Urban, Greg; Smith, Kristin 1998. The sunny tropics of 'dialogue'?. Semiotica 121 (3/4): 263-281.
Dialogue is, if nothing else, a capacious vehicle for conveying social information. An interpreter, immersed in the circulating discourse out of which a snippet of dialogue grows, is able to reconstruct from it an imagined social world, replete with characters standing in defined social relations to one another. (Urban & Smith 1998: 263)
"Social information" as opposed to other types of information.
With so much social meaning jam-packed into so little dialogue, it is no wonder that, a semiotic form, dialogue has become, at times and [|] for some, a vehicle for utopian social longing. Dialogue encodes social interaction, and thus appears to be about sociability, with social relations (literally, in the case of novelistic discourse) imagined from discourse. It is not such a far step from here to think of dialogue as a tool or instrument for social transformation. Something like this underlies the normative faith in communicative rationality - really a form of dialogue or debate - espoused by Jürgen Habermas (1989[1962]). And it is a guiding idea in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin (1994[1975]) and V. N Voloshinov (1973[1929]). (Urban & Smith 1998: 263-264)
Dialogue as a semiotic form that is about sociability and encodes social interaction. Well, that's one way to approach conversation semiotically.
Traces of the simultaneously normative and descriptive interest can be seen in the collection by Tullio Maranhão (1990), The Interpretation of Dialogue, to which one of us has contributed. However, the Bakhtinian influence is seen most clearly in the collection under review, edited by Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim (1995), The Dialogic Emergence of Culture. Some authors in the latter volume view dialogue as a way of reforming the ethnographic endeavor, producing a more collaborative approach to ethnography, and giving voice to ethnographic subjects. (Urban & Smith 1998: 264)
Both sound interesting.
- Maranhão, Tullio (ed.) 1990. The Interpretation of Dialogue. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. [ESTER] [Google]
- Tedlock, Dennis; Mannheim, Bruce (eds.) 1995. The Dialogic Emergence of Culture. Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press. [Google] [Google Books Preview]
Our purpose in this review article is to nudge the understanding of dialogue further in the direction of semiotics. While we find compelling the goals of the Habermasian and Bakhtinian projects, and while we believe that Tedlock and Mannheim have helped open up a major new area of anthropological investigation, we are worried that others may too hastily conclude that dialogue solves the problems of ethnography, and, indeed, that they may too readily accept the utopian claims for it. Because of its semiotic properties - many of them revealed in the Tedlock and Mannheim collection - dialogue is not only a democratic tool, but also a source of illusions. The tropology of dialogue reveals the happy face of social relations, but we must also be concerned with the sad face that it may semiotically conceal. (Urban & Smith 1998: 264)
Dno why the authors presume a utopian promise in the concept of dialogue. Must have been due to the wishful political thinking of the 1990s - back when people were still excited about the democratic promise of the internet and didn't consider the possibilities of corporate centralization. Today we're in a similar position with regard to the gig economy. It could be used to liberate and revolutionize the workforce but it looks like we're going in the direction of corporate feodalization and being a "self-employed" gig worker for monopolistic international companies is the only option for many.
Substantively, the "semiotic properties" of dialogue could do with clarification, expansion, and explanation. Define:tropology - the use of figurative language in speech or writing; a treatise on figures of speech or tropes. A word I did not know I would need (see "paraphrase sets"). The point appears to be something like Zuckermann's critique of phatic communion, that it is oftentimes used by anthropologists in a very positive way, as if association itself produced positive social bonds. That's more or less what Malinowski says, yes, but Malinowski's vision of dialogue is problematic to say the least. He leaves out, from Ross's sociology, the problem of "interests" and how conflicts of interest produce antipathies rather than just something someone says, as it may appear from Malinowksi's own text. The trope of bonding is very superficial and glides over all the social issues involved in the type of interaction Malinowski himself was involved - an foreign ethnographer under the protection of the colonial powers interviewing informants through a translator employing pidgin English, for example. Why didn't Malinowski share with the Trobrianders the spells to ward off the evil spirits called the "British"?
Our contribution here to the ongoing conversation is to propose a distinction between three semiotic levels at which dialogue should be examined. There is, first, what we will call the semiotic plane of dialogue, that is, dialogue studied in terms of the semiotic mechanisms that make possible 'voice', and the interactions among 'voices', in ongoing discourse. Second, there is the meta-semiotic plane, or dialogue or dialogic form construed as itself a sign vehicle, capable of communicating information about the discourse in which it operates. Third, there is the tropological plane, where the words 'dialogue' and 'dialogic' are used to pick out aspects of the world - principally, but not exclusively, discourse - and to imbue them with significance. What is of most interest to us are the interactions among these planes. (Urban & Smith 1998: 264)
If I'm reading this correctly, the three planes/levels are approximately communicative, metacommunicative, and "tropological", so that the first two belong to the realm of the participants and the third to the realm of the observer of the act of communication:
- semiotic/communicative - ability to use language and formulate messages in said language;
- meta-semiotic/metacommunicative - ability to use language about language (metalanguage) or to communicate instructions about the codification of the message; in this case the dialogic form is a meta-message about how the exchange should be interpreted (as a dialogue and not, for example, as a (collective) monologue, a boxing match, or anything else); presumably, this plane can intersect with the first when one makes an explicit comment about the ongoing interaction, e.g. a third person interjects and one of the two people having a private conversation says to the interjector, "Hey, we're having a private conversation here!" - I say presumably because what the authors appear to be aiming at is the form of the dialogue itself acting as a meta-message like this without explicating it verbally, i.e. the private conversation may be held somewhat away from other people at a public gathering, in whispered voices, or the participants may hold frequent eye contact with each other without glancing much at other people, etc.;
- tropological would be tantamount to "metapragmatic" categories, i.e. instead of the form of dialogue it's ideational content, the qualities of dialogue that enable the abstraction of a thing called "dialogue" from the rest of human activities; or the researcher's ideal of "dialogue" as something with a promise of social transformation.
A great deal (but probably not enough) of analytic attention has been directed to the semiotic properties of dialogue, and these are, indeed, fascinating. Leaving aside simultaneous or parallel discourses - as when two people talk at once - dialogue can be found in continuous, unilinearly-unfolding stretches of discourse (oral or written). Its salient characteristic is that, while it may be a linear phenomenon, dialogic discourse is interpreted as containing two or more 'voices'. The first question we posed in our own investigation into dialogue is: What is a voice? (Urban & Smith 1998: 265)
That is, "the reciprocity is established by the change of rôles" (PC 5.6). By "linear" they appear to mean that, for example, a recorded audio spectrum of a dialogue is a continuous sequence of frequencies but a human listener will discern two different persons talking.
