1. Interactivity
Face to face mode with two people, alternating shifts and negotiation
1. verbal code and oral channel
1.2 temporal synchrony and spatial condition
1.2.1 Presence of a context of common enunciation
1.2.2 Co-presence of a speaker and an interlocutor
2. Intentionality
1. Epistemic states, attribution of beliefs
2. shared code and purpose
Intentionality is found in epistemic states such as (duty, power, knowledge), the attribution of beliefs, by shared code and purposes, different according to the type of communication (between people, people and computers, animals) and the specific interaction.
In face-to-face dialogue and in the interaction between people, the sharing of beliefs will establish different "communities of interpreters" based on the experience and type of mental knowledge more or less shared and explicit: from the stereotypical ones, culturally shared to level of social community, to the most particular and idiosyncratic ones shared perhaps only by two speakers who refer to specific knowledge of couples, friendships, parents, work.
Verbal interaction aspects: understanding, negotiation, co-production
The issue of understanding is very important because it is a complex phenomenon, with varying degrees of depth and completeness not easy to achieve. In our personal daily experience, understanding is often a tiring process not only with the elderly, foreigners, aphasics but also in "normal" situations such as when we are misunderstood or when many explanations are needed for something easy in our point of view. Bazzenella, Damiano (1997, 1999) stressed that understanding is a stepwise procedure with various stages: understanding \ partial understanding \ non-understanding ".
For Wittgenstein (1980) what makes understanding difficult is not so much the need for preparation for certain topics, but the contrast between understanding the topic and what people "want" to see. In short, people have a preferential wait or habit of seeing, and therefore understanding, in a certain way; recognition mainly plays in understanding, that is the set of structures and frames of reference to be applied in new circumstances, making the most of contextual information. To understand we need a strong intertwining of perception, context and experiences.
How do we understand each other (or not understand each other) when we speak? In face-to-face interaction, understanding follows many paths, verbal and non-verbal, and often manages to overcome daily obstacles thanks to contextual information, multimodality, information redundancies, inferences, flexibility of human interaction which it allows to neglect non-convergence factors that do not make communication fall as occurs in the "human-machine" interaction with polar communication (all or nothing). The flexibility present in human interaction as a way to reach understanding involves the presence of "reparation" and the central characteristic of human interaction is denial understood not as haggling but as a concept to arrive at understanding.
When two people talk to each other, not only do they negotiate the meaning of what they say but they continually negotiate their relationship, in short, you must always keep in mind what the other person wants or hears about what is being said. In the first perspective, the process of co-construction of meaning is highlighted; in the second, conversational and social roles are intertwined and in many cases a compromise is reached between two starting points, in particular when it comes to interactions based on power or on the search for agreement, as in the case of commercial transactions. In recent linguistic analysis there has been a tendency to consider the role of the interlocutor as "co-author" (Duranti, 1986) and therefore the co-production conversation as understood by Bazzanella (1994):
The conversation is the result of a collaboration, of a joint work, so much so that it is considered as a metaphorical fabric in which the contributions of the speaking speaker and interlocutors intertwine with each other, almost to produce a single product. Communication is a multi-dimensional joint venture based on coordinated joint actions, on continuous negotiation of meanings, interactions, one's social roles, the shift itself, within conversational development, not only when you agree, but even in case of conflict a discussion or a contrast is built.
Contextual traits and conversational development
The studies on dialogue have revealed three main characteristics: sequencing, interactivity, dynamism, structuring and dialogue development are intertwined with the various components of the "global and local" context. Let's consider some contextual traits during the verbal interaction such as the setting, the participants \ agents, the type of interaction.
The setting consists of time, space and physical transmission medium. In the classical situation of the enunciation space and time coincide and many dialogic interactions are instead characterized by the lack of temporal synchrony and spatial sharing. What does the lack of a context of common enunciation entail? This implies the absence of visual control and the non-co-presence of the speakers \ interlocutors. On the one hand, the degree of planning and textual structuring increases but many "contextualization cues" by Gumperz are lost, namely: prosodic aspects to understand the tone, the gestures, the paralinguistic and non-verbal means, the physical contacts between the participants, the type of immediate feedback such as interruption, requests for clarification, emotional involvement in general.
The space implies its lack of sharing with the absence of visual control of the scene as already happened with the advent of the telephone. The medium of transmission highlights the greater need for identification since we have no visual elements. The "transmission medium" parameter also includes the type of code \ language used as the register (formal, informal, very or unfamiliar, generic or specialized lexicon, jargon, taboo terms influenced by the type of interaction.
The studies on dialogue have revealed three main characteristics: sequencing, interactivity, dynamism, structuring and dialogue development are intertwined with the various components of the "global and local" context. Let's consider some contextual traits during the verbal interaction such as the setting, the participants \ agents, the type of interaction.
The setting consists of time, space and physical transmission medium. In the classical situation of the enunciation space and time coincide and many dialogic interactions are instead characterized by the lack of temporal synchrony and spatial sharing. What does the lack of a context of common enunciation entail? This implies the absence of visual control and the non-co-presence of the speakers \ interlocutors. On the one hand, the degree of planning and textual structuring increases but many "contextualization cues" by Gumperz are lost, namely: prosodic aspects to understand the tone, the gestures, the paralinguistic and non-verbal means, the physical contacts between the participants, the type of immediate feedback such as interruption, requests for clarification, emotional involvement in general.
