Language and Dialogue - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2019

This article, introducing the Special Issue, investigates the notion of “agency of language” and its historical roots: the phenomenological emphasis on the social actors’ role in constituting their Life-World. It reconstructs the genesis – at the beginning of the 20th century – of two ideas that still nourish contemporary interactional and pragmatic views of language: language meaning relies on use, language is a tool to perform activities. Focusing on dialogue in institutional settings, it illustrates how cultures, social orders, and moral horizons are talked-into-being and shaped through the activities performed in institutional talk. It also presents the contributions in the Special Issue that address the co-constitutive relationship between language, interaction, and culture from different disciplinary perspectives as well as methodological approaches.

In this article I would like to focus on the dialogical transformations that the use of social media has introduced into political discourse, showing why they have an increasing relevance on the whole landscape of our contemporary political arena. In order to do that, I will analyse their semiotic functioning, and the way in which they have transformed the traditional dialogical structure, still present in other forms of technologically mediated communication. Finally, I will advance some hypothesis on how these transformations can favour the growth of populism, a phenomenon that should concern anybody interested in dialogue, since populism represents precisely the death of any form of dialogue.

This paper analyzes the rhetorical formats used by Austrian members of parliament (MPs) to express disagreement with previous speakers during the so-called ‘inaugural speech debates’. During these debates, MPs position themselves publicly as either government or opposition party representatives. Disagreeing with previous debate contributions represents a positioning practice that focuses on the interpersonal plane of interaction. The strict procedural rules of the debates, however, prevent MPs from engaging in genuine conflict talk. MPs rather use four rhetorical formats for signalling conflict with a previous speaker. This paper analyzes these strategies as well as their use by different groups of MPs and discusses their face aggravating/ impoliteness potential. Finally, it relates the results to previous studies of face work in political discourse.

This study analyzes judges’ decision announcements at the end of small claims hearings when the judge informs the parties who has won. Background on US small claims courts is provided, and the data and grounded practical theory, the analytic approach, are described. Then, we overview the small claims decision announcement genre, describe key areas of variation among judges, and identify and explicate a recurring problem built into the design of small claims proceedings. Cases that pit what is legally correct against what commonsense fairness dictates can be troublesome for judges and this trouble is marked discursively in judge announcements. The paper concludes by describing the challenge this raises for the development of grounded practical theory.

In this study, mediator – party power dynamics in workplace disputes mediation dialogues are examined. Adopting Gramsci’s concept of hegemony (e.g. 2005) and Foucault′s notion that power is not fixed in dialogues, but constantly negotiated by participants (e.g. Foucault 1980), the analyses show that the power dynamics shift in the mediation setting when mediators subordinate dominant parties and enforce their own formalized power as procedural guides to design (Aakhus 2003, 2007) a favorable context for conflict resolution. When their procedural power is threatened, mediators may use specific devices in their interventions that correlate with the four devices – interruption, enforcing explicitness, topic control, and formulation – Fairclough (1989, 135–137) states can be used by dominant participants to control weaker parties in dialogues.

The paper aims to present the outcome of a research on the persistence of Latin in Medical Language. The analysis has been carried out on written and spoken data: clinical records; doctor-patient interactions; prescriptions; package information leaflets. The study shows that in medical communication Latin is used as a tool for social and epistemic discrimination, to increase the knowledge gap among professionals and lay people. A different way to reaffirm the voice of medicine against the voice of life. Our project is inserted in the series of studies dedicated to languages for specific purposes understood not only as specific vocabularies but mostly as “discursive patterns” that express precise and distinctive professional visions.

Delivering and acknowledging assessments are the most recurrent institutional activities occurring in parent-teacher conference. This paper reports data from a mother-teacher conference concerning a gifted child. We show how participants’ practices to accomplish and receive assessment in the report-assessment phase of the event: (a) display their relative epistemic and deontic rights, (b) are oriented to participants’ institutional relevant identities, and (c) project or even enact different and quite opposite assessment trajectories. We contend that struggles in assessing the child display participants’ different stances: teachers’ ‘normalizing’ and ‘group oriented’ trajectory vs. the mother’s orientation toward ‘doctorability’ and pressure for individualized treatment. Although typically occurring between routine-case oriented institutions vs. idiosyncratic-case oriented clients, such a struggle displays also the ‘paradoxical injunctions’ that frame teachers’ everyday work: adopting a ‘group-oriented’ perspective while at the same time being accountable for an individualized approach.

The experience of linguistic globalization, and the communicative disorder it entails, requires a serious retooling of most basic units of semiotic analysis. The complexity and indeterminacy of late-modern communication affects most sociolinguistic assumptions behind social interactions. In particular, we can no longer assume a model of dialogue based on shared indexical knowledge. By introducing the concept of transidioma – i.e. the ensemble of communicative practices of people embedded in translingual environments and engaged in interactions that blend face-to-face and digitally-mediated communication – this paper documents the renewed reliance on denotational references, especially proper names, as a primary strategy to handle dialogue during asylum hearings.

Professionals working in residential care for children everyday perform the institutional relevant activity of constructing their cases. This article analyzes the ways in which they construct the case of ‘unaccompanied minors’ (UAM) and how, in doing so, they talk into being their everyday practices of work. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with Italian residential care professionals, this study adopts a Discourse Analysis approach. Findings illustrate how the discursive assemblage of UAM relies on participants’ multiple distinctions and on a contrastive rhetoric that is widely used in social work. Differences in the case-construction of UAM mirror participants’ institutional settings and overall socio-cultural debate, paving the way for future investigation.