Voice is not, from our point of view, to be equated with distinct persons or individuals in the world. Rather, it is a property of discourse. Voices may emanate from distinct individuals, but they do not necessarily do so. A narrator or author, as a single speaker/writer, may construct a narrative containing multiple voices (as in the case of Gaddis's JR), where the individuals that seem to be behind the voices are fictional. Furthermore, one may represent oneself in discourse as a distinct individual, but assume different 'voices' through which one's individuality is communicated. This is the case in Jane Hill's fine contribution to the Tedlock and Mannheim volume - 'The voices of Don Gabriel: Responsibility and self in a modern Mexican narrative'. In the discourse Hill so convincingly analyzes, Don Gabriel employs distinctive voices, one in discussing commercial interactions, the other in talking about personal events in his life, despite the fact that he represents himself as one person. (Urban & Smith 1998: 265)
The concept of voice drifts away from the individual in only one direction. It is one individual that can have multiple voices, as when taking on different characters/personas or when communicating "individuality" (a curious topic). The other possibility is that multiple individuals talk in the same voice. The example that comes to mind is an internet forum in which several people express the same extreme views as if they were the same individual; they very well could be with sock-puppet accounts, or they may just be several individuals living in the same or similar information bubble and, in a sense, acting as mouthpieces of a single entity. This, I realize, nudges the substance of voice towards content but it could very well be a characteristic of voice - the example that comes to mind is the voice of pilots, which echo a particular southern drawling ace pilot from an earlier age of aeronautics. I might be thinking of Eddie Rickenbacker (see Jay A. Stout's The Men Who Killed the Luftwaffe).
What strikes us as crucial to voice is not the presence or representation of distinct individuals in discourse, although this is fundamental to dialogic discourse per se. Rather, we regard voic as a function of the internal iconicity and co-reference that characteriz-e a stretch of discourse. A necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition for dialogic discourse is the presence of at least two systems of iconicity and co-reference - two 'voices'. Each system is organized around a kind of force-field of attraction through similarity, as well as cross-clause co-reference through anaphora, including anaphora used to maintain stable reference around the use of first- and second-person pronouns. The latter are, of course, what give rise to the idea that voice equals a represented 'I'. (Urban & Smith 1998: 165)
This looks like a very bare-bones definition of the semiotic self. This "internal iconicity" or "force-field of attraction through similarity" is certainly formed in vivid language but not very expressive - iconicity between what? What is it "inside" that appears as a "copy" of something else? Is that something else, of which the voice is in this sense a copy, something internal or external? The attraction through similarity sounds like personalities are discriminated through voice in some mystical gravitation of similarities. Clay's "unitiveness" comes to mind for some reason.
However, a voice is consolidated in the first place by the similarities among the bits of discourse that seem to emanate from it. A voice is the virtual locus of those similarities. (Urban & Smith 1998: 265)
Here "voice" sounds a lot like the critical theory conception of "discourse". The "similarities among the bits of discourse" bring it closer to "content". I.e. we can say "homophobic discourse" because we recognize that people who talk about homosexuality as if it was a contagious disease that can be propagated through acceptance and toleration - if you let gay people live free and happy lives they'll have more gay children, and the heterosexual variety of humanity will die out - constitute a chorus of a small minority universe of discourse that just happens to be hateful and anti-science. In this case we can say, likewise, that "homophobic discourse" is a "virtual locus" of similarly boggled views of the world.
In this case, the B voice seems to come from a class of individuals - the grade-school students with whom the teachers interact. While there may be reasons to suspect that the different instances of the B voice are associated with distinct individuals, in the Gaddis novel, at least, we cannot hear those individuals as distinct voices. Because they are characterized by the same grammatical features and lexical choices, as well as topics, the various individuals blend into one another, the 'voice' being identified with a class of individuals. (Urban & Smith 1998: 266)
The other possibility is addressed. Grammatical features on the level of morphemes, lexical choices on the level of words, and choice of topic on the level of phrases or groups of phrases (discourse).
The similarity can be based on physical properties (for example, intonation, stress patterns, or voice qualities, in the case of spoken discourse), grammatical characteristics, lexical choices, and even topics. (Urban & Smith 1998: 266)
Verbal qualities, i.e. grammatical-lexical-topical, and nonverbal qualities (intonation, stress, quality).
In the case of Don Gabriel, Hill shows that the two distinctive voices he inhabits are repre-sented in the discourse by language choice, either Spanish (for talking abut commerce) or Mexicano (for talking about personal issues). (Urban & Smith 1998: 266)
Why this hyphenation?
For a stretch of discourse to be labeled dialogical, it must be analyzable as containing at least two distinct voices, two force fields of iconicity, with its different segments drawn into one or the other of the fields, and interpretable as emanating from one of the fields. While the semiotic bifurcation [|] of a stretch of discourse in this way is a necessary condition for dialogue, it is not a sufficient condition. In addition, the two fields must interact in some way. (Urban & Smith 1998: 266-267)
"Force fields of iconicity" thus do indeed stand for semiotic personalities. The bifurcation of a dialogue into distinct speakers is "semiotic" on this basis, that we recognize the distinctive qualities of different persons or groups of persons in the verbal and nonverbal material presented. There is a case that interested me in dystopian literature - in Zamjatin's We the speakers or persons spoken about are sometimes distinguished by nothing else than a single characteristic feature, like O's round wrists or X's nasolabial fold and slanting eyebrows.
The second part is seen as a response to the first. This is the phenomenon Goffman (1981) analyzed as 'uptake', namely, that discourse from one voice shows evidence of taking up discourse from another. (Urban & Smith 1998: 267)
Another term I desperately needed, from Goffman's Forms of Talk. In phatic communion this is that phenomenon when, for example, someone interjects by repeating the last few words the last speaker just uttered. It is sometimes used to "steal" a turn. A curious case to elaborate upon with regard to that pesky "reciprocity" and its subversions.
