Publications

Publication details [#59419]

Feller, Sebastian. 2014. The good, the bad, and the ugly: The co-construction of identities in dialog. Language and Dialogue 4 (3) : 341–356.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/ld

Annotation

This paper presents a dialogic view of identity. It argues that identity is not a static description of who or what a person or thing is rather than the outcome of what is labelled here a dialog of cultures. In a broad sense, identities are negotiated or, co-constructed, against the background of different perspectives between the dialog partners. From this point of view, identity construction is a joint activity with no one having full control over its outcome. In contrast, identities rather “happen” in dialog. The analysis of selected dialogs from a German talk show will illustrate how the co-construction of different identities works, giving rise to a re-definition of identity in genuinely dialogic terms.