Introduction: Dialogue across Media
Jarmila Mildorf and Bronwen Thomas
In her introduction to a recent volume of essays on film dialogue, Sarah Kozloff (2013, xiv)
argues that the ubiquity of dialogue across media is part of the reason for its relative neglect,
as “the more disciplines that could reasonably study dialogue the less concentrated attention it
gets.” She goes on to claim that “The study of dialogue has also suffered from a persistent
devaluing of speech as a trivial mode of communication,” and calls for dialogue to be placed
“front and centre” rather than being treated as an inconsequential aspect of technique or style.
This study sets out to provide detailed medium-specific analyses of contemporary dialogue
forms to examine how each contributes to how we understand the concept of dialogue. The
analyses primarily draw on linguistic and narratological models and terms, but also make
reference to ways in which dialogue has been explored in the contexts of literary criticism,
philosophy, media and cultural studies.
The current media landscape presents new challenges for the study of dialogue, and
particularly the notion that we can look at different media as monolithic entities, when user
experience is increasingly one of accessing and enjoying dialogue across media, and via
multiple platforms. For example, a reader of the Harry Potter series of novels is highly likely
to have had that reading punctuated by viewing the film adaptations of the novels, or playing
videogames based on the characters, plots and settings. Likewise, reading on screen has made
it possible for us to read the ‘same’ text across devices, but with the affordances of those
devices, and the contexts in which they are used, inevitably contributing to how we engage
with the text as a material object.
Despite concerns that in our media-saturated age, “we find ways around conversation”
(Turkle 2015, 3) and so are never “fully present to one another,” the essays in this volume
seem to suggest precisely the contrary: that conversation and the need for dialogue are to be
found everywhere as people continue to strive to find new ways to connect and communicate,
however problematic or faltering their efforts may be. The chapters also suggest that the
impulse to experiment with new ways of representing and capturing dialogue continues to
hold a fascination for writers and artists across media, particularly in areas where there is less
of a tradition to draw on or work against (e.g., videogames or role-play games, see Domsch’s
and Mäyrä’s chapters).
The contributions to this book explore how media-specific conditions influence the
linguistic features and structural shapes of dialogues and the ends to which the dialogue form
is put in pursuing goals relevant to its medium. However, rather than just foregrounding the
differences among the various media, the volume also seeks to highlight shared features and
functions of dialogue that can be found across different medial presentations. The title of our
volume signals its connection with related work in the field of narratology, particularly MarieLaure Ryan’s groundbreaking Narrative Across Media (2004) and its attempt to bridge the
fields of media and narrative studies, and more recently Ryan and Thon’s Storyworlds Across
Media (2014) which revisited questions of mediality in the context of technological advances
facilitating the migration and mutation of stories across contemporary transmedial worlds and
universes. The discussion of whether narrative concepts can ‘travel’ (Hatavara, Hydén and
Hyvärinen 2013) across different forms and media is one that has become increasingly
pressing as new technologies present us with ever more challenges and new varieties. While
the chapters that follow do not explicitly deal with dialogue in transmedial narratives, the
intention of the volume is to build up a transmedial and comparative approach, particularly by
examining how our understanding of dialogue is influenced by looking at its forms and
functions across different media. As in previous studies, the chapters in this volume adopt a
‘bottom up’ approach, building their analyses and insights through close reference to key case
studies. Many chapters draw on work from media and cultural studies, particularly when it
comes to considering how dialogue operates in multimodal contexts (Mikkonen, Domsch), or
locating the texts studied in relation to production contexts and their interrelationship with
multiple co-texts and paratexts (Thomas, Richardson).
Overall, the contributions to this volume demonstrate that dialogue, no matter which
medium or textual genre it occurs in, offers a number of common features and functions.
While dialogues are shaped by the medium through which they are transmitted, they also in
turn play a formative role by creating characters and presenting them in interaction, by
puncturing as well as building narrative structures, by affording subject positions for
interactions between characters or narrators and their audiences, by offering spaces of
freedom where new perspectives and personae can be adopted.
