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The talk will present examples from an analysis of various ‘interactional markers’ in dramatic dialogue, with relative hypotheses on the interpretation of special types of sequences; the final part will be focussed on a single element, i.e. on now as a discourse marker in various ME texts, in order to include text-type differences in the picture that will be sketched.
The spur from this kind of study comes from the fact that recent developments in conversation analysis have shown that categories of ‘classical’ pragmatics are very often insufficient to explain several aspects of the dynamics of dialogue. Taxonomies of ‘moves’ and ‘strategies’ have thus been questioned (as, previously, those of ‘speech acts’ had been), and dialogic sequences have been reinterpreted within the frameworks of Relevance Theory or of Interactional Sociolinguistics, both approaches that highlight the importance of the construction of stance and of the dynamics of the exchanges during interaction itself, thus downplaying the role of pre-set categories. These developments have consequences on the way we look at notions that were considered ‘given’ up to only few years ago, such as Power or Distance, Cooperation, and Politeness. They have also shown that speakers can strategically ‘steer’ conversational dynamics to some extent, with a flexibility not predicted by previous models.
Increasingly, these results are applied to historical dialogue studies, where the main advances have been made when literary and non-literary dialogues have started to be analysed trying to consider them, to some extent at least, as simulations of real dialogue. Of course, the application of frameworks that highlight the role of the speakers’ knowledge of the context results in an increased difficulty for historical studies, yet it is indeed possible to interpret stretches of dialogue by considering them conscious projections or approximations of ‘plausible’ conversational exchanges of the time. The talk will be an attempt to work in this direction, taking into account both the abovementioned advances in research on contemporary English dialogue and the unavoidable problems of employing constructed dialogue in research.