Cfp: "Dialogisme: Langue, Discours [Dialogism: Language, Speech]," Universite de Montpellier, September 8-11, 2010.

Nowadays, the concept of dialogism is widely used in linguistics, where it proves to be of a great heuristic help, especially in the sub-disciplines of discourse analysis, discourse semantics, grammatical semantics, textual linguistics and enunciation. If it is commonly accepted that the concept comes from the writings of the Bakhtine's circle, and especially of that author's, no explicit explanation appears in those works. Relying on them, dialogism can be defined as the orientation of any discourse towards other discourses. This can appear as echoes, harmonics that refer to other texts; as voices introducing a text in another. Those features of dialogism, more or less explicit, mark the discourse at several levels from macrotextual (novel, text, speech, speech turn) to microtextual (word); as well as in its various dimensions: semantic, syntactic, intonative, enunciative. The aim of this colloquium is both theoretical and practical. (i) To establish the theoretical basis for the concept, by for instance coming back to this history of its production as well as to its present success, by confronting it to related concepts, by reworking on its definition (the one offered above is only provisional and explanatory)

• What are the origins and the position of the concept in the works of the Bakhtine's circle? In contemporary research, what is the position of the concept of dialogism in discourse analysis? in textual analysis? in enunciative linguistics? in semantics? How does it fit in the different 'toolboxes'?
• Does the dialogic dimension concern only discourse, as Bakhtine would sometimes claim? to what extent does it have an influence on language too?
• What are the links between the concept of dialogism that is little or not used in the Anglo-Saxon linguistic writings, and concepts such as subjectivity, speaker empathy, point of view, subject-raising, etc., that allow dealing with partly similar linguistic facts? What are the possible relationships with the concepts of relevance, mental spaces or the de re/de dicto distinction.
• What is the relationship between "dialogal" and dialogic? What are the possible articulations between the two concepts, partly in competition, of dialogism and polyphony?

(ii) The heuristic properties and the relevance of the concept of dialogism will also be tested through concrete analysis of linguistic and discursive data to precisely study the advances and the renewal of approaches it allows, as well as its limits.

• How does dialogism precisely play a role in a specific discursive type? in a type of textuality? in a discursive genre?
• What areas of the language - in addition to those already well described such as negation, concession, conditional etc - are likely to be studied through dialogism? is it possible to talk of a dialogic marker? How does the dialogic dimension of a specific element concretely show?
• To what extent and in which way is dialogism part of the grammaticalisation ands pragmaticalisation processes?

Further information: jacques.bres@univ-montp3.fr.