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From Pragmatics to Dialogue
Edited by Edda Weigand and István Kecskés
[Dialogue Studies 31] 2018
► pp. 5–28

Dialogue

The key to pragmatics

When trying to find out the ‘state of the art’ in pragmatics we risk getting lost in a mix of diverse approaches which seems to be accepted as the ‘plurality of models’ but in the end means nothing other than ‘anything goes’. The ‘pragmatic turn’, which introduced the new natural object ‘language use’, waits to be structured by the ‘dialogic turn’, i.e. the insight that language use means dialogic use in a sequence of initiative and reactive actions. In this sense dialogue provides the key to the yet unstructured field of pragmatics. Human beings are dialogic individuals who use their abilities for dialogic purposes. It is their extraordinary ability of competence-in-performance which allows them to tackle the challenge of ‘living with uncertainty’.

Keywords: pragmatics, dialogue, action and reaction, the dialogic turn, plurality of models, competence-in-performance
Article outline
  • 1.The issue
  • 2.What pragmatics is about
    • Separating levels and items
    • Seeking for a solution at the level of artificial terms
    • Flying into vague concepts
      • To sum up
  • 3.The challenge of the dialogic turn
  • 4.The architecture of complexity
    • 4.1Dialogue and speech acts
    • 4.2Dialogue and utterance grammar
    • 4.3Dialogue and lexical meaning
  • 5.Examples of dialogic action games
    • 5.1So-called monologues
    • 5.2Culture integrated
    • 5.3Ethics integrated
  • 6.Conclusion and outlook
  • References
Published online: 5 October 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ds.31.02wei
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