The idea of uptake receives its highest expression, for Voloshinov (1971[1929]), in reported speech, that is, direct and indirect quotation, and free indirect style. It is in reported speech as dialogicality that the interaction of voices is best displayed. The theme is taken up, in the Tedlock and Mannheim volume, by Deborah Tannen in 'Waiting for the mouse: Constructed dialogue in conversation'. However, she gives the theme a different spin. Rather than emphasizing the interaction between reporting voice and reported voice, she views the reporting as 'constructed' dialogue, done for purposes of communicating with an audience. While we agree with her general observation, we stress that what is constructed for the audience is dialogical. That is, what the audience is interested in may be, in part, the engagement of voices. Discourse that represents engagement has, by virtue of that fact, we suspect, aesthetic appeal. (Urban & Smith 1998: 267)
So then I says to Mable, I says... [someone interjects] ...so anyway I says to Mable, I says...
At this point, it is important to consider what the result of the engagement is. One possible outcome is that the two voices, A and B, are brought closer to one another. The force fields over time intertwine, such that the distinction between voices is blurred. This is the theme of the interesting chapter by Steve Attinasi and Paul Friedrich, entitled 'Dialogic breakthrough: Catalysis and synthesis in life-changing dialogue'. By 'life-changing', the authors mean that the dialogue includes epiphany. In the case of Attinasi's dialogue with his tutor while learning Chol Maya, the engagement leads to a 'phatic brotherhood', as Attinasi learns when to utter a Chol phrase expressing encouragement and unity. From our point of view, Attinasi's speech gets pulled into the force field of similarities characterizing his tutor's speech. (Urban & Smith 1998: 267)
A very buzy paragraph, this. First of all, "phatic brotherhood" is very loaded. It comes across as a synonym or paraphrase of "links of fellowship" (PC 4.5) or "bonds of personal union" (PC 9.1). Secondly, the closening or intertwining of voices here amounts to establishing "common ground states" for some information or expressions (cf. Power & Dal Martello 1985: 240).
If we think about it in the abstract, the two voices, A and B, may each undergo change in the course of engagement, with A's voice becoming more like B's and vice versa, the result being a kind of synthesis, a new voice C. This would be a dialectical view of dialogic engagement, the synthesis working together the thesis and the antithesis. But engagement may also lead to A and B becoming more, not less, distinct. (Urban & Smith 1998: 267)
Communization and differentiation (Morris; Ruesch).
We are not sure what outcome would reflect the democratic utopia of dialogue; perhaps in the democratic dialogue the engagement of voices would lead, over time, to some assimilation and some differentiation, with the various voices maintaining themselves as distinct, but also intermingling. Alternatively, the democratic ideal could be realized by a true synthesis, in which A and B both change into a single new voice, C. (Urban & Smith 1998: 268)
Assimilation is not a perfect synonym of communization because it has sociological connotations, such as assimilation in a nation or "The assimilation of texts from another culture", which "results in the phenomenon of polyculturality" (Lotman et al. 2013[1973]: 68). Reportedly Piaget distinguished between assimilation (the process of taking in and fully understanding information or ideas), "the process whereby an action is actively reproduced and comes to incorporate new objects into itself" and accommodation (a convenient arrangement; a settlement or compromise) "the process whereby the schemes of assimilation themselves become modified in being applied to a diversity of objects" (Huxley 1977: 32). Piaget's distinction seems to be comparable to Locke's distinction between certain truths and convinced truths, the two degrees of habitual knowledge, one in which we can perceive the relations between ideas that lay out or demonstrate the thruthfulness of the conviction and one in which the mind is certain "having been convinced" earlier in the relations between ideas but has forgotten the proofs (cf. Locke 1741b: 129). Put together and drawn further, the "third" voice or knowledge with "common ground" status can be assimilated, there is an actual uptake into semantic memory, or accommodated, in which case the uptake is spurious and memory of the failed uptake may be lodged in episodic memory, so to say. The democratic ideal model of utopia seems dubious - how democratic are utopian visions? I don't recall if Fourier had any democratic elements, even. But then again he might not have considered himself a utopian thinker as Marx and Engels did, his plans merely lacked the finances.
Our concern, however, is that the trajectory of engagement be studied empirically. We know that not all dialogical engagement is democratic. The Socratic dialogues reflect the submission, over time, of the competing voices to that of Socrates. This kind of power asymmetry seems also to characterize law school dialogues, as analyzed by Mertz (1996). The result of dialogue may be the assertion or exacerbation of power asymmetries, rather than their erasure. (Urban & Smith 1998: 268)
"For in this use of speech the bonds created between hearer and speaker are not quite symmetrical, the man linguistically active receiving the greater share of social pleasure and self-enhancement."
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, we note the intimate connection between theories of dialogue and theories of culture. The view of culture as shared throughout a society corresponds to the idea of discourse as tending towards univocality, with all of the various snippets of discourse pulled into a single force-field of similarity/iconicity - a single voice. The emergence of a multiplicity of force fields around which discourse is organized leads to dialogical engagement, which, from the perspective of dialogicality, is the norm rather than the exception. However, while insisting on the engagement between voices, those who view society dialogically have too often failed to look at engagement as diachronic process. From the point of view we have outlined here - with dialogue as a linearly unfolding process - it is possible to see shared culture as one phase in the engagement process, a phase that may result from a genuine synthesis of opposed voices, or one that may reflect the suppression of one voice by another or the assimilation of one voice to another. Under a dialogic model, however, shared culture woul drepresent only one moment or possibility in a longer diachronic process, and it would be a more or less stable moment, with the ever-present possibility of the re-emergence of distinct voices. Lastly, the equation of voice with the individual, resulting in the view of society as a conversation between its individual members, would be only [|] one variety of dialogicality, whose alternative would be voice associated with a class or category of person, such as Gaddis's grade schooler in JR. (Urban & Smith 1998: 268-269)
Dialogue/culture, conversation/society, culture/society. Univocality - assimilation - suppression versus plurivocality - synthesis - re-emergence. These look like Bakhtinian tropes, i.e. "the ever-present possibility of the re-emergence of distinct voices", which re-emerge just like fleeting meanings return to have their homecoming festival. The democratic utopia of dialogue sounds like a possible world in which artificial intelligence sets up puppets of influential "voices" who'll argue to the n-th iteration every argument ever proposed by a human mind and then tally their advice like an angel on your shoulder through bone conduction headphones.