A key question that arises is just what is the object of study: in a print novel, this may
be fairly straightforward, but when it comes to television or film, is it the script or the
dialogue as performed by actors that we need to pay attention to, and do we need a full
transcription for this, or can we rely on the kind of “close listening” Kozloff advocates? How
about dialogue in non-literary or non-artistic contexts? Does the fictive or non-fictive status of
a presented verbal interaction matter for how we read it? And what are the differences
between dialogue and conversation, for example? These are questions to which the chapters in
this volume will return.
What is Dialogue?
When one thinks of ‘dialogue’ one may perhaps think of what linguists call “talk-ininteraction” (Psathas 1995), that is, the most fundamental and presumably earliest dialogic
form that is at the heart of our daily transactions with others. Such a view of dialogue also
draws on the fact that we are essentially “relational beings,” as psychologist Kenneth J.
Gergen (2009) puts it, as we are always to some extent dependent on others for knowing who
we are and for creating our self-identities. Studies of dialogue often focus on the
representation of speech or equate dialogue with conversation, without always considering
what kind of meaning is carried by what has been referred to as the “idea” or ideology of
dialogue (Thomas 2012; Womack 2011). According to these views, the concept of dialogue
brings with it an expression of value, whether that is the privileging of the “duologue of
personal encounter” (Kennedy 1983) over multiparty talk, or the idea that dialogue brings
enlightenment, is therapeutic, emancipatory and equitable. These ideas of dialogue typically
accrue over long periods of time, reinforced by cultural representations across media.
Thinking about dialogue, one may also be reminded of one of dialogue’s oldest
paradigmatic written forms: philosophical dialogue. Philosophical dialogue is defined as a
verbally conducted argument involving two or more persons. Their interaction consists in
speech and counter-speech, which can take the shape of questions and answers (to clarify
terms and concepts), claims and rejections (to offer judgment and evaluation), and proof and
falsification (to reach a conclusion) (see Lorenz 2005, 189). Even though philosophical
dialogue purports to report actual discussions between, for example, Socrates and a number of
dialogue partners it is clear that their representation in writing is rhetorical and literary in
quality (Hösle 2006) and has very little resemblance to the ‘messy’ forms of dialogic
exchange one can find in actual conversations. Manfred Pfister asks “why a philosophical
dialogue put on stage – as is occasionally done – makes rather poor drama” (1998, 4). His
response is that “it is persons and characters in their corporeality, their biographies, their
temperament, their general affective dispositions and their present emotional states that are
[…] at stake in dramatic dialogue and not in philosophical dialogue” (Pfister 1998, 13).
In actual everyday conversations, interlocutors repeat themselves, break off speech,
make false starts and repair them, interrupt one another or overlap each other’s speech. They
also signal relevant points in the dialogic exchange by means of prosody (Sacks, Schegloff
and Jefferson 1974). It is therefore hardly surprising that specialists in Conversation Analysis,
a methodology which examines in great detail the turn-taking mechanisms underlying actual
conversation in a variety of contexts (Hutchby and Wooffitt 2008), prefer not to use the term
“dialogue” (Schegloff 1968, 1075-1076; see also Koivisto’s and Georgakopoulou’s
contributions in this volume).
One linguistic area where the term ‘dialogue’ is used is interactional sociolinguistics.
Deborah Tannen (1989), for example, talks about “constructed dialogue” to capture the fact
that, even in conversational storytelling, presentations of previous dialogue situations are
rarely accurate or verbatim renditions but approximations at best. This kind of dialogue is of
course different from the spontaneously emerging dialogical interactions in everyday
conversation since, in contrast to the latter, it may well have been ‘rehearsed’ during earlier
storytelling situations. The use of “constructed dialogue” in non-fictional discourse genres –
especially written ones such as autobiography, journalistic writing or court witness reports,
where it may shift from direct to indirect and even free indirect discourse – becomes relevant
as it displays affinities with fictional dialogue while at the same time retaining a different
epistemic-referential framework (Mildorf forthcoming). Questions of design, ‘fictionality’ vs.
factuality, and referentiality are particularly pertinent in this regard.
