Dialog potoczny a tekst

Abstract

The overriding aim in the present study was to seek units of dialogue in higher order structures — in the text and also in the description of the principles of organisation of the text, its coherence in the interior and exterior of the unit. The starting point was provided by the endeavour to establish, can dialogue be treated as a text. At the same time we assumed that as a text we recognise a suprasentence structure having the nature of a concrete utterance of non-limited length, intuitively perceived as a ’’whole” produced by the socially specified participants in the act of communication and reflecting their psychocultural determinants and the characteristic quality of coherence. The problem of coherence prompted us follow in the path laid down by V. Mathesius (1971), who fairly strongly accentuated the situational aspect of the act of communication. This made it possible to separate the pairs usually seen as identical: novum — datum, remat — theme by reinforcing the pragmatic aspect of the terms ’’novum” and ’’datum” as information new or known (novum is the part of the information not known to one of the interlocutors — something not forming part of their common knowledge, while datum is information known or negotiated by the two speakers — their common knowledge). Hence novum introduces asymmetry in the dialogue, datum — symmetry of knowledge. The dialogue then becomes a dynamic process of overcoming asymmetry, that is passing from an asymmetry situation to a symmetry situation. The consequence of novum and datum in dialogues indicated a far reaching regularity: there appeared characteristic triplets (doublets) N — D — D (N — D), which exhibited the qualities of constantly repeating segments in the region of the dialogue. The made it possible to establish units of dialogue, the so-called exchanges of minimum form: Initiation — Reaction or Initiation —Reaction — Coda. Exchange is hence an interaction unit with constant sequence of internal elements exhibiting the quality of coherence, that does permit them to be sundered or interchanged. These is also an example of progressive structuring of the dialogue — each of its components has inherently either the quality of foreseeing the next utterance (I, Rin) or a quality of being foreseen by the preceding utterance (R, C). Dialogue is a text formed by a chain of exchanges successively following each other, each of which may by described as an element of a communication process. It is comprised of at least two speakers (in exceptional circumstances, by one) and their consituation, further: the area of actualised objects and states of things, that is to say the most generally conceived themes of conversation and also the purpose of the conversation understood as the intention of the speaker, that the communication should bring about a certain result. Dialogue takes place in the individual contact. Each of the participants — resulting from the structure of the exchange — is either the initiatory speaker (opens the asymmetry state, introduces the novum) or the reacting speaker (eliminates the asymmetry, brings in the datum). Only the first of these has the operative role in this sense, that he may introduce a new theme, continue a theme or remain with the theme proposed by the reacting speaker. Analysis of dialogue organisation in the area of theme — the second of the elements in the communication process — depends on showing up the roles of initiation, reaction and coda in the development of the thematic lines, showing up initiation as a constitutive element of the exchange and also various types of these individual elements, which as a consequence would enable the formulation of the four fundamental principles of the discursive follow-up of words in the dialogue. The last component — intention — led us directly to the theory of speech acts and their utilisation allowed analysis of the components of speech as acts of illocution or perlocution.