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Linguists routinely emphasise the primacy of speech over writing. Yet, most linguists have analysed spoken language, as well as language in general, applying theories and methods that are best suited for written language. Accordingly, there is an extensive 'written language bias' in traditional and present day linguistics and other language sciences. In this book, this point is argued with rich and convincing evidence from virtually all fields of linguistics.

This essay deals with how to “bring things into languaging” (`enlanguaging´). The theoretical background is a humanistic perspective, Merleau-Ponty´s phenomenology and extended dialogism. It will be argued that the phenomenon of `internal dialogue´, i.e., internal interaction within individual minds, are at play in such processes. This paper will consider different activities such as perception, thinking, speaking, planning for speaking, understanding, reading, interaction, and decision-making. It also pays attention to circumstances when public talk is evaded or inhibited.

Approaching Dialogue has its primary focus on the theoretical understanding and empirical analysis of talk-in-interaction. It deals with conversation in general as well as talk within institutions against a backdrop of Conversation Analysis, context-based discourse analysis, social pragmatics, socio-cultural theory and interdisciplinary dialogue analysis.People's communicative projects, and the structures and functions of talk-in-interaction, are analyzed from the most local sequences to the comprehensive communicative activity types and genres. A second aim of the book is to explore the possibilities and limitations of dialogism as a general epistemology for cognition and communication. On this point, it portrays the dialogical approach as a major alternative to the mainstream theories of cognition as individually-based information processing, communication as information transfer, and language as a code. Stressing aspects of interaction, joint construction and cultural embeddedness, and drawing upon extensive theoretical and empirical research carried out in different traditions, this book aims at an integrating synthesis. It is largely interdisciplinary in nature, and has been written in such a way that it can be used at advanced undergraduate courses in linguistics, sociopragmatics of language, communication studies, sociology, social psychology and cognitive science.About the author: Per Linell holds a Ph.D. in linguistics and has been professor within the interdisciplinary graduate program of Communication Studies at the University of Linköping, Sweden, since 1981. He has published widely in the fields of discourse studies and social pragmatics of language.

This paper explores issues of intersubjectivity and shared understanding as they arise in dyadic spoken interaction. Using data from Swedish conversations, we approach the topic by focusing on the functions of a reactive construction that occurs in situations when a linguistic expression (x) has been used in a prior utterance, and this expression is found to be only partially acceptable in the situation at hand. It is therefore reacted to by one of the interlocutors, and negotiated in a new turn initiated by x-å-x, i.e. a unit in which two identical copies of x are conjoined by å ‘and’, and then expanded by a supporting argument. The pragmatic functions of the construction include that of suggesting a sufficient clarification of what should be a reasonable situated meaning and an intersubjective basis for ensuing talk.

Recent studies of conditionals in English have cited putative evidence from German word order in support of the functional distinction between content and speech-act conditionals (Dancygier & Sweetser, 2005; Declerck & Reed, 2001) while counterexamples have largely been ignored. The present study takes a closer look at the syntactic marker in question, namely integrative and non-integrative word order in wenn 'if'-initial conditionals. The findings raise doubts about the hypothesized correlation of the construction's syntactic form and the cognitive domain in which it is interpreted. In this paper I explore how clausal integration interacts with mental space construction in conditional speech acts and show that integration does not mark content or predictive conditionality. Rather, clausal integration signals that the if-clause (P) is the sole space where the apodosis (Q) holds and that in all other spaces, ~ Q would take Q's place. From the perspective of Construction Grammar (CG), the form-function mapping of syntactic integration and contrastivity observed in the German data provides a window on functional distinctions which may exist but are not formally marked in other languages.