Language and Dialogue - Online First

This paper looks at cross-cultural variation in corporate communication over the pandemic, focusing on the language adopted by rail companies in the UK and Italy to enhance trust in safety and highlighting how they engage in communicative action with potential passengers and other online users. The analysis shows that UK companies generally prefer personal forms of self-mention and avoid technicisms, while Italian companies adopt more formal language and more impersonal forms of self-representation. Common elements seem to be related to repeated communicative functions, and the semantic elements they involve, thus highlighting the close link between pragmatic units and lexico-grammatical patterns (with their semantics), as well as the interplay between meaning, dialogic action and context in communication.

The article analyses a Romanian corpus of intercultural dialogues recorded in natural settings during language proficiency examinations and discusses the usages of the frequently occurring word yes (Rom. da). The framework is provided by the Mixed Game Model ( Weigand 2009 , 2010 , 2017 , 2018 , among others) intersected with the socio-cognitive approach to intercultural communication ( Kecskes 2007 , 2008 , 2010 , 2013 , among others). Beyond the analysis of a single lexical unit in a limited collection of texts, the author aims to demonstrate how a particular word of the lexicon becomes a culturally-socially-cognitively-discursively-rhetorically situated utterance that acquires specific functions when it is used by interlocutors who negotiate their communicative agendas to come not only to mutual understanding but also to achieve their convergent-divergent institutional purposes.

This study investigates children’s dialogic negotiation of the moral order of the classroom in a heterogeneous peer group. Drawing from video-ethnographic research in two primary schools in Italy, the study adopts a CA-informed approach to analyze 9- to 10-year-old children’s dialogic interactions around the appropriate and inappropriate ways of behaving in the classroom. As the analysis illustrates, children reproduce institutional moral norms and ideologies to sanction perceived infringements of the classroom moral order. In response to that, the recipients provide accounts to justify their conduct or resist the moral accusation of their classmates. In the discussion it is argued that these morality-building practices are relevant to (a) children’s negotiation of their social organization and local identities in the peer group and (b) children’s socialization to the moral expectations of the classroom community.

The paper addresses the problem of (im)politeness in light of mismatches between what we/others say and what we/others mean in a multi-dialogic search for meaning where humans integrate all their competence-in-performance and co-construct situated relationships in a more or less sustainable way. We examine how these processes occur by analyzing (im)politeness mismatches in telecinematic satire using dialogic speech act typology and methods of the Mixed Game Model to describe and explain the communicative meta-meaning of (im)politeness. We demonstrate that in satire the dialogic semantics of (im)politeness is polyvalent, interactant-relative, temporally variable, scalar and self-reflexive because it is part of integrational language-in-use engagement with the world through which humans construct multiple relational domains and relationships in them.

This article investigates how dialogic negotiations contribute to the enhancement of pupils’ epistemic authority. The analysis was based on two interactions collected in a primary school and a higher secondary school in Italy, as part of a European research project promoting dialogue-based activities. The aim of the research was to investigate children’s agency and participation in changing their social and cultural conditions of hybrid integration. Their participation was promoted in different ways to facilitate dialogue, which enhanced dialogic negotiations and narrative interlacement. The analysis demonstrates that, through dialogic negotiations, children and adults shape the meanings of children’s personal stories together and create a network of interlaced narratives. Both these conditions impact on children’s participation in knowledge production and identity construction.