From a semiotic point of view, dialogue is a particular organization of discourse. We can speak of a given stretch of discourse as 'a dialogue'. But if we as two analysts are able to point to some discourse as an instance of dialogue, so also are the 'natives'. That is, a dialogue becomse a recognizable thing, and, hence, like other things, it acquires the capacity of serving as a sign vehicle for carrying information in its own right. This is what we mean by referring to dialogue as 'meta-semiotic'. The form of dialogue may be regarded as a sign usable for carrying meanings and accomplishing goals in specific situations; it tells participants how to interpret the discourse of which it forms part. What is important here are not the semiotic properties of dialogue - how discourse organizes internally as dialogue - but rather the meta-semiotic properties - how the fact of discourse organized dialogically may itself communicate on a separate level. (Urban & Smith 1998: 269)
Discourse is substance and dialogue is accident. Archetype and ectype? Becoming recognizable would be the "copy" aspect, similarity is the first one over the threshold (the capacity to act as sign). Instructions that tell participants "How to interpret the discourse" are Batesonian metacommunicative messages, which broadly subsumes the pragmatic contexts of the discourse, such as the overall, general, or dominant function, the social relationships between the participants, emotional communication, and why not even the metapragmatic labels for contexts of the situation ("phatic communion") and the literary, popular, and technical tropes of communication (e.g. the fact of communicating).
In previous work by one of us on ceremonial dialogues in South America (Urban 1986, 1991; see also Maranhão 1990), the observation was already made that people use the dialogic form as a sign. We wish to explore here the kinds of meanings that meta-semiotic dialogue communicates. In a general way, the self-conscious use of dialogic form communicates the presence of dialogue, as semiotic, in the situation in which it is used. But what does dialogue as semiotic means to the participants who use the form meta-semiotically? (Urban & Smith 1998: 269)
Exceedingly interesting. Makes me think if there are in-depth studies of the self-conscious meta-semiotic use of linguistic functions by communication theorists. I have collected some such instances as the "phatic microphone", I guess. One of the arguments I wish to formulate into a publication is that the last three - aesthetic, metalingual, and phatic - functions in Jakobson's scheme are meta-functions: poetic = emotive2 - instead of merely giving off an impression of an emotion, aesthetic/poetic captures it in the autonomous, self-reflective form of the message, making it capable of invoking a specific emotion at a distance, making art the sign of feeling, which is a simplification but hey feeling is first over the threshold; metalingual = referential2 - instead of referring to an object or something within the universe of discourse, the metalingual refers words to other words to explicate the semantics of the linguistic form, or, e.g. encyclopedic or etymological information as to why a word refers to a particular real object or unreal objects in the universe of discourse; phatic = conative2 - instead of conveying a command or appealing to the addressee to influence the latter's intentions to do something, the exercise of the phatic function is as if of pure appeal, or an imperative devoid of actionable information, more or less a "Pay attention to me!" without a valid reason to do anything of the kind.
Mannheim and Tedlock begin to address this problem in their introduction (p. 4). They make a distinction between anacretic and syncretic dialogue. For Mannheim and Tedlock, the difference is that between form and function: Anacretic dialogues ae 'formally but not functionally dialogical', whereas syncretic dialogues are 'functionally dialogical regardless of their form'. (Urban & Smith 1998: 269-270)
It looks like being "functionally dialogical" means being used for the practical purposes of communication, to convey information, questions and commands. This is the "universally recognized view of language as a tool of communication" (Jakobson 1963d: 423). This "regardless of their form" could do with a clarification: syncretic dialogues are functionally dialogical even when they are not formally dialogues. You can convey information in a joke, a casual remark, even question and command. Anacretic on the other hand are formally dialogues but not functionally dialogical, which is also evident in phatic communion: it is formally dialogical, a type of social intercourse, but it does not function dialogically because the reciprocity between the speaker and listener bifurcates between synthesis and suppression, there is a question power asymmetries - are the speaker and listener equals in a natural state or in some power relation in a political state.
The form-function contrast allows them to account for the fact that some phenomena that are apparently 'dialogic' - the Peruvian military's diálogos with the peasantry during the 1970s, for example - do not reflect egalitarian multivoicedness of the sort they associate with dialogues in the functional sense. (Urban & Smith 1998: 269)
Bakhtinian unwellformedness. Haven't had a chance to point out any ephemeral floating qualities in a while. This "apparently" relates to the trope of pretending to communicate; there's "pseudophatic communion, since the speaker pretends to achieve no other aim than displaying a socially appreciated form of interactional behavior" (Haverkate 1988: 61).
If such formal dialogues are 'not functionally dialogical', then what is their function? What are they communicating? Why are they there? These are the kinds of questions that the meta-semiotic formulation helps us to address. If we are dealing only with a distinction between form and [|] function, then the purely formal or 'anacretic' dialogue would seem to have no communicative purpose, or, perhaps, only one purpose - to provide a false interpretation of the situation at hand. We believe, in fact, that there may be different meanings carried by dialogue as meta-semiotic. (Urban & Smith 1998: 269-270)
Does the function pertain to what the discourse communicates? Or should it pertain to how it does so? The "no communicative purpose" is a familiar phatic trope. Providing "a false interpretation of the situation at hand" on the other hand goes back to the pretending.
One key to this problem is the specific form that the self-conscious, meta-semiotic dialogue takes, and how that form relates to the discursive processes making up social life in the culture in which it occurs. The form supplies insight into its iconic meaning, as well as being the basis of that meaning for the participants. In this regard, it is important that the self-conscious use of the dialogue involves the selection of certain aspects of dialogic form as a means of stereotypically representing it, of saying, in effect: 'this is dialogue'. An analogy here would be the political cartoon in which a few features cue us in to the identity of the character - a ski-jump nose, stick-out ears, a pointy chin. Empirically, in fact, different ritualized dialogues tend to pick out different features and use them as the means of suggesting: 'This is an instance of dialogue'. The choice of features cues us into the different meanings that ritualized dialogues carry. (Urban & Smith 1998: 270)
Which came forst - a Jakobson or a Bakhtin? Poetic form calls out that it is a poetic form. Poetic features like syntactical breaks, pauses, rhymes and rhythm announce that the linguistic material is in the form of a poem. Of course there is also free verse which, much like functionally dialogical but formally undialogical practical communication, functions as poetry without the poetic form. "Ritual dialogue" is effectively a synonym of phatic communion.
