Structure, Use, and Meaning Brașov

For almost 50 years, culture in linguistic analysis has evolved from communicative competence (Hymes 1974), cultural linguistics (Langacker 1994), languaculture (Agar 1994), and ethnolinguistics (Wierzbicka 1997), towards ethnopragmatics (Goddard 2006) and intercultural pragmatics (Kecskes 2014).

‘Dialogue’ is a familiar concept in the field of intercultural communication with a great potential for development and exploration in terms of theoretical resources and forms of practice. Dialogue has been mostly seen as a ‘social practice’, constructed and enlivened by users in a variety of contexts throughout the world. Multiple intellectual traditions were born within a dialogic perspective upon language, bearing in mind the centrality of discourse, as a language-in-use system of thought that structures the way people make sense and act in their social worlds (Fairhurst and Putnam 2004). The dialogic nature of language has been traditionally interpreted as either a contiguous or an interactive process, in which the two interlocutors may merely be mutually presenting ideas to each other or enabling and affecting the other, in a ‘functional’ manner, highly dependent on the multiple voices and cultural logics that need to contend with each other. If one investigates the structure of language and linguistic presentation, one might also say that the utterance/sentence/ word itself stands in a similar juxtaposed relationship to other utterances/sentences/words in a speech or text, as in a kind of internal dialogue without hierarchy. Bakhtin (1981, 275) presents a three-layer nesting model of juxtaposed “dialogue orientation, [first] amid other utterances inside a single language, (…) [second] amid other ‘social languages’ within a single national language, and finally amid different national languages within the same culture”, also relating to genre, age group, social dialects, and so on. The essential elements in Bakhtin’s dialogical theory refer to the existence of multiple voices in ‘polyphony,’ the open communication among these voices, and the development of human beings during dialogue.

Dialogue is a situated performance. In turbulent times, a dialogical approach may equate with initiating and facilitating negotiations between conflicting groups, and mobilising them towards a common goal (Gao 2017). For example, Holliday (2013) challenges the old frame of cultural perception (us vs. them, self vs. other, the East vs. the West, etc.), suggesting that research in this area should focus on the identification and acknowledgement of common themes that operate across group boundaries. This approach could also be used to analyse other aspects, such as teacher-student relationship, or to promote dialogical learning. Thus, intercultural dialogues must not be restricted to interethnic levels (Gao 2017) since they can also take the form of a dialogue between different communities, real or virtual, a dialogue between different fields of practice or even a dialogue between different voices of the same individual.

The dialogic perspective allows the interplay among communication, context, action, and meaning, being viewed as a holistic and systemic outcome of the human linguistic manifestations. A strict separation of competence and performance, between language as an abstract system of rules and language as use, that displays “language-internal, cognitive and social factors” (Kempson 2017, 197), is no longer in line with modern linguistic research. The perspectives have changed in time and, given the development of computational models of dialogue, there has appeared a more flexible perspective, Dynamic Syntax, which primarily considers the natural process of language use based on “shifting goals, shifting contents and shifting contexts” (Kempson 2017, 203) or goal-oriented sequences of action.

The dialogic nature of culture is very similar to that of the language, in the sense that just as language is seen as a mobile system with different glosses and meanings built up over time, so can culture be interpreted as something on the move, or, as Street (1993) comments, ‘culture is a verb’. “Individuals and society construct one another through social interaction” (Ochs 1996) and culture is seen as the shared meanings of a group formed through interchange, with a set of “central codes of meaning that are enshrined in language and semiotic systems” (Morgan and Cain 2000, 22) in an intercultural and intracultural manner.

We welcome contributions dealing with language and dialogue, from the point of view of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, rhetoric, dialogue studies, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, or intercultural and foreign/second language instruction.

Scientific committee

Mihaela Gheorghe, Transilvania University of Brașov

Andra Vasilescu, University of Bucharest

Marina Bondi, University of Modena and Reggio

Francisco Yus, University of Alicante

Władysław Chłopicki, Jagiellonian University in Kraków

Elena Buja, Transilvania University of Brașov

Stanca Măda, Transilvania University of Brașov

Răzvan Săftoiu, Transilvania University of Brașov

Organizing committee

Elena Buja

Stanca Măda

Răzvan Săftoiu