From Dialogue to Dialogue. Dialogical CTT and Ginzburg's take on Conversation. Some introductory steps (original) (raw)
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Meaning, rules and conversation
Wittgenstein writes: 'To understand a sentence means to understand a language'. My question is: what is a language, and what is its importance to the idea of understanding what someone has said? Familiar ways of developing Wittgenstein's 'rule-following considerations', along with the idea that the notion of a 'correctness condition' must be central to any account of meaning, do not throw light on the idea of a language. If we give central place to the idea that understanding a sentence involves grasping its logical relations with other sentences we must remember that it is the things that people say that stand in logical relations with each other, and that this is just one instance of the more general point that in a conversation what one person says may bear on what another says. The notion of a 'conversation' may vary in its temporal stretch. Those with whom I share a language are those with whose words what I say may be connected: connected in a way analogous to that in which the remarks in a conversation are connected.
Intercultural Pragmatics, 2018
Dominant accounts of 'speaker meaning' in post-Gricean contextualist pragmatics tend to focus on single utterances, making the theoretical assumption that the object of pragmatic analysis is restricted to cases where speakers and hearers agree on utterance meanings, leaving instances of misunderstandings out of their scope. However, we know that divergences in understandings between interlocutors do often arise, and that when they do, speakers can engage in a local process of meaning negotiation. In this paper, we take insights from interactional pragmatics to offer an empirically informed view on 'speaker meaning' that incorporates both speakers' and hearers' perspectives, alongside a formalisation of how to model speaker meanings in such a way that we can account for both understandings-the canonical cases-and misunderstandings, but critically, also the process of interactionally negotiating meanings between interlocutors. We thus highlight that utterance-level theories of meaning provide only a partial representation of speaker meaning as it is understood in interaction, and show that inferences about a given utterance at any given time are formally connected to prior and future inferences of all participants. Our proposed model thus provides a more fine-grained account of how speakers converge on 'speaker meanings' in real time, showing how such meanings are often subject to a joint endeavour of complex inferential work. The interactional achievement of speaker meaning: Towards a formal account of conversational inference "meaning lies not with the speaker nor the addressee nor the utterance alone as many philosophical arguments have considered, but rather with the interactional past, current, and projected next moment. The meaning of an entire utterance is a complex, not well understood, algorithm of these emergent, non-linear, sense-making interactions" (Schegloff et al. 1996: 181)
The possibility of dialogic semantics
This paper outlines and demonstrates the viability of a consistent dialogic approach to the semantics of utterances in natural language. Based on the philosophical picture of language as dialogue, adumbrated by Mikhail Bakhtin and incorporating work in conversation analysis and cognitive-functional linguistics, I develop a method for analyzing both the function and the content of human utterances within a unified philosophical framework. I demonstrate the viability of this method of analysis by applying it to a brief conversational exchange (in Hebrew), (...) which is analyzed here in full detail.
Fictive interaction and the nature of linguistic meaning
Forthcoming in: Esther Pascual and Sergeiy Sandler (eds), The conversation frame: Forms and functions of fictive interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins
One may distinguish between three broad conceptions of linguistic meaning. One conception, which I will call “logical”, views meaning as given in reference (for words) and truth (for sentences). Another conception, the “monological” one, seeks meaning in the cognitive capacities of the single mind. A third, “dialogical”, conception attributes meaning to interaction between individuals and personal perspectives. In this chapter I directly contrast how well these three approaches deal with the evidence brought forth by fictive interaction. I examine instances of fictive interaction and argue that intersubjectivity in these instances cannot be reduced to either referential-logical or individual-cognitive semantic notions. It follows that intersubjectivity must belong to the essence of linguistic meaning.
Occasioned Semantics: A Systematic Approach to Meaning in Talk
Human Studies
This paper puts forward an argument for a systematic, technical approach to formulation in verbal interaction. I see this as a kind of expansion of Sacks' membership categorization analysis, and as something that is not offered (at least not in a fully developed form) by sequential analysis, the currently dominant form of conversation analysis. In particular, I suggest a technique for the study of ''occasioned semantics,'' that is, the study of structures of meaningful expressions in actual occasions of conversation. I propose that meaning and rhetoric be approached through consideration of various dimensions or operations or properties, including, but not limited to, contrast and co-categorization, generalization and specification, scaling, and marking. As illustration, I consider a variety of cases, focused on generalization and specification. The paper can be seen as a return to some classical concerns with meaning, as illuminated by more recent insights into indexicality, social action, and interaction in recorded talk.
Conversation analysis and Wittgenstein
Text & Talk, 2023
In the present paper I discuss the affinities between conversation analysis and Wittgenstein’s later ordinary language philosophy. Although both paradigms differ in purpose, they share some similarities: they both conceive language as an instrument for action, understanding as a manifestation of behaviour, and meaning as something generated in situ. I suggest that the concepts of adjacency pair, positionally sensitive grammar, and action ascription particularise, in some ways, Wittgenstein’s notion of context. Both paradigms share similarities and differences in terms of method and in terms of their conception of rules; for example, both are inductive approaches but for Wittgenstein rules are normative in principle whereas for conversation analysts like Sacks they are primarily practical.