Native South American ritualized dialogues tend to pick up on the presence of two individuals, and on their rhythmically alternating contributions to some ongoing discourse. In the most extreme variant, the two individuals produce (insofar as is possible) exactly the same sound. One speaker echoes the syllable produced by the other. Thi sis a stylized 'dialogue'. However, there are in fact not two distinct voices present but one - or, rather, the two voices are minimally distinct, the distinctiveness lying in such pragmatic features as voice quality, but not in the linguistically segmentable material or semantic content. The idea of this dialogue seems to be to close or eliminate the gap between voices - that is, to produce, insofar as is possible, a single 'voice', perfect sharing, the passage down over time of tradition. (Urban & Smith 1998: 270)
The Japanese aizuchi comes to mind (cf. Kita & Ide 2007), as does Trotter's phrase "these elaborate evolutions" (Trotter 1921: 119-120). Or: "It is by uttering the same cry, pronouncing the same word, or performing the same gesture in regard to some object that they become and feel themselves to be in unison" (Durkheim 1915: 230).
We believe that this extreme variant, when understood as meta-semiotic, is not deployed in an attempt to falsely suggest egalitarian multivoicedness. Instead, this ritualized dialogic form represents (by virtue of being an icon of) a specific form of linguistically-mediated interaction found in this society. The ceremonial dialogue reflects the process of learning or social transmission of the origin myth itself. Young boys, as part of their training, repeat the myth as it is told by one of their elders; they repeat it syllable by syllable, the elder going patiently through each syllable as the younger man repeats it. As a meta-semiotic sign vehicle, therefore, the ceremonial dialogue says in effect: 'This instance of dialogue you are hearing is founded on social transmission, on the culture we share'. This is hardly the message one associates with Bakhtinian dialogue, or probably even with what Mannheim and Tedlock would regard as syncretic or functional dialogue. (Urban & Smith 1998: 270)
Finally the "semiotic" aspect of the concept of dialogue itself. It appears to be a curious interpretation of cultural semiotics: the type of "linguistic-mediated interaction" that a culture is known for. The aizuchi, for example, is characteristic of the Japanese. By introducing this component of iconicity into the matter of a ritual verbal interaction, it necessitates an outside-looking-in perspective: not the actual interactionss typical within the source culture but its most iconic type of interaction within the target culture is the criterion on which the "semioticity" of this approach hangs. What of types of verbal interaction rituals that are not known, iconic, and stereotypical? What of the types of culture that are not well represented outside of their area? How many minority cultures are still hanging on to dear life within the Russian Federation? Or within any national territory for that matter? This kind of semioticity makes me think of the objectives and ethics of research. It's an interesting development upon speech genres, I'll give it that, but the type of representation this level is concerned with is a bit conceited.
The use of meta-semiotic dialogic form to signal the presence of social or cultural transmission, however, resonates with one chapter in The Dialogic Emergence of Culture - an essay by Allan F. Burns describing the video-taping of a conversation about a lynching that had taken place in a north Florida town some seventy years earlier. The conversation is a multi-participant event. What marks it meta-semiotically as a device for transmitting cultural knowledge is the predominance of some voices (Elizabeth's and Rose's) as the story-tellers, and the presence of other voices (Charles's and Allan's) as the eager-to-learn audience. As Burns (p. 76) writes: 'the meaning or message of the story itself is a result of the primary speakers' interest in preserving family history', as well as 'a grandson's interest in honouring his great aunt'. The meta-semiotic form of the dialogue signals to the videotape's audience that the video is to be understood as an instance of learning, of passing knowledge across the generation. (Urban & Smith 1998: 271)
It looks a bit like the authors are trying to establish the "cultural transmission" function of language. Jakobson treated of six speech functions but didn't limit them. He also mentioned the magical function of language. Effectively there could be as many "speech functions" as there are speech genres because its genre comes with its own subcode, the words, phrases and modes of discourse which are characteristic of it. I've highlighted the several instances of the same object, the goal-orientation of the cultural transmission mode of dialogue. The authors make it sound awe-striking: you are in "the presence of" social or cultural knowledge being transmitted from one generation to another - presumably not the "next" generation because it sounds more awe-striking if it's a grandparent instructing a grandchild in matters of culture rather than a parent admonishing a child in matters of social decorum. I also notice that the "matter of culture" being passed down is "family history". Effectively this is phatic communion with extra steps: the young are "under some restraint" trying to veil their impatience while the old recount their personal "views and life history" (cf. PC 5.4).
To take a different example, in American society formal debates - such as the presidential debate during election season - act as metasemiotic devices. They are dialogues in a formal sense, involving two distinct voices in interaction. However, again, they are a peculiar form of dialogue. This is so not only because there is a moderator who sets the topic and who specifies the amounts of time allotted to each voice at different phases, but (and this is crucial) because the debaters are not actually talking to each other. They are talking to an audience, and they typically refer to each other in the third person. Moreover, the purpose of the debate is to have the audience act as judges, deciding who has won and who has lost. The debate, as a meta-semiotic device, is thus in some measure iconic with sporting events. Rather than producing an egalitarian outcome, it is designed specifically to result in a ranking of the interlocutors. (Urban & Smith 1998: 271)
My enthusiasm vains with every succeeding detail of these authors' semiotic theory. This "iconic with sporting events" scrapes the roof of the mouth, so to say. The debate can be "analogous to" a sporting event. The debate may be a metaphorical sporting event, perhaps. But the debate is not an iconic instance of a sporting event. Even the common-sense use of the word "iconic" doesn't fit. From a Peircean perspective, which this "iconic" seems to go for, the similarity should ideally be visual, what with Peirce being awfully involved with images as mental representations, which is why Jakobson's application of Peircean iconicity on verbal art, as in paronomasia, rhyme, and euphony, is not all that popular or merited. What the debate and sporting events have in common is the "judge" in a sporting event and the audience acting as judge in the debate. The latter is already metaphorical, so the analogy takes a long walk for a very small sip. The language of "device" here I don't yet know what to do with; is conversation a semiotic mechanism of culture?
We might add that there is nothing egalitarian about the 'dialogues' reported by Jean de Bernardi in her contribution, 'Tasting the water'. De Bernardi is concerned with Malaysian Chinese dialogues with the 'Wealth god'. She notes that 'the 'gods' who possess spirit mediums engage in dialogue with their human suppliants, and in these dialogues they have the social power of their divine personalities' (p. 194). Correspondingly, 'a skillful medium with a closely bound committee has the power of incontrovertible interpretation' (p. 196, n. 7). (Urban & Smith 1998: 271)
It turns out that "spiritual medium", too, is a phatic category. This paragraph made me think of a neat writing task: to write something, an exhortation or plea or prayer or whatever to every polytheistic god you come across. Happen to read something that mentions Thor or Perkunas and you'll have to write something to him ("Sup T, read a mention of you in..."), and if it's an obscure Chaldean deity or someone you haven't come across before, you'll have to search for more information and write to said god as if it were spurred by a recommendation ("Hey Aneros, I've heard that you're an expert on this. They say that falling in love is easy but getting out of love takes a bit of practice. I was wondering if you could help with..."). Might be a fun bit of creative writing.