Peter Womack (2011, 4) divides presentations of dialogue into those where (1) a text
“pretends to be the record of a conversation” as is the case in philosophical dialogue, (2) texts
such as novels “represent conversation,” (3) the dialogue “simulates conversation” as in
drama, or (4) dialogue is used as a metaphor. The fourth category, which underlies, for
example, the Bakhtinian concept of “dialogism,” is where we move into the realm of talking
about dialogue as a fundamental quality of language itself, which carries with it ideas about
textual openness and freedom of expression that are highly seductive. In Bakhtin’s writing,
dialogue is a means of resisting the monologic. It is also a form of social action where as a
result of the exchanges that take place something happens. But dialogue is also about
emergence and becoming, and about refusing closure and finalisation. As Morson and
Emerson (1989, 4) put it, “in all genuine dialogue something unforeseen results, something
that would not otherwise have appeared.” Bakhtin’s writings have also been influential in
allowing for the participation of listeners and readers/audiences as their involvement and
engagement is presupposed by the “addressivity” (Bakhtin 1986 [1929], 95) of any utterance
or text directed outwards from a speaker or writer. In this book, Lambrou’s contribution
explicitly applies Bakhtin’s theories to journalistic dialogism.
In recent years, both the dialogue form more narrowly defined as well as dialogue as a
metaphor have received renewed attention from scholars across the arts and humanities
(Bachleitner et al. 2011; Cooren and Létourneau 2011; Fishelov 2010; Kinzel and Mildorf
2012 and 2014; Thomas 2012). This is not surprising given the fact that dialogue, in addition
to playing a significant role in everyday communication, has also experienced somewhat of a
revival in other fields where language is used. Fictional texts have made use of this form and
have revived the tradition of the dialogue novel (e.g., Nicholson Baker, Carlos Fuentes,
William Gaddis, Matthias Göritz, Wolf Haas, Gabriel Josipovici, Cormac McCarthy,
Wladimir Sorokin, Philip Roth, Mario Vargas Llosa), and even literary criticism has drawn on
dialogue to present its subject matter in a more intriguing way (McGann 1972, Phelan 2005,
Ozick 2006, Schmidt 1994). Philosophers have written dialogues and have thus not only
reinforced but also extended the ancient form of the Platonic dialogue (see, e.g., Paul
Feyerabend, Peter Kreeft, Iris Murdoch, George Santayana, Roger Scruton, Paul Weiss).
Beyond these written genres dialogue has in the last decades also gained importance in media
formats such as “talk radio” and television talk shows (Kacandes 2001), television drama
(Richardson 2010 and in this volume) and film (Kozloff 2000, Thomas in this volume). It is
also present in interactive social media, e.g., internet chatrooms and blogospheres, twitter, and
the like (Page 2012, Georgakoupoulou 2013 and in this volume). In the present book, our
contributors furthermore address dialogue in comics (Mikkonen), radio drama (Bernaerts),
telephone conversations (Koivisto) and radio interviews (Mildorf).
In these diverse contexts, dialogue has assumed numerous functions: dramatisation
and the creation of involvement, the juxtaposition of voices and the negotiation of ideas, the
diversification and personification of a plurality of viewpoints, the creation of (group)
identities, the presentation of characters and the attribution of thoughts, feelings and
viewpoints to these characters. It is to the specific functions of dialogue that the contributions
to this volume attend in more detail (see chapter outlines below). The media through which
these dialogues are transported obviously play a major role as their affordances and
limitations give shape to the dialogues.
Dialogue and Media
One could consider the two types of dialogue mentioned above as two points on a continuum
of dialogic forms which can be found across textual genres and which range from literary to
non-literary, fictional to non-fictional and immediate to variously mediated (and medially
transposed) dialogues. The latter will be at the centre of this book: dialogue across media.
This book systematically explores the uses and functions of dialogic language not only across
textual genres but across a selection of media, including aural, audiovisual and visual media.
