his role as dominant, strong, and credible nominee for presidency. Since we focus on a particular practice in dialogic language use, we will show that the Mixed Game Model (MGM) is more appropriate to study the argumentative power of words than integrationism.

This paper looks at blogs as dialogic action games characterized by specific communicative purposes and corresponding language use, as described in the MGM. The assumption is that web-mediated communication is particularly apt to developing simultaneous conversations within and without the scientific community. Using a small-scale study of blog threads originated by well-known economists who write for the academia as well as for the media, I look at how they establish dialogicity and intertextuality in the post and at how they develop interwoven polylogues in comments, thus engaging participants in parallel conversations, some of which are more clearly oriented to sharing views, while others aim at knowledge dissemination and others still at knowledge construction proper.

My starting and concluding point is the Zhuangzi, at least in parts attributed to the Chinese philosopher of the same name. His view, guided by the Daoist tradition, is that language users are free to reconstruct collectively their discursive realities (for instance the notion of happiness), as discourse does not refer to the unspoken reality. While both Edda Weigand and Roy Harris accept that meanings are not fixed, I disagree with Weigand as she wants to leave behind the language sign, and with Roy Harris, as for him it is each solitary person who is creating their signs, whether they take part in discourse or not. For me, but not for them, dialogue drives discourse in the sense of a contingent evolution of ideas, while for them dialogue is driven by solitary individuals. Perhaps we all agree that the meaning of a word like happiness is arbitrary and we are free to construct its discursive reality, the only reality that counts.

In this comparative paper I suggest that linguistic theories need to be discussed in terms of the metatheoretical presuppositions sustaining them. In view of Edda Weigand’s rejection of the linguistic sign and her critique of Roy Harris’ integrational linguistics for failing to abandon the sign as its working concept and not adopting a holistic model that accounts for the complexity of human communication, I will argue that the key to understanding linguistic theories is semiology, including tacitly assumed – since ‘commonsensical’ – beliefs about what constitutes ‘language’, ‘a language’ and ‘communication’ (i.e. the metatheory). I will further argue that methodological considerations are not the primary domain of semiology. This paper is designed (i) as an integrational critique of Weigand’s conception of human communication as intentional and intersubjective and (ii) as an affirmation that linguistic indeterminacy concerns both form and meaning.

In this article, I offer a critical discussion of the work of prominent dialogue theorist Edda Weigand from an integrational linguistic perspective. The discussion centres upon Weigand’s ‘Mixed Game Model’ (MGM), a model which is claimed to constitute a holistic theory of dialogue and to describe how language is integrated in a general theory of human action. I am particularly interested in determining how much (un)common ground exists between the two approaches especially since both style themselves as ‘non-orthodox’ and accord considerable theoretical importance to the notion of ‘integration’. In the end, I come to the conclusion that despite what turn to be some rather superficial areas of convergence, the gap between integrationist and Weigandian thought remains considerable and most likely unbridgeable. I suggest that this state of affairs can be explained by the highly divergent views concerning the nature of linguistic inquiry and the role of theory therein held by those in the respective camps.

Roy Harris identifies the “main flaw” in J. L. Austin’s account of language as a “failure to consider to what extent being able to ‘do things with words’ is parasitic on being able to do things without them”. Harris’s comment here serves as a springboard for a critical evaluation of communicational theories based around “talk-in-interaction” or dialogic principles. The primacy thereby given to linguistic interaction arguably entails a mystification of communication processes and the dis-integration of the social world into which our communicational experiences are intervowen. Consequently, the ghost of segregationism, in the shape of Harris’s “fallacy of verbalism”, continues to haunt, at times faintly, at times aggressively, the assumptions and methodologies of the approaches in question.

This paper investigates how communicating participants dialogically make and remake signs, and how they rely on the reflexivity of language in order to talk about linguistic experience of relevance to the communication situation they are currently involved in. It addresses the metalinguistic strategies and techniques participants employ in order to deal with linguistic indeterminacy, given that, as presumed by integrational linguistics, contextualization is individual and unique. By way of illustration a transcript of a lively discussion is provided in which the participants demonstrate some of these techniques with the result that they end up effectively contextualizing ‘together apart’.

The experience of hearing one’s own voice during the act of speaking is a form of self-awareness and self-reflection that occurs in relation to and in interaction with the flow of experience, including the experience of other selves and their voices. Self-communication is deeply implicated in and necessary for interpersonal communication ( Harris 1996 ). And yet, it is the latter which is generally taken to be the paradigm case of human languaging. The fundamental role of self-communication is neglected in the language sciences. Starting with the important fact that we hear our own voice when we speak ( Harris 1996 , chap. 11), this paper examines the central role of self-communication in the emergence of the self and the self’s role in languaging.