From our point of view, the meta-semiotic meaning of dialogue is not: 'You should (falsely) construe what is happening here as egalitarian multivoicedness'. In each instance, there is a highly specific meaning, based on the iconicity of the meta-semiotic dialogue with other discursive and extra-discursive phenomena in the society: 'Construe this event as evidence and an instance of the transmission of culture'; and: 'Construe this event as a win-lose-or-draw competition'. The meta-semiotic meaning [|] is not simply true or false, but subtly engendered by specific external iconicities. (Urban & Smith 1998: 271-272)
Yuup, "extra-discursive phenomena in the society" is too roundabout for nonverbal aspects. "External iconicities" makes no sense to me. Iconicity inside and outside what? Language? Round about you go.
This leaves us with the question of whether there is such a unitary thing as functional dialogue, 'regardless of [the] form' (p. 4). What precisely would functional dialogues be? (Urban & Smith 1998: 272)
Indeed, a functional dialogue - is it a dialogue that accomplishes its function effectively or simply one that has a function, regardless of the performance? What's more, does the dialogue have a single function or can it be plurifunctional? If the main, unmarked "function" here is the default view of language as a tool of communication, the "practical" use of language, then functional dialogue regardless of the form means nothing more than a dialogue with a dominant referential function and some subordinated functions, whose linguistic subcodes it is "borrowing" as form. The advertising that pretends to be news, for example, is not that - it is taking the form of functional dialogue but not using it for practical purposes but for subversive ones; functional dialogue regardless of the form would be illustrated by news that pretends to be advertising, which is a rather rare occurrence, I reckon - perhaps someone using the trappings of advertisement, creating a mock ad, to promote something that legitimately needs to be communicated, or something true about the world or some universe of discourse (if the default functionality is reduced to the referential function).
The concluding chapter by Dennis Tedlock, for example, is self-consciously written as a dialogue. What is the significance of this format? The chapter is, evidently, not an instance of egalitarian multivoicedness. While the chapter is written as dialogue, both voices emanate from Tedlock himself, and one voice is constructed entirely as questioner, the other as respondent. The respondent seems to be the one in the know, the questioner functioning as catalyst, but seemingly developing no particular point of view. One is reminded of a journalistic interview. This is not give and take between equals with different points of view, although some interchanges do suggest this. (Urban & Smith 1998: 272)
It's much worse if there are different points of view but no give and take, only giving off and self-reuptake.
So why should Tedlock have constructed this chapter as a dialogue? One interpretation we have is that the meta-semiotic form he deploys has practical efficacy for him. In particular, it stimulates him to develop his ideas, and to voice his own (or imagined others') doubts about those ideas, along with his response to the doubts. In short, the meta-semiotic form both encodes and helps to bring about the emergence of ideas. It would be entirely possible to re-write this chapter in monological form, eliminating the questioner and brushing up the transitions. However, the dialogical form reminds readers (and perhaps Tedlock himself) of the dialogical emergence that the editors themselves discuss in their introduction. (Urban & Smith 1998: 272)
Google Books currently allows only the introduction to be previewed but it talks about self-communication (autocommunication) and even cites Jakobson's "bad take" about it (only drunkards and schizophrenics talk to themselves). I'll have to read that. If the point of a review is to make you think the source material deserves to be read then this one has been a successful one, and I've only made it halfway through.
Yet Behar's voice never engages Esperanza's as interlocutor; instead, it hovers over Esperanza's, interpreting and reading and re-narrating it to a new audience. Behar sees herself as transmitter in a chain of tellings and recontextualizations: '[Esperanza] told her story to me and I have told it to you. Now you must tell it to someone else, so that eventually the lord and judge of all our actions will hear it, too' (p. 172). Is this piece the counter-hegemonic chapter within a book hegemonically devoted to dialogism. (Urban & Smith 1998: 273)
"Although I was not the addressee of the stranger's oral message, I received it nevertheless and later transposed this utterance first into handrwiting and then into printed symbols; now it has become a part of a new framework - my message to the prospective reader of these pages" (Jakobson 1981[1964e]: 7).
Whatever the case, the larger point is that the organization of discourse - whether monological or dialogical - can itself be meaning-bearing. The meanings are subtle and various. From a meta-semiotic point of view, it is not sufficient to label a discourse as 'dialogic'. One must specify in detail the characteristics of that dialogic form in order to understand the meta-semiotic meaning it communicates. (Urban & Smith 1998: 273)
The the fact of or external qualities, or whatever, of anything can be meaning-bearing. I'm still irked by "meta-semiotic" where metacommunicative would have stood better, seeing as this distinction between monologue and dialogue is pretty much the extent of the "semioticity" meant here, and I would much rather have dialogical-plurivocal interchange be "communicative" and monological-univocal construction of representations (such as texts) be "semiotic". It's like that classical cone of concentric circles: semioses of information (or signification) from the environment, semioses of symptomatization from living quasi-emitters, and semioses of communication from conspecifics and communicable species (cf. Th. V. Uexküll 1992: 460-461). If one of the "participants" in the communicative act is a "quasi-emitter", as in a monologue disguised as dialogue, then we are not dealing with "communicative" semiosis, and viewing it as communication would be - to use my own unwellformedness - communicationalization.
What are we to make of the utopian reformism that has sprung up around dialogue? The utopian claims, we believe, stem not from the careful empirical observation of conversations in the world, nor from the ethnographic study of ritualized dialogues as meta-semiotic devices. Rather, they stem from the tropics of the word 'dialogue' itself. Dialogue, in other words, exists at another plane, not just as a describable object in the world, but as a word through which the object is picked out. That word is, of course, itself an empirical phenomenon, and hence studiable in its own right. (Urban & Smith 1998: 273)
Uh... Don't all words signify some objects (real or unreal)? Tropology/tropics; phatics/phatic-something-something-ology? Phaticommunicology? The utopian reformism they keep alluding to really seems like a hangover from an earlier phase of the linguistic turn. As the saying goes, everything that happens in the west arrives a decade later in the east: the same tendency can probably be found in Schönle, Andreas (ed.) Lotman and Cultural Semiotics: Encounters and Extensions (2006).
