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From Pragmatics to Dialogue
Edited by Edda Weigand and István Kecskés
[Dialogue Studies 31] 2018
► pp. 189–216

Types and functions of pseudo-dialogues

In pure dialogues, the speakers address their words to recipients who concentrate on listening, while in pseudo-dialogues the recipients are not able to listen, or prefer not to listen. The speaker may be fully aware of the recipient’s mental absence. The aim of the chapter is to study how pseudo-dialogues are used in everyday communication. We differentiate four main categories of pseudo-dialogues based on the role of the recipient: a human recipient who is present in the situation but whose role in the interaction is secondary; a physically remote human recipient; a non-human recipient (a dog, a computer, etc.); a speaker who speaks to himself/herself (no other recipients than oneself). In most cases, the manner of speaking in pseudo-dialogues largely resembles that of pure dialogues. Examples of the usage of pseudo-dialogues are taken from the St. Petersburg One Day of Speech Corpus.

Keywords: dialogue, pseudo-dialogue, non-standard dialogue, talking to oneself, talking to animals, talking to a computer, listener, recipient, ORD project
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Constituents influencing the course of communication
  • 3.Types of dialogues
  • 4.Types of pseudo-dialogues
  • 5.Observations on pseudo-dialogues in ORD material
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 5 October 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ds.31.10mus
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