The dialogic turn in cognitive linguistic studies: From minimalism, maximalism to dialogicalism

Abstract

Theoretically speaking, semantic minimalism and semantic maximalism are two current dominant assumptions on the nature of meaning in the linguistic communication. The former lays more emphasis on the syntactic basis of sentence meaning, while the latter stresses much over the pragmatic properties of utterance meaning. This paper, grounded on the studies of dialogicalism from the perspective of philosophy of language, and of the distinction between type-level sentence and token-level sentence from the perspective of schema–instance cognitive principle and cognitive construction grammar, advocates the cognitive dialogic construction grammar approach to the meaning in linguistic communication. According to the basic claim of this approach, the adjacent two utterances in a conversation are construed as the instantiations of a shared schema in the view of schema–instance cognitive principle. The interactions between speaker, hearer, and utterances in a conversation significantly imply the nature of meaning constructed in the linguistic communication, namely, being temporary, dynamic and dialogic construction-based. The cognitive dialogic construction grammar approach to the construction and acquisition of meaning indicates the ideology of dialogicalism and the dialogic turn in the current studies in Cognitive Linguistics, meanwhile throwing light on the studies on conversational analysis as well as language acquisition.