Earlier we suggested that 'if we as two analysts are able to point to some discourse as an instance of dialogue, so also are the "natives"'. However, this is not quite right. In the first place, not every culture may pick up on the latent possibility of using dialogic form as a sign vehicle. in fact, from an empirical point of view, ceremonialized dialogues are not ubiquitous even in South America, where they have, rather, a characteristic spatial distribution, being found most typically to the north and west of the Amazon river, but being considerably more rare in central Brazil. (Urban & Smith 1998: 273)
Here it must be lamented that "functional dialogue" and dialogue in general is so slippery. There probably isn't a language that lacks labels for speech situations of the type "conversation" and "ritual speech" or something of the kind. Just because a specific form of ritual dialogue is not universal does mean that a metapragmatic labels for "contexts of situation" are completely lacking. This "using dialogic form as a sign vehicle" is not very exact.
We can wonder, indeed, as the extent to which functional or syncretic (in Mannheim and Tedlock's sense) dialogue is really the projection onto discourse phenomena of specific discourse meanings of the word 'dialogue', such as the meanings deriving from the writings of Bakhtin. Is there a functional dialogue? Or is there a range of different functions accruing to what we construe as dialogic form? (Urban & Smith 1998: 274)
Still fighting with windmills the monolithic hypothesis of language. Obviously there is a range of different functions and if you're a hierarchical functionalist you'll address the dynamics of functions as if they constituted a strict hierarchy of dominant and subordinated functions whose interrelationships can be elucidated through the structure of the material used in the process. Thus, pronouns show who is communicating with who and perhaps even about whom or what. The linguistic material (pronouns) may indicate the dominant function of the text. For example, if the text says what you are supposed to do and not do in order to avoid an obscure form of punishment called the wooden horse - being forced to sit on top of a sharp triangular wooden log high enough that legs don't reach to the ground - then you can deduce that it's dominant function is conative, and that you are reading your officer's manual in 17th century Swedish army (cf. Laidre 1989: 165-166). But, that very same manual may lay out important information about life within that army (referential), clarify important technical jargon and honorifics within the the army (metalingual), heck, it could even include a few songs to sing or lines to be recited on special occasions (poetic), even proscribe particular expressions of greeting and specify appropriate forms of salutation (phatic). It really depends on what unit of text your analysis is establishing the order of functions, as it is a form of imputation, a theoretical device on the observer's side of the communicative act that may or may not reflect the intentions of the participants. I should really re-read "The Dominant" (Jakobson 1981[1971f]).
Alton Becker and Bruce Mannheim, in their contribution to The Dialogic Emergence of Culture - a contribution that, like Tedlock's, is in the form of a dialogue - discuss the tropology of the words 'code', 'text', and 'language'. They find each term stultifying because of its apparent presupposition of univocality. They believe (and we agree) that the word 'dialogue', when used by analysts, turns attention to polyvocality and to alternative voices. As a stimulus to research, therefore, the term dialogue is an important one. It leads researchers to look at the world in a different way. (Urban & Smith 1998: 274)
I've started considering writing my thesis as a tropology of phatic concepts. The univocality/plurivocality aspect is not all that interesting for me. I'd much rather employ Fiordo's (1989) concepts of hypo- and hypersemioticity. It is connected with hypo- and hypersemanticity in the work of an early 1960s linguist who drew a parallel between Sapir and Jakobson's functions (semantic language is like the elevator, phatic language is like the doorbell). Set phrases (or "phatic utterances") are not necessarily asemantic, but I'm not all that interested in semantics. Fiordo uses and develops Morris's behavioral semiotics in the direction of communicology and general semantics.
But it is possible that the word 'dialogue' can mislead as well as help us. The word has had a s pecific tropics, not, or not only, because of the intrinsic qualities of empirically describable dialogues, but because of the discursive resonance the word dialogue has as it comes out of the writings of Bakhtin and Voloshinov, and because of the role of dialogue within thenormative communicative rationality of Jürgen Habermas. (Urban & Smith 1998: 274)
"Tropics", huh. Why not tropology? What the hell is "discursive resonance"? The word "dialogue" sounds good when used in a sentence?
We note, in this regard, that the chapter by R. P. McDermott and Henry Tyblor, 'On the necessity of collusion in conversation', shuns use of the word 'dialogue'. This strikes us as significant because McDermott and Tylbor look on the dark side of conversation, how conversation involves collusion between participants, and how that collusion results in power asymmetries. They take as their case matrials transcriptions of interactions in a first-grade classroom, and they find evidence of collusion to stifle one student's voice, even among these young interlocutors. To label these conversations 'dialogues' would, we suspect, have put too positive a spin on them, masking their possibly sinister outcomes. (Urban & Smith 1998: 274)
Something akin Zuckermann's phatic violence - the dark side of human interaction. Frosh (2015) and others have discussed silencing of collective voice but the phenomenon of "interference" (in behavioral environment psychology) can silence or drown out individual voices. If I'm reading this correctly, one student is "crowded out" by several other students. The other students work in concert, with a singular aim, making their interaction a... define:collusion - secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy in order to deceive others. Not bad.
Our conclusion is that the optimistic or happy tropics or dialogue provide a foundation for delusion and self-deception, as well as for optimism. (Urban & Smith 1998: 274)
I don't think "tropic" should be a thymic category (optimistic/happy vs pessimistic/unhappy). Are there no neutral tropes?
At the same time, ethnographic interviews in general, and this one in particular, are forms of interrogation, where the questions are disproportionately posed by the ethnographer, the informant supplying answers. Dwyer's dialogue may be instructively compared to Bakhtin's (1984: 11) anacrisis, that is, dialogue 'as a means for eliciting and provoking the words of one's interlocutor, forcing him to express his opinion and express it thoroughly'. Consider this excerpt (Dwyer 1987[1982]: 225-226):[Dwyer:] To your mind, what is the most important subject that we talk about? You know, for some subjects you might say to yourself, 'What is the sense of talking for so long about such a thing?' Or, on the other hand, you might think, 'Oh, that's really interesting'.(Urban & Smith 1998: 275)
"Anacrisis" is a tad bit too legal for my taste: "an investigation of truth in a civil law case in which the interrogation and inquiry are often accompanied by torture". But the point is interesting in itself. The question is effectively: what is "likely to register in the long-term memories of the other participants and to influence the future course of the conversation" (Power & Dal Martello 1985: 249). Asking it that way you can really point out that the interviewer's desire for summarization or consummation is not innocent but hint at ulterior purposes. That's why the Faqir answers with an impersonal, uninvolved deflection: "I know that these questions serve your purposes, not mine" (ibid, 275).
