Edda Weigand is a pioneer in the field of Dialogue Analysis. This anthology comprises a selection of twenty of Weigand's essays that represent her theorizing of “language as dialogue” over the years, providing a new standpoint in linguistic research and in other disciplines. According to Weigand, language as a natural phenomenon is not just based on conventions and clear-cut rules, but mirrors interlocutors' own cognitive horizons, emotions, and experiences. The volume is organized into three parts, with brief introductions by Sebastian Feller at the beginning of each section. The first part reflects the rule-governed competence approach underlying Weigand's early work, offering a comprehensive account of what dialogue grammar is. This part deals with a wide range of topics in dialogue grammar such as speech act theory, definitions of terminology, structures of dialogic turns, words, lexical and syntactic units, and argumentation studies.
In the second part, Weigand argues against the idea of dialogue as a well-formed sequence of speech acts. Instead, she accepts differences between interlocutors as an integral part of dialogic interaction. Essays in this part consider the dialogic action game as an independent but complex cultural unit of communicative competence, as specific types of social interaction take place in dialogic forms. Weigand goes on to discuss coherence and emotion as crucial dialogic principles, along with the impact of new technology such as mass media, the internet, and machine translation on dialogue analysis. She maintains that dialogue analysis should go beyond the analysis of fixed patterns in dialogic interaction and lexical semantics, as dialogue cannot be restricted to rules and rules have no absolute authority. The certainty of rules should be replaced by principles of probability.
The last part delineates new concepts comprising a theory of communicative competence-in-performance such as a theory of dialogic action games known as the Mixed Game Model, which focuses on human ability to understand the complexity of dialogue. Weigand offers various principles underlying the dialogic action game and a framework to understand how humans interact, integrate their abilities, and negotiate meaning. In her framework, corpus linguistics plays a limited role as a supplementary tool, because corpus data represents only part of human interaction and no absolute truth can be discovered empirically. Accordingly, specific dialogic games such as educative didactic dialogues and business dialogues call for specific analyses for their additional functional components such as multiculturalism and economic interest. Although Weigand emphasizes context as a central issue in dialogue analysis, she stresses the action-in-context more. In the final essay of this part of the volume, Weigand demonstrates the argumentative power of words by analyzing political speeches by Obama and Clinton from their campaign for the US Presidency in 2008.
With a copious amount of analysis of actual dialogues that cover a wide range of topics, this anthology will be an invaluable resource in the field of dialogue analysis.