The space implies its lack of sharing with the absence of visual control of the scene as already happened with the advent of the telephone. The medium of transmission highlights the greater need for identification since we have no visual elements. The "transmission medium" parameter also includes the type of code \ language used as the register (formal, informal, very or unfamiliar, generic or specialized lexicon, jargon, taboo terms influenced by the type of interaction.
The participants / agents are the different interlocutors in relation to the degree of involvement and responsibility in the interaction. There are interactions between person-person, person-computer-person (online games), and person-machine (automated services).
Sociolinguistic characteristics, reciprocal, symmetric or asymmetrical relationships, the status of interactional and conversational participation, their shared beliefs \ knowledge that accumulate in the conversation itself affect the person-person interactions. In general, cultural norms relating to the group to which the interlocutors belong belong to both the forms of linguistic production as well as the possibility of mutual understanding. How can we master the cultural norms of others? It is very difficult to know the pragmatics of a new language because we lack the link between linguistic forms and their cultural and interactional value.
In addition, there is the parameter of the number of interlocutors present at the event: when overcoming the dyad as in family conversation, between friends, in conferences, on television where the public plays a very important role. The audience in the dining room or at home often becomes the real interlocutor of the conversation between the guests and the interviewer in the context of a talk show for example.
Types of interaction
In addition to the setting and the participants, the type of interaction is very correlated to the type of text or discursive genre and is characterized by the degree of conventionalization \ institutionalization, the task \ purpose of the topic, the production format.
A first distinction concerns symmetric interactions (equal role between speakers) as in family or between friends and asymmetric interactions in which the role is structurally unbalanced in favor of one of the members affected by the evaluation (exams, job interviews, visit to the doctor, etc.).
In asymmetric interactions, the same asymmetry is highlighted through the thematic management (with the choice between maintenance, change, resumption of the topic), the rotation of the shifts (those who select the shifts, which they stop more frequently outside the transitional relevance point of the shift of speech, who keeps the longest shift, the type of discursive signals).
The purposes of the interaction are mainly established on a social basis, especially in the context of asymmetric situations, precisely because the purpose is external and "ritualized". The external purpose of the interaction may involve: modification of a state (hired or fired), decision-making after a meeting, purchase of an asset in cases of commercial transactions.
The aims are closely intertwined with the degree of conventionality, other in service meetings (such as at post offices, banks, bookshops, travel agencies) and institutionalization (in the courts), which are very low in symmetric interactions. When the degrees of conventionalization and institutionalization are high, rather rigid linguistic action schemes are followed and the contents themselves are limited. It is necessary to distinguish the collective purpose of the interaction (shared by all or many) and the individual one (proper to each participant in the interaction. The type of task modifies the linguistic production (small talk, finding information at the station, therapeutic dialogue) are all modalities different.
The task can condition the choice of the topic: for example the topic of wages is usually taboo but becomes central during a job interview or during the career opportunity).
The change of topic can also signal a change in the type of interaction, more cooperative or conflicting.
For example in SMS, the conversational format is of the "triplet" type as in the school lesson, with mainly fatiguing functions.
The discursive signals as an interactional phenomenon
The language is permeated by interaction and therefore is very sensitive to the context; in some cases this pervasiveness is more evident. The phenomenon of discursive signals is very frequent in speech and sometimes also in writing. Here are some examples of discursive signals very present in Italian:
- allora (often at the beginning of the shift)
- no (conclusion seeking confirmation)
- giusto (placed at the end of the statement performs a consensus search function)
- sì insomma (way to make people understand how the sentence is perceived globally)
- credo (mitigates one's way of seeing things during a statement)
- cioè (attempt to explain to give greater weight to one's positive face)
- penso (doubtful and therefore mitigating position)
These words have in common that they do not belong to the same grammatical category (there are discursive signs that belong to the conjunction, adverbs, verbal phrases, clauses as it is said) have a different meaning, different functions in the various sentences in which they are produced.
A definition for discursive signals could be the following:
"The discursive signals are those elements that partially empty their original meaning by taking on values that serve to connect functional, inter-phrasal, extra-phrasal elements, to underline the structuring of the discourse, to explicate the placement of the sentence in an interpersonal dimension, to highlight ongoing cognitive processes.
The complexity of the language can be understood with the notion of "pragmatic compositionality" understood schematically as the calculation of a sentence in the light of some parameters:
- propositional content
- the global and local context
- the attitude of the speaker
- the interactional level
This pragmatic composition of the language is found through the presence of discursive signals, dialogic repetitions, interactions, verbal forms (imperfect with mitigation value), diminutives, passive forms.
Therefore we see well how language turns into a complex, redundant and self-organized system where feedback (especially positive) as reinforcement plays a fundamental role connected to the system's adaptability and a dynamic and open conception of language.
A definition for discursive signals could be the following:
"The discursive signals are those elements that partially empty their original meaning by taking on values that serve to connect functional, inter-phrasal, extra-phrasal elements, to underline the structuring of the discourse, to explicate the placement of the sentence in an interpersonal dimension, to highlight ongoing cognitive processes.
The complexity of the language can be understood with the notion of "pragmatic compositionality" understood schematically as the calculation of a sentence in the light of some parameters:
- propositional content
- the global and local context
- the attitude of the speaker
- the interactional level
This pragmatic composition of the language is found through the presence of discursive signals, dialogic repetitions, interactions, verbal forms (imperfect with mitigation value), diminutives, passive forms.
Therefore we see well how language turns into a complex, redundant and self-organized system where feedback (especially positive) as reinforcement plays a fundamental role connected to the system's adaptability and a dynamic and open conception of language.
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