Volume 44, Issue 3

The concepts of dialogism, dialogue and interaction are notoriously difficult to define and to operationalize. The introducing article briefly discusses different conceptions of dialogism, sketches linguistic theories such as dialogue and discourse analysis as well as interactional linguistics and gives an overview of the contributions of this special issue on dialogism.

This paper attempts a critique of the notion of ‘dialogue’ in dialogue theory as espoused by Linell, Markova, and others building on Bakhtin’s writings. According to them, human communication, culture, language, and even cognition are dialogical in nature. This implies that these domains work by principles of other-orientation and interaction. In our paper, we reject accepting other-orientation as an a priori condition of every semiotic action. Instead, we claim that in order to be an empirically useful concept for the social sciences, it must be shown if and how observable action is other-oriented. This leads us to the following questions: how can we methodically account for other-orientation of semiotic action? Does other-orientation always imply interaction? Is every human expression oriented towards others? How does the other, as s/he is represented in semiotic action, relate to the properties which the other can be seen to exhibit as indexed by their observable behavior? We study these questions by asking how the orientation towards others becomes evident in different forms of communication. For this concern, we introduce ‘recipient design’, ‘positioning’ and ‘intersubjectivity’ as concepts which allow us to inquire how semiotic action both takes the other into account and, reflexively, shapes him/her as an addressee having certain properties. We then specifically focus on actions and situations in which other-orientation is particularly problematic, such as interactions with children, animals, machines, or communication with unknown recipients via mass media. These borderline cases are scrutinized in order to delineate both limits and constitutive properties of other-orientation. We show that there are varieties of meaningful actions which do not exhibit an orientation towards the other, which do not rest on (the possibility of) interaction with the other or which even disregard what their producer can be taken to know about the other. Available knowledge about the other may be ignored in order to reach interactional goals, e. g. in strategical interactions or for concerns of socialization. If semiotic action is other-orientated, its design depends on how the other is available to and matters for their producer. Other-orientation may build on shared biographical experiences with the other, knowledge about the other as an individual and close attention to their situated conduct. However, other-orientation may also rest on (stereo-)typification with respect to institutional roles or group membership. In any case, others as they are represented in semiotic action can never be just others-as-such, but only others-as-perceived-by-the-actor. We conclude that the strong emphasis which dialogue theories put on other-orientation obscures that other-orientation is neither universal in semiotic action, that it must be distinguished from an interactive relationship, and that the ways in which the other figures in semiotic actions is not homogeneous in any of its most general properties. Instead, there is a huge variation in the ways in which the other can be taken into account. Therefore close scrutiny of how the other precisely figures in a certain kind of semiotic action is needed in order to lend the concept of ‘other-orientation’ empirical substance and a definite sense.

On the basis of a dialogically oriented and contextually situated approach, this study aims at investigating uses of addressing present co-participants in cases in which the subsequent order of speakership is not at issue. Starting out from Lerner’s (2003: 184) observation that address terms “appear to be deployed to do more than simply specify whom the speaker is addressing”, the article explores turn-initial as well as turn-final uses of address terms as practices of increased dialogism in everyday interaction. The paper argues that address terms function as a means to display a personified “orientation and sensitivity to the particular other(s)” (Sacks/Schegloff/Jefferson 1978: 43) – frequently used in disaffiliating activities.

The first two paragraphs deal with the question of how the term dialogue is to be understood and how the terms dialogue and monologue are related. Then arguments for and against the assumption that written communication is a kind of interaction are discussed. Paragraph 4 points out the typical features of written interaction, using the example of WhatsApp – an internet-based instant messaging service which can be installed on a smartphone. In this context the following questions are discussed: how are the characteristics of such dialogues to be described? What distinguishes them from spoken dialogues? And why – compared to text messaging via mobile phones – do they constitute a new kind of dialogue? Paragraph 5 deals with Linell’s (1998) concept of dialogism and investigates in what ways this concept is applicable to written interaction. Finally it is shown that not only spoken but also written dialogues may be described in the context of interactional linguistics and other well established research contexts. However, new descriptive methods are needed to do justice to the specific features of written interaction.

This paper aims to investigate the occurrences and characteristics of visual dialogues in urban spaces. In order to systematically examine the specific elements of visual dialogues the analysis draws on a corpus of more than 25.500 digital photographs taken in selected neighbourhoods in the cities of Essen, Bochum, Duisburg and Dortmund. The article discusses several approaches to the concept of “dialogue” and “dialogism” and distinguishes between a “narrow”, i. e. interactional approach and a “wide”, i. e. more fundamental approach to utterances and texts. In this more fundamental perspective on dialogism, utterances and texts are not the sole product of one individual speaker but full of references to pre-utterances and pre-texts, recontextualiations, polyphony as well as invitations for responses. The analysis reveals that the majority of visual dialogues in urban spaces are best explained within the framework of the latter approach, a previously inaccessible point of view in linguistic landscape studies.