Generally speaking, ‘media’ or ‘medium’ cannot easily be defined since scholars from
different disciplines disagree on what exactly to include under this umbrella term. As Gabriele
Rippl (2015, 9) puts it, the meaning of the term ‘medium’ is “notoriously shifting and
ambiguous.” Marie-Laure Ryan (2004, 15-16) makes a similar point when she lists a number
of very different things that sociologists, art critics, philosophers, artists or media theorists
would list if asked about what they understood by the term ‘medium.’ One point of
divergence is whether one concentrates on media as channels of communication, i.e., on what
media ‘do,’ or on media as “material means of expression” (Rippl 2015, 9), i.e., on what
media ‘are.’ As regards the latter, scholars also disagree on whether they want to restrict the
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term to technological media that allow for optical and acoustic transmission or whether they
also want to include non-technological media such as the human voice, writing or painting
(Rippl 2015, 7). In this regard it is noteworthy – and this is overlooked by Rippl as she applies
the term “technical” rather than “technological” here – that non-technological media are in
principle still ‘technical’ in the sense that they involve techniques (of writing, of painting,
etc.) and, as is the case with the human voice, may even involve a technical, albeit natural,
apparatus consisting of vocal chords, the tongue, the glottis, lips, etc. Whether we consider the
human voice as a medium or not has ramifications for how we conceptualize dialogue
because one could then either say that dialogue is always already mediated as it involves the
transmission of words through voices or that it becomes mediated only when this primary
form of transmission is transferred to (and modified by) other media such as books, radio,
telephone or computers, to name only a few.
The attempt to capture the “unattainable immediacy of speech” has long fascinated
novelists, producing scenes that are “imaginatively radiant” (Womack 2011, 3-4).
Defamiliarising and foregrounding aspects of the speech situation in new ways might also
help explain why this fascination extends across media, and also to readers and audiences. In
Piwek’s and Thomas’s chapters in this volume, we see how the attempt to create computers
capable of engaging in dialogue raises interesting new questions about the nature of human
interaction as well as interactions taking place between humans and machines. Meanwhile, it
could be argued that the ability of dialogue to immerse readers and audiences in the
“presentness” of a situation (Womack 2011, 94), makes it particularly important in a media
age where satellite and web technologies offer us the enticement of representations of ‘life as
lived’ and the promise or illusion of forms that are more authentic, vivid and immediate
(Margolin 1999, 161) than previously.
This brief discussion already indicates that dialogue forms raise a host of interesting
and relevant questions cutting across genre theory, stylistics, sociocultural and medial
concerns. However, it is important not only to distinguish among different kinds of dialogue
but also among kinds of theoretical and methodological approaches to analysing dialogue.
How Can We Study Dialogue? Methodological Issues
Edda Weigand (2008, 4) distinguishes between approaches to dialogue whose object is rulegoverned competence on the one hand or empirical performance on the other. Furthermore,
approaches can look at dialogue in the abstract and in this regard are either “normative,”
prescribing rules for ‘best performance,’ or “descriptive,” delineating the features of idealized
forms of dialogue that are in accordance with prescribed rules. By contrast, approaches can
also be empirical, focusing on features of dialogic exchanges as they are actually found in
real-life contexts (Weigand 2008, 5-6). Both abstract and empirical approaches are
reductionist, according to Weigand, because they exclude one or more aspects of the
complexity of “competence-in-performance,” which is “neither restricted to rules and
conventions nor […] lost in unlimited variability of performance” (Weigand 2008, 4). For
Weigand (2008, 3), it is important to recognise that dialogue is inherently rhetorical in the
sense that human beings employ it to achieve certain goals and that therefore dialogue, just
like rhetoric more generally, is “rooted in human beings’ interests and needs” (italics
original). This in a way ties back to Gergen’s (2009) concept of relationality (see above).
Weigand proposes the model of a “mixed game” to capture the complexity of competence-inperformance. The model acknowledges the fact that dialogue is rule-governed but that it can
create difficulties when interlocutors play according to different rules because they operate
within different expectational frames, e.g., a news interview vs. an argument. The model also
takes into account cognition and emotion and thus moves beyond approaches which purely
focus on conversational turns as actions (Weigand 2008, 8). Furthermore, Weigand’s model
accommodates institutional and cultural conventions and their impact on the “action game”
that dialogue constitutes (Weigand 2008, 7). The Mixed Game Model is attractive in that it
captures the complexity of dialogue as a discourse type, a complexity which obtains no matter
in which form and medium an actual dialogue is presented.
Linguistic and narratological approaches to the study of dialogue have demonstrated
how linguistic models and terms may be useful for the analysis of character interactions in
Comment [BT2]: Need to expand on
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literary texts. Thus, linguists with a research interest in stylistics have applied pragmatic and
conversation-analytic tools to fictional and dramatic dialogue (Herman 1995, Leech and Short
2007, Thomas 2012). Dialogue is also discussed within