Table Of ContentDialogue in Spanish
Dialogue Studies (DS)
Dialogue Studies takes the notion of dialogicity as central; it encompasses every type
of language use, workaday, institutional and literary. By covering the whole range of
language use, the growing field of dialogue studies comes close to pragmatics and
studies in discourse or conversation. The concept of dialogicity, however, provides
a clear methodological profile. The series aims to cross disciplinary boundaries
and considers a genuinely inter-disciplinary approach necessary for addressing the
complex phenomenon of dialogic language use. This peer reviewed series will include
monographs, thematic collections of articles, and textbooks in the relevant areas.
Editor
Edda Weigand
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
Editorial Advisory Board
Adelino Cattani Marion Grein Anne-Marie Söderberg
Università di Padova University of Mainz Copenhagen Business School
Kenneth N. Cissna Fritjof Haft Talbot J. Taylor
University of South Florida University of Tübingen College of William and Mary
Světla Čmejrková John E. Joseph Wolfgang Teubert
Czech Language Institute University of Edinburgh University of Birmingham
François Cooren Werner Kallmeyer Linda R. Waugh
Université de Montréal University of Mannheim University of Arizona
Robert T. Craig Catherine Kerbrat- Elda Weizman
University of Colorado at Orecchioni Bar Ilan University
Boulder Université Lyon 2
Yorick Wilks
Marcelo Dascal Geoffrey Sampson University of Sheffield
Tel Aviv University University of Sussex
Valeri Demiankov Masayoshi Shibatani
Russian Academy of Sciences Rice University
Volume 7
Dialogue in Spanish. Studies in functions and contexts
Edited by Dale April Koike and Lidia Rodríguez-Alfano
Dialogue in Spanish
Studies in functions and contexts
Edited by
Dale April Koike
University of Texas at Austin
Lidia Rodríguez-Alfano
Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, México
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
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American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dialogue in Spanish : studies in functions and contexts / edited by Dale April Koike, Lidia
Rodriguez-Alfano.
p. cm. (Dialogue Studies, issn 1875-1792 ; v. 7)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Spanish language--Discourse analysis. 2. Dialogue analysis. 3. Interdisciplinary ap-
proach in education. I. Koike, Dale April. II. Rodríguez, Lidia, 1941-
PC4434.D53 2010
460.1’41--dc22 2010010768
isbn 978 90 272 1024 1 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 8810 3 (Eb)
© 2010 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Introduction vii
Dale April Koike and Lidia Rodríguez-Alfano
1. A continuum of approaches to dialogue 1
Lidia Rodríguez-Alfano
Part I. Dialogue in interpersonal contexts of informal conversation
2. Dialogues within oral narratives: Functions and forms 31
Laura Camargo Fernández
3. Being polite through irony 55
Xose A. Padilla García and Belén Alvarado Ortega
4. Humor in verbal irony 69
María Isabel Kalbermatten
5. Evaluation, interpersonal meaning and co-construction
in oral narratives by Mexican adolescents 89
Irene Fonte and Rodney Williamson
6. The truth about verdad: Its discursive uses
and its modal-epistemic value 117
José Estéban Hernández and Beatriz Solís
7. Backchannels as a realization of interaction:
Some uses of mm and mhm in Spanish 137
Nadezhda Bravo Cladera
Part II. Dialogue in public, professional, and educational contexts
8. Dialogue in the dynamics of political practice 159
Adriana Bolívar
9. Conflict resolution: Mexican and Spanish strategies of repair 189
Lori Czerwionka
vi Dialogue in Spanish
10. A discourse analysis of Alzheimer-type dementia
in personal conversations 221
Beatriz Valles-González
11. Triadic discourse: Interpreter-mediated dialogue 237
Fritz G. Hensey
12. Behind L2 pragmatics: The role of emerging expectations 257
Dale April Koike
Conclusions and implications of studies that approach dialogue
in its complexity 283
Dale April Koike and Lidia Rodríguez-Alfano
References 291
General index 315
List of contributors 321
Introduction
Dialogue is essential in our lives, since no communicative activity is fulfilled
without the participation of at least two interlocutors. Even in monologue, one
speaks with an interlocutor (oneself). Through dialogue we identify with oth-
ers from the moment of birth, and in this multidirectional process of linking
to others we become educated, we mature and we realize activities in all realms
of existence. Due to the broad conceptualization and varying, complex nature
of dialogue, it is difficult to limit its study to a given area because such limi-
tations would immediately restrict what such studies can discover about com-
munication. At the same time, due to its breadth, complexity and multi-faceted
nature, dialogue can be seen as a vastly rich area for linguistic and sociocultural
investigation, which this volume intends to address by incorporating several ap-
proaches to its study. However, in order to present a cohesive set of studies, this
collection centers on what we consider to be the guiding basis of dialogicity:
the fulfillment of a ‘communicative project’, in its expression and interpretation
by others who listen and respond. This term, originally coined by Luckmann
(1995) but expanded upon by Linell (1998, 2009a), refers to the coordination of
“mental and interpersonal activities” in which the interlocutors work together to
bring about a resolution or understanding of a communicative ‘problem’ in the
sense of a communicative task (Linell 1998: 218). Such a focus takes the form
of pragmatics study. The book contains investigations that approach dialogue
largely from perspectives derived from a broad sense of pragmatics. It includes
research where interaction among participants is studied in multiple contextual
dimensions. The volume in its entirety seeks to comprehend dialogue in all types
of communicative events, considering that there is always an interlocutor who
completes the dialogical dimension of language.