Suppose, for example, we specified that true (or egalitarian) dialogue - in addition to being a continuos stretch of discourse segmentable via internal iconicities into at least two force fields or 'voices', as discussed earlier - must also involve the following:as to the reason for stipulation (3), Max Weber (1978[1922]: 52) defined domination as the probability that a 'command with a given specific content will be obeyed'. (Urban & Smith 1998: 276)
- each of the voices has its principal addresse(s) the other voice(s) present in the interaction;
- the voices evidence uptake and response to one another;
- the voices use, in roughly equal measure, grammatical forms such as imperatives, interrogatives, and declaratives.
This "Utopian dialogism" is weak sauce. The qualifications for segmenting a stretch of discourse on the other hand are pretty nifty. First would look up who is talking to whom. The second measures uptake - in Malinowskias phatic communion actual uptake would be very meagre. And thirdly the discourse functions.
Uptake - as in stipulation (2) - is already a part of Bahktin's notion of dialogue. We make this an explicit requirement of egalitarian dialogue only because some contemporary authors have failed to recognize its significance. Uptake provides the evidence that the words of the other have been taken into one's own words, that there is influence by one voice on another, that the interaction represents something more than a 'collective monologue'. (Urban & Smith 1998: 277)
Piaget!
In the Becker and Mannheim chapter, there are at least two changes of turn that revolve around question and uptake, for example, pp. 245-246:BECKER: ...Isn't troping, from inside or outside the language, a normal and healthy way for a philology to change and grow?MANNHEIM: It is, but we might distinguish between the troping that takes place when an old text is published into the present, in other words, 'troping within a tradition', and the troping that takes place when the tradition itself is made the object of study.However, the two 'voices' in fact engage very little in a question and answer fashion, or in terms of the give and take of distinct points of view. The addressees for each voice seem instead, more typically, to be the generalized addressees of any academic work, written in what the editors of the volume themselves might regard as monological style. (Urban & Smith 1998: 278)
"Troping", huh? Why not tropologization? The, uh... "the give and take of utterances which make up ordinary gossip" (PC 7.6) probably don't represent distinct points of view. Though the "addressee" question is interesting. Only the addressee's listening is as if addressed.
The Becker and Mannheim chapter indexes itself as dialogical by virtue of its employment of meta-semiotic signs of dialogicality. But it is only at the tropological plane - when the word 'dialogical' is used to describe this chapter - that the discourse takes on the connotations of openness, creativity, and egalitarianism associated with Bakhtinian dialogicality. The meta-semiotic sign points to the semiotic sign as dialogical, even though the semiotic sign is not, for the most part, substantively dialogical in the sense of our earlier discussion, and the meta-semiotic sign summons the label 'dialogical', which in turn calls up the connotations of the word, making the semiotic plane appear to be infused with egalitarian multivoicedness and openness, when, in fact, its substance is primarily monological. (Urban & Smith 1998: 278)
Ah yes, the semiotic sign and the meta-semiotic sign, as opposed to the tropological sign and the non-semiotic sign. A title like "Biosemiotic, social, and cultural signs" could really hide a typology of signs.
This suggests an insight about cultures wherein dialogicality exists on all three planes - semiotic, meta-semiotic, and tropological. The word 'dialogue' brings its tropological meanings to bear on a discourse phenomenon, and those tropological meanings can be called up when the meta-semiotics of the discourse are manipulated. Hence, it is possible for one person's syncrisis to be another persons anacrisis, and even for one person's 'dialogue' to be another person's 'monologue', depending on the specific meanings and connotations of the word 'dialogue' for the two. (Urban & Smith 1998: 278)
Remember, kids! If you wish to manipulate the meta-semiotics of the discourse, call up the tropological meanings of the word "discourse".
Dialogical ethnographies carry their own risk of false essentialization. If meta-semiotically monological ethnographies run the risk of essentializing a culture as a monolithic thing, thereby disguising the internal variation within it, meta-semiotically dialogical ethnographies like Dwyer's run the risk of essentializing the individual, when the individual may not understand his or her own voice to be distinctive within his or her culture. Even meta-semiotically monological ethnographies are substantively dialogical in some measure, articulating a dialogue between 'voices'. However, the other voice emanates from a class of individuals rather than a single individual. It contains reported speech, if only of an abstract and generic sort - 'Nuer say that it is cattle that destroy people' (Evans-Pritchard 1978[1940]: 49). Overtly dialogical and overtly monological ethnographies are much closer, on a substantive plane, than the recent claims for dialogicality would lead one to suspect. As Tedlock (p. 280) aptly remarks: 'An ethnographer who doesn't pursue dialogue as a thing in itself might produce a thoroughly multivocal work'. We would add that any good ethnography is multivocal, regardless of the meta-semiotic form the ethnographic representation takes. (Urban & Smith 1998: 279)
Still fighting with the monolithic hypothesis of language culture. This lengthy paragraph got me thinking about Malinowski's subjects, his informants, who they were and who they weren't. Correlating his ethnographies with his diaries might be interesting, but laborious. The main take-away is to pay attention whose psychology is it anyway when he describes "tribal psychology".
Has a cloud fallen over the sunny tropics of dialogue? Is there no basis for faith in utopian dialogism? The question for us has two parts. One part concerns social utopianism, in which the stipulation of dialogical form is expected to result in egalitarianism. Our feeling is that dialogic form as loosely construed is not equality-inducing, just as it is not asymmetry-inducing. A tighter definition of dialogue as form may result in a sharper empirical focus for investigating the relationship between discourse and egalitarianism. (Urban & Smith 1998: 279)
This I appreciate because of the figure of sunlight and clouds, one of my favourite topics in the study of body language in (older Estonian) literature. I've been thinking of continuing that research and writing something in Estonian about Estonian linguistic tropes. The overall point of the piece, as the title indicates, is very much the stuff Zuckermann pointed out: communication researchers often have a too positive outlook, making them overlook the dark side of a phenomenon.
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