Language as Dialogue

Abstract

This summary gives an introduction to the volume “Language as dialogue. From rules to principles of probability” (Weigand, Benjamins, 2009), which traces the development of my thinking about language and languages within the last two decades. The volume assembles a series of articles, some of them unpublished before. The topics of the articles are manifold and far-reaching; they include, for instance, speech act theory, pragmatics, semantics, lexicology, language comparison, corpus linguistics and language use in institutions. Language turns out to be a concept that is intrinsically connected with other human abilities such as thinking, perceiving, and feeling. Consequently, what is necessary in theory is a change from reductionism to holism, from separating components to integrating and reconciling them in a genuinely holistic model. Such a change has been made by means of the model of the dialogic action game or the Mixed Game Model (MGM) based on principles of probability.