The goal of this volume is to provide a strong theoretical and empirical founda-
tion for the study of dialogic functions in various contexts in Spanish. In order to
support such an endeavor, this book includes studies that address various contex-
tual and functional dimensions of dialogue in Spanish. These dimensions encom-
pass informal face-to-face, personal exchanges, as well as interactions in public,
professional and learning contexts. The volume also includes a final chapter that
reviews the findings of the studies and points to future research and issues. The
distinctive and original contributions of this volume elucidate an understanding
viii Dale A. Koike and Lidia Rodríguez-Alfano
of dialogue in its complexity, considering the wide range of its contexts and func-
tions, in terms of linguistic theory, pragmatics and discourse analysis.
The belief that underlies this volume is that dialogue entails such a wide
range of human communication that it must be studied from many points of
view and in different contexts and functions. The researchers featured in this col-
lection provide in-depth, complementary studies based on empirical data from
the Spanish language and culture. The broad questions that the volume addresses
in general are:
1. What do studies of dialogue reveal about language, with special reference to
pragmatic / discursive approaches to communicative interaction in different
contexts and functions?
2. How do intervening variables – specifically, context (participants, places, re-
lationships), functions (activities) and intentions – affect the interaction?
3. How can these studies inform us about human communication, especially
with regard to the Hispanic language and cultures?
The importance of such a collection is multi-faceted:
a. First, much valuable linguistic information is gained from studying linguistic
elements in its natural context of interaction. This information contributes
not only to the field of linguistics but also to such others as anthropology,
sociology, philosophy, communications and education;
b. Second, given the increased contact between speakers of Spanish and other
languages in the world today, the study of interaction is timely for increased
efficacy of communication and sociocultural understanding of Spanish. Dia-
logue in the English language has been enriched with in-depth study, while
dialogue in Spanish is an area that is propitious for more investigation, given
the growing populations of speakers of this language throughout the world;
c. Third, since talk is a direct reflection of the members of the society who en-
gage in it, through the study of various aspects of their dialogue one can come
to understand the various cultural norms in the different Hispanic societies
represented herein that guide their interactions;
d. Finally, by knowing more about dialogue, educators, students and others who
are interested in language and communication can understand processes of
talk, and interaction between and among people can be improved.
The volume is divided into two main parts:
Part I: Dialogue in informal, interpersonal contexts studied via approaches that
focus on conversations between friends and acquaintances and on other types of
interaction that reveal aspects of discrete markers of intentionality;
Introduction ix
Part II: Studies of dialogue in public contexts – including political speeches and
hypothetical service encounters – as well as professional interactions and educa-
tional discourse. The latter entails the examination of contexts involving relation-
ships such as native and nonnative speakers engaged in personal conversations.
Although the two parts of the volume represent intersecting aspects of dialogic
interaction, they approach their data in somewhat different ways, focusing on dif-
ferent elements of talk. A brief description of the contents is as follows.
