Dialogue Analysis Units Relations And Strategies Beyond The Sentence

The topic of this volume was discussed at a Round Table of the International Association for Dialogue Analysis (IADA) at the University of Bologna in March 1995. The Round Table was intended to make a scientific contribution in honour of the president's 65th birthday. The topic refers on the one hand to the central problem of 'Dialogue Analysis' which is to discover a new, communicatively functioning unit after having left behind the unit of the sentence which can be considered the unit par excellence of structural linguistics. On the other hand, it includes the manifold units, relations, and strategies, i.e. the specific problems of dialogue analysis.

With her theory of Language as Dialogue, Edda Weigand has opened up a new and promising perspective in linguistic research and its neighbouring disciplines. Her model of competence-in-performance solved the problem of how to bridge the gap between competence and performance and thus substantially shaped the way in which people look at language today. This book traces Weigand s linguistic career from its beginning to today and comprises a selection of articles which take the reader on a vivid and fascinating journey through the most important stages of her theorizing. The initial stage when a model of communicative competence was developed is followed by a gradual transition period which finally resulted in the theory of the dialogic action game as a mixed game or the Mixed Game Model. The articles cover a wide range of linguistic topics including, among others, speech act theory, lexical semantics, utterance grammar, emotions, the media, rhetoric and institutional communication. Editorial introductions give further information on the origin and theoretical background of the articles included."

The Mixed Game Model represents a holistic theory of dialogue which starts from human beings competence-in-performance and describes how language is integrated in a general theory of human action and behaviour. Human beings are able to adapt to changing conditions and to pursue their interests by the integrated use of various communicative means, mainly verbal, perceptual and cognitive. The core unit is the dialogic action game or the mixed game with human beings at the centre acting and reacting in cultural surroundings. The key to opening up the complex whole is human beings nature. The Mixed Game Model demonstrates how the different disciplines of the natural and social sciences and the humanities are mutually interconnected. After a detailed overview of the state of the art, the fundamentals of the theory are laid down. They include a typology of action games which ranges from minimal games to complex institutional games. The description is illustrated by analyses of authentic games."

This book features a fascinating and extended focal interview with Professor John J. Gumperz, who ranges over his long career trajectory and reflects on his scientific achievements and how they relate to the contemporary linguistic scene. In this way, the reader is presented with a snapshot introduction to Gumperz's work in a contemporary context. A number of commentaries provide a stimulating and illuminating series of theoretical and applied encounters with Gumperz's work from different perspectives. In so doing, they shed new light on Gumperz's seminal contribution to the study of language and interaction. In his Response Essay and in a final discussion, Gumperz clarifies his views on many of the topics discussed in the volume, as well as sharing with readers his views on some other approaches to language and interaction that are closely aligned to his own. Sociolinguistics, the ethnographic approach to language, language and social interaction, intercultural communication, communicative conventions, contextualization – these are some of the key terms which Professor John J. Gumperz discusses in this wide ranging and searching interview about his career as an anthropological linguist and sociolinguist interested in cultural diversity and intercultural communication. John J. Gumperz, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, is one of the founders of Sociolinguistics whose early work on speech communities and on the relationship of linguistic to social boundaries helped lay the basis for much current work in the field. Since the 1970s he has concentrated on a theory and methods of discourse analysis that can account for the intrinsic diversity of today’s communicative environments. His publications include: Language in Social Groups (1962); Ethnography of Communication (1964) and Directions in Sociolinguistics (1972/2002), both coedited with Dell Hymes; Discourse Strategies (1982); Language and Social Identity (1982); and Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (1996), coedited with Steven Levinson. He is currently working on a collection of studies New Ethnographies of Communication (coedited with Marco Jacquemet); and Language in Social Theory.

The volume celebrates the tenth anniversary of the International Association for Dialogue Analysis in the year 2000. Part I discusses general methodological issues - mostly within the framework of discourse and conversation analysis - whereas Part II presents specific case studies. The volume includes contributions that address both traditional areas of dialogue analysis such as politeness, and more recent areas of interest such as argumentation or the analysis of dialogic interaction in specific contexts.

The basic claim of this book is that for 2000 years and more the western tradition has relied on two very dubious assumptions about human communication: that each national language is a unique code and that linguistic communication consists in the utilization of such codes to transfer messages from mind to mind.

These two volumes offer a selection of the papers held at the conference of the International Association for Dialogue Analysis (IADA) in 2003. Volume I contains 38 articles devoted to dialogue and the phenomenon of 'dialogicity' in literature, ranging from antiquity to a large number of modern languages and literatures. The conversation-analytic approaches drawn upon are notable for their methodological diversity. This is also true of the 32 articles in Volume II. The main focus here is on present-day types of dialogue in the new electronic media and their 'traditional' counterparts (press, radio, television, film). The examples are taken from various countries, and they are discussed in terms of the intercultural, semiotic, translatorial, and general pragmatic issues they pose.

Contrastive lexical semantics was the main topic of an International Workshop at the University of Münster in May, 1997. It was addressed from different perspectives, from the pragmatic perspective of a corpus-oriented approach as well as from the model-oriented perspective of sign theoretic linguistics. Whereas the rule-governed model-oriented approach is necessarily restricted to subsets of vocabulary, the pragmatic approach aims to analyse and describe the whole vocabulary-in-use. After the pragmatic turn, lexical semantics can no longer be seen as a discipline on its own but has to be developed as an integral part of a theory of language use. Essential features of individual languages can be discovered only by looking beyond the limits of our mother languages and including a contrastive perspective. Within a pragmatic, corpus-oriented approach essential new ideas are discussed, mainly the insight that single words can no longer be considered to be the lexical unit. It is the complex multi-word lexical unit a pragmatic approach has to deal with.