Partnerorientierung zwischen Realität und Imagination: Anmerkungen zu einem zentralen Konzept der Dialogtheorie

Abstract

This paper attempts a critique of the notion of 'dialogue' in dialogue theory as espoused by Linell, Markova, and others building on Bakhtin's writings. According to them, human communication, culture, language, and even cognition are dialogical in nature. This implies that these domains work by principles of other-orientation and interaction.In our paper, we reject accepting other-orientation as an a priori condition of every semiotic action. Instead, we claim that in order to be an empirically useful concept for the social sciences, it must be shown if and how observable action is other-oriented. This leads us to the following questions: how can we methodically account for other-orientation of semiotic action? Does other-orientation always imply interaction? Is every human expression oriented towards others? How does the other, as s/he is represented in semiotic action, relate to the properties which the other can be seen to exhibit as indexed by their observable behavior?We study these questions by asking how the orientation towards others becomes evident in different forms of communication. For this concern, we introduce 'recipient design', 'positioning' and 'intersubjectivity' as concepts which allow us to inquire how semiotic action both takes the other into account and, reflexively, shapes him/her as an addressee having certain properties. We then specifically focus on actions and situations in which other-orientation is particularly problematic, such as interactions with children, animals, machines, or communication with unknown recipients via mass media.These borderline cases are scrutinized in order to delineate both limits and constitutive properties of other-orientation. We show that there are varieties of

Chapter 9. Changes in turn-design over interactional histories – the case of instructions in driving school lessons

“…Linell 2009). 'Recipient design is more specific (see Deppermann and Schmidt 2016). The term is meant to capture how the specific individual or categorical properties of the intended addressee(s) which the producer of a stretch of talk ascribes to their addressee inform the talk to be produced.…”