Part I: Dialogue in interpersonal contexts of informal conversation
Based on theories of dialogue proposed by Bakhtin (1982), Halliday (1978) and
Linell (1998), Rodríguez-Alfano (Chapter 1) presents a broad conceptualization
of approaches to the study of dialogue. The author defines and discusses issues
of dialogue and its categories such as ‘dialogue versus monologue’, ‘interaction’,
‘context’, ‘framework’, ‘dialogic principles’, ‘communicative project’, ‘collaborative
strategies’ and ‘co-construction’. She proposes a continuum in which the two end-
points correspond to dialogue studies based on micro and macro frameworks.
Thus, she concludes that ‘dialogue’ includes all types of verbal and nonverbal
exchanges and relationships among participants who are physically or virtually
present and, to achieve a full understanding of dialogue, it is necessary to broaden
the scope of its study, avoiding an exclusively micro or macro approach. Her con-
tribution provides a backdrop for how the studies contained in the volume illus-
trate many of the various points on the continuum.
The following six studies examine talk in conversations among friends and
acquaintances. The chapters investigate (1) contexts of personal narrations and
anecdotes, which represent a rich source of dialogic information because narra-
tives are at once monologic and dialogic in their co-construction with the listener,
and (2) interactions that demonstrate discrete markers of intentionality. The three
studies by Camargo Fernández, Padilla and Alvarado, and Kalbermatten address
personal narrations and anecdotes. Inspired by work by Goffman (1974, 1981),
Tannen (1986, 1989) and Grice (1975a), and concepts from Conversation Anal-
ysis, Camargo Fernández (Chapter 2) studies reconstructed dialogues reported
within personal oral narratives, describing their internal structures and func-
tions, as well as their pragmatic indicators.
Both Padilla and Alvarado’s study, as well as that by Kalbermatten, explore
irony in narrations and anecdotes, although their results show different intersec-
tions with other areas of pragmatics. Padilla and Alvarado (Chapter 3), basing
their work on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Theory of Politeness, suggest that
irony does not imply impoliteness. Kalbermatten (Chapter 4) argues that irony is
x Dale A. Koike and Lidia Rodríguez-Alfano
closely tied to the same implicatures used in humor, as proposed by researchers
such as Attardo and Raskin (1991) and Norrick (1986, 2003). Irony is an area of
pragmatics that has been studied very little as a separate category and it illustrates
clearly how individual pragmatic categories closely intersect with each other.
The second group of chapters in this section includes three studies by Fonte
and Williamson, Hernández and Solís, and Bravo Cladera. They are dedicated to
the discrete markers of intentionality that are found in personal conversations.
Fonte and Williamson (Chapter 5), who also work within the genre of narrations,
examine the evaluative resources used in personal oral narratives to promote an
interpersonal, co-constructive nature, such as intonational contours, images and
vulgarisms. They base their study on work by Labov (1972), Halliday (1978) and
Norrick (2000), and also spectrograms illustrating phonetic nuances that enter
into the construction of these evaluative resources, to show a multi-layered depic-
tion of how the evaluative resources contribute to building the narrative.
Hernández and Solís and Bravo Cladera examine discourse markers in vari-
ous contexts. Hernández and Solís (Chapter 6) use ideas from researchers such
as Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1991) on assertiveness, Schwenter (1996) and Schiffrin
(1987) on discourse markers, and Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca (1994) on gram-
maticality and epistemic modality. From this theoretical basis, they study the
discourse marker of “verdad” ‘right?’ that, they claim, has developed epistemic
uses in conversations in a small town in Texas. In some cases the epistemic value
is affirmed due to previously-known or newly-learned information, and an an-
swer from the interlocutor is not expected. This marker, then, can signal differ-
ent degrees of veracity as intended by the speaker. Bravo Cladera (Chapter 7)
examines the backchannel cues of “mm” and “mhm” in the dialogue of bilingual
and monolingual Spanish-speaking adolescents in Sweden, based on Schegloff’s
(1982, 1993) approach to conversational exchanges and Allwood’s (1983, 1988)
work on feedback. She not only discusses the various manifestations and mean-
ing of such cues in their talk, but also contributes to knowledge of the bilingual
communities in that context.
The studies of personal interaction are valuable because they reveal new as-
pects of how implicatures, which are heavily used in personal interactions, func-
tion in Spanish dialogues.
Part 2: Dialogue in public, professional, and educational interactions
The five articles in this section examine the broader functions of dialogue in the
contexts of public, professional and educational interactions. In the first two arti-
cles by Bolívar and Czerwionka, respectively, the authors study the public venues
