Carol A. Chapelle - The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

Understanding the second discursive issue—that is, examining how interactants achieve intersubjectivity when there are no apparent problems in communication—entails taking the analytic focus away from investigating trouble sources. One way of doing this is to examine how utterances are designed to enhance comprehensibility. In dialogues, both the speaker and listener can design their talk and interaction in order to enhance comprehensibility. In most communicative situations, speakers are in a perpetual state of designing their talk according to the intended audience (Goodwin, 1979). This occurs at the most fundamental level of communication when a speaker uses the language of the recipient. At a more complex, microinteractional level, speakers design their talk in order to maintain meaningful communication. Speakers can speed up or slow down their speech (Miller, Grosjean, & Lomanto, 1984), carefully select or avoid words with special meaning (Stokoe & Edwards, 2007), strategically place stress and intonation (Couper‐Kuhlen & Selting, 1996), and raise or lower voice amplitude (Selting, 1994)—to name a few.

Listeners can also design their utterances in order to enhance comprehensibility in dialogues. Verbally, listeners do this by providing feedback while another interactant is speaking. These feedback cues usually come in the form of minimal verbalizations. For example, an “okay” or “mmhm” may signal to the speaker that an utterance has been understood, and at the same time serve the function of active listening (Yngve, 1970). In addition to signaling understanding, these minimal verbalizations also serve the interactional function of letting an interactant know whether or not he or she should continue speaking (Young & Lee, 2004). Therefore, listeners enhance intersubjectivity in dialogues at the content level—by displaying understanding (or nonunderstanding)—and at the interactional level—by taking part in the management of turns and floor contributions.

The ways in which interactants organize dialogues while maintaining understanding reflect the larger social context in which communication takes place. Social context is important to the analysis of dialogues because communication is fundamentally about people, and the real‐life situations they are faced with (Malinowski, 1923). Aspects of social context include anything from the physical setting—for example, a hospital or dining room—to the institutional roles and social categories of the interactants—for instance, the relationship between doctor and patient or mother and daughter. Aspects of social context shape dialogues in many ways. The physical setting of a dialogue may compel interactants to communicate in a particular manner. For example, being in the confines of a library may oblige interactants to talk quietly, while speaking with increased voice amplitude is more socially acceptable in a bar or loud restaurant. Moreover, institutional roles sometimes dictate the flow of information in dialogues. For instance, a judge determines what is said and when it is said during courtroom deliberations. In a similar vein, a moderator during a televised debate allocates turns and organizes the dialogue according to a list of predetermined topics. Many more examples can be given, but the upshot is that everything said and done in dialogues can be understood in terms of its social context. This is true at the most micro levels of a dialogue. So, for example, an interactant can refer to herself or himself as “we”—instead of “I”—to bring authority to what is being said, as in “We do not accept your opinion,” as opposed to “I do not accept your opinion.” In a different social context, a “we” can be used to displace blame, as in “We have made the wrong decision,” as opposed to “I have made the wrong decision.” Accordingly, dialogues—including the meanings and functions of language—are intimately connected to social context. The idea that a dialogue is both a product of, and catalyst for, social context can be extended to psychological states. The work of discursive psychologists, for example, has shown that psychological or cognitive states (e.g., anger or recalling an experience) are constituted in and through dialogic exchanges, and reflect the normative actions and activities of social contexts (see Lester & O'Reilly, 2018).

The methodologies used to understand the relationship between dialogue and social context can be categorized into two, sometimes overlapping, domains of inquiry: a priori and data‐driven approaches. In a priori approaches, the researcher identifies, or is aware of, particular aspects of social context that are believed to be important to a dialogue. For example, the political history of a country, say South Korea, may be used to make observations about the reasons why a Korean dialogue participant is communicating in a particular way. That is to say, the dialogue is investigated with the “a priori” understanding that the political history of South Korea is omnirelevant to the ways in which the South Korean participates in a dialogue. Methodologies that are associated with a priori approaches include critical discourse analysis and social psychology. In data‐driven approaches, being Korean can be discussed as an observational finding if the researcher can show—in and through the organization of a dialogue—that this cultural identity is demonstrably relevant to the interactants. In other words, Korean is only one of many social categories that an interactant belongs to (e.g., male/female, teacher/student, husband/wife, Asian/non‐Asian), and it is the responsibility of the researcher using data‐driven approaches to show how any given social category is relevant to the local, situated practices of participating in a dialogue. Methodologies that are associated with data‐driven approaches include, but are not limited to, discursive psychology and conversation analysis.

Dialogues can be understood by looking at three intersecting themes: organization, intersubjectivity, and social context. An examination of one theme often requires an understanding of the other two. This is because, despite possessing a complex, internal structure for which interaction and meaning are managed, dialogues are situated in the real‐life experiences of people. The analysis of dialogue aims to understand this complex interplay between interactional structure and social reality. While investigating the organization of talk and interaction is a discipline in its own right, no examination of spoken interaction is fully complete without an understanding of how people fit into the, as it were, dialogic equation.

SEE ALSO:Ethnography of Communication as a Research Perspective; Frame Analysis; Multimodal Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics Research Methods

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