Volume 25, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Dialogic Resonance: Activating Affinities Across Utterances

Dialogic syntax investigates the linguistic, cognitive, and interactional processes involved when language users reproduce selected aspects of a prior utterance, and when recipients respond to the parallelisms and resonances that result, drawing inferences for situated meaning. The phenomenon typically arises when a language user constructs an utterance modeled in part on the utterance of a prior speaker or author. The result is resonance, defined as the catalytic activation of affinities across utterances. This paper presents the concept of dialogic syntax and outlines some directions of current research on dialogic resonance, as represented in this Special Issue.

This paper argues for the need to recognize a new order of syntactic phenomena, and for a theory of syntax capable of addressing it. Dialogic syntax encompasses the linguistic, cognitive, and interactional processes involved when speakers selectively reproduce aspects of prior utterances, and when recipients recognize the resulting parallelisms and draw inferences from them. Its most visible reflex occurs when one speaker constructs an utterance based on the immediately co-present utterance of a dialogic partner. Words, structures, and other linguistic resources invoked by the first speaker are selectively reproduced by the second. The alignment of utterances yields a pairing of patterns at varying levels of abstraction, ranging from identity of words and affixes, to parallelism of syntactic structures, to equivalence of grammatical categories and abstract features of form, meaning, and function. This mapping generates dialogic resonance, defined as the catalytic activation of affinities across utterances. The key unit of analysis is the diagraph, recognized as a higher-order, supra-sentential syntactic structure that emerges from the structural coupling of two or more utterances. Dialogic syntax goes beyond traditional linear syntax to recognize as integral to the task of syntactic analysis a new kind of structural relation that arises between otherwise independent sentences.

How can we investigate the relation between language and the human capacity for intersubjective engagement? Here we combine insights from linguistics and psychology to study the language of children with autism. We begin by reviewing why it might be worthwhile to study autism from the perspective of dialogic resonance , defined as the catalytic activation of affinities across utterances. Then we report on a controlled study of conversations involving individual children with autism and an interested adult interviewer. According to reliable ratings of the transcribed conversations, each considered as a whole, the speech of participants with autism was characterized by atypical forms of dialogic resonance. On the other hand, the children with autism were similar to control participants insofar as their conversations manifested “typically developed frame grabs” in which dialogic resonance was accompanied by a coherent expansion. These findings were compatible with those that emerged from utterance-by-utterance analyses of the same conversations reported elsewhere (Hobson et al. 2012). To complement the quantitative findings, we present illustrative excerpts of language use. We consider how dialogic resonance relates to structural priming, and consider implications for understanding the relations among intersubjectivity, language, and autism.

According to the graded salience hypothesis, salient meanings and salience-based interpretations are not only involved in language comprehension but also in language production (Giora 2003, 2011a; Giora and Gur 2003). This should be true of irony production as well. If, as predicted by the graded salience hypothesis, the ironist herself indeed activates utterance interpretations on account of their salience-based accessibility rather than solely on account of their contextual fit, this might be reflected in the ironies' environment. Given the crucial role of the salience-based interpretation of “what is said” in deriving and supporting the ironic interpretation, this interpretation should not be suppressed (Giora 1995). Such a view of irony production predicts that its environment will demonstrate dialogic resonance (à la Du Bois, this volume) with ironies' salience-based, but incompatible interpretations. To test this prediction, we studied a written Hebrew corpus including over 1600 ironies. Our findings show that 46% of the ironies, 10% of which are extended ironies, are addressed via reference to their salience-based contextually incompatible interpretations; resonance with the context-based , ironic interpretation occurred in only 8% of the cases; the environment of the rest either did not resonate with any of their interpretations (43%), or resonated with both their compatible and incompatible interpretations (3%). These results support the view that, like comprehenders (Giora et al. 2007), irony producers too activate and retain salience-based albeit inappropriate interpretations.

In this paper, we take a Construction Grammar approach to Du Bois' concept of resonance activation. We suggest that the structural mapping relations between juxtaposed utterances in discourse, described in terms of diagraphs in dialogic syntax, can acquire the status of ad hoc constructions or locally entrenched form-meaning pairings within the boundaries of an ongoing conversation. We argue that the local emergence of these ad hoc constructions involves the same cognitive mechanism described for the abstraction of conventional grammatical constructions from usage patterns. Accordingly, we propose to broaden the scope of Construction Grammar to include not only symbolic units that are conventionalized in a larger speech community, but also a dimension of online syntax, i.e. the emergence of grammatical patterns at the micro-level of a single conversation. Drawing on dialogic data from political talk shows and parliamentary debates, we illustrate the spectrum of these ad hoc constructional routines and show their local productivity, which we take as an indication of their (micro-)entrenchment within a given conversation.

Children start producing grammatically complex sentences during toddlerhood (Bloom et al. 1984; Diessel 2004). This study examines how toddlers use complement constructions as a communicative resource in peer interactions. The data come from an archival database, which consists of 500 hours of videorecordings of children's naturalistic interactions in a daycare center. All complement constructions produced by seven target children were identified. The data illustrate children using “format tying” (Goodwin 1990, 2006) and “dialogic syntax”. They construct utterances “based on the immediately co-present utterance[s]” (Du Bois, this issue) of their own and others (caregivers) in the discourse, as means of demonstrating positive or negative alignment with their interlocutors, thereby negotiating the participation framework (Goffman 1981; Goodwin and Goodwin 2004). As children tie to prior utterances, and transform and embed them into matrix clauses with stance-indexing verbs like I said , I want , and Let me , complex complement constructions are built up dialogically over sequences of interaction.

This study investigates the interaction between linear and dialogic syntax in Hebrew conversation. Analyzing resonance in divergently aligned contexts, we examine a particular dialogic modification of complex syntactic constructions: the embedding of one construction within the scope of another. Specifically, we examine a family of constructions which, in the terms of linear syntax, are analyzed as forms of complementation (via the complementizer še - ‘that’, via a question word, or via the conditional conjunction ' im ‘if ’). However, the dialogic alignment of these forms with their preceding utterances reflects a complex picture, in which some patterns are still definable by linear syntax, but others are not accounted for by these traditional terms. Rather, the application of the Dialogic Syntax framework calls into question defining such constructions from a purely structural perspective and supports a more fluid, Emergent Grammar approach. Moreover, we illustrate how dialogic actions in fact motivate the interaction-based grammaticization of new constructions, culminating, in the case of the constructions examined here, in the emergence of discourse markers.