Approaching Dialogue: Talk, Interaction and Contexts in Dialogical Perspectives (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Approaching dialogue: Talk, interaction and contexts in dialogical perspectives by Per Linell Maurice Nevile Approaching dialogue: Talk, interaction and contexts in dialogical perspectives. By Per Linell. (Impact: Studies in language and society 3.) Amsterdam Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1998. Pp. xvii, 331. This book is well-timed and ambitious. Linell describes his primary interest as the theoretical understanding and empirical analysis of talk-in-interaction (xi), and his second interest as exploring ‘the possibilities and limitations in dialogism as a general epistemology for cognition and communication’ (xi). [End Page 621] After more than twenty years of detailed study of naturally occurring talk-in-interaction, within or arising from the traditions of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, the time is right to explore theoretical concepts for analyzing spoken interaction. The book has fourteen chapters divided into three parts. Part 1, ‘Monologism and dialogism contrasted’ (3–63), includes Chs. 1–4 and provides background to the two paradigms of monologism and dialogism, covering the basic assumptions of monologism (Ch. 2, 17–33) and the historical development of dialogism (Ch. 3, 35–54). According to L, monologism is the dominant framework in studies of communication. It tends to identify ‘the speaker alone as the origin of an utterance’ (xii) and adopts theories of ‘cognition as individually-based information processing, communication as information transfer, and language as code’ (xii–xiii). Dialogism views utterances as produced by speakers who are always ‘in dialogue’ with interlocutors and contexts (xiii). Part 2, ‘Interacting and making sense in contexts’ (67–259), has eight chapters and forms the bulk of the book. This part is concerned with describing dialogue and talk-in-interaction. It presents a dialogistic understanding of speaking as a situated and communicative activity. ‘Communicative projects’ are accomplished by the collaborative action of all participants in the interaction. So, for example, dialogism does not favor simple distinctions like speaker/hearer but instead considers the role of the speaker’s partner in authoring the utterance. Cognition and communication are social and contextualized. Other chapters are Ch. 5 ‘The dynamics of dialogue’ (67–89); Ch. 6 ‘Speakers and listeners’ (91–109); Ch. 7 ‘Sense-making in discourse and the situated fixation of linguistic meanings’ (111–26); Ch. 8 ‘Contexts in discourse and discourse in contexts’ (127–58), which presents aspects of a theory to explore how utterances can both shape and be shaped by context; Ch. 9 ‘Elementary contributions to discourse’ (159–80), Ch. 10 ‘Episodes and topics’ (181–205); Ch. 11 ‘Communicative projects’ (207–34); and Ch. 12 ‘Situation definitions, activity types and communicative genres’ (235–59). Part 3, ‘Monologism and dialogism reconciled?’, has just two chapters. In Ch. 13 ‘Dialogism: Opportunities and limitations’ (263–76), L looks at how dialogism can be extended to look at other forms of communication and cognition, including written texts, and considers methodological issues such as coding and quantification in studying spoken interaction from a dialogistic perspective. Ch. 14 ‘Reconstructing monologism as a special case’ (277–87), is the final chapter and describes a place for monologism while retaining dialogism as ‘the most basic and comprehensive theory of cognition, communication and language’ (278). The book draws on a range of traditions in discourse study, making it both more rewarding and more challenging to read. On the whole, L is to be commended for developing a dialogical theory of discourse while remaining firmly grounded in the study of authentic spoken interaction. Maurice Nevile Australian National University Copyright © 2001 Linguistic Society of America