Towards a Dialogic Syntax

This paper outlines in preliminary form some of the fundamental linguistic concepts that are needed to explore the potential of a dialogic syntax. 1 At this early stage the emphasis is on presenting illustrative analyses of key linguistic phenomena which characterize dialogic syntax, so as to exemplify and develop in informal terms the ideas and methodologies that show the greatest promise for pursuing the potential insights of the theory. Dialogic syntax can be defined as the structure of engagement between and through signs. This engagement entails a structural coupling which establishes an array of links between two or more comparable linguistic units (or stretches of discourse), by means of, and in reference to, language or another symbolic system. The present utterance is coupled to a prior one, whether near or distant, spoken or written, produced by a face-to-face interlocutor or a predecessor from the remote past. The evoked utterance may be audible or silent, accessible from the immediate prior discourse or conjured up from memory or from the imagined potentials of language. The dialogic relations so constructed may extend to anticipated or projected utterances, whether predictable or novel in form. The open-ended character of language guarantees that the potential for engagement will be limitless, or at least, that it cannot by delimited in advance. Two key aspects of dialogic syntax to be addressed here are parallelism and resonance. Parallelism {Harris, 1952 #996; Jakobson, 1966 #433} articulates a relation of structural similarity between two or more stretches of discourse; for example, between pairs of utterances. Each of the utterances so related may in itself appear as a complete linguistic unit, e.g. an ordinary sentence which in its conventional internal attributes seems selfsufficient and independent of any other sentence. Viewed in isolation, each individual sentence included in a given dialogic mapping may not betray any tell-tale features distinguishing it from sentence types that would be considered autonomous in any traditional theory of syntax. But dialogic syntax looks beyond the individual sentence to identify relations between pairs of sentences. It identifies factors capable of treating multiple utterances as comparable, aligning them, and forging links both structural and functional between their corresponding elements. Going a step further, it seeks to draw out the implications of this mapping for the interpretation of the units so linked, and thus attends to the consequences for structure, meaning, and use. A second key concept in dialogic syntax is resonance, understood as the activation of affinities across utterances {Du Bois, 2007 #1372}. Resonance is the basic currency of the dialogic connection between pairs of utterances. Resonance is both source and product of the structuring of engagement between dialogically juxtaposed utterances. The canonical instantiation of dialogic syntax is realized in a sequence of coordinated utterances produced by co-participants in a dialogic exchange across successive turns. But dialogic syntax is not limited to conversational exchanges, and can arise as well within the successive clauses produced by a single speaker. Beyond the two central concepts of parallelism and resonance, dialogic syntax can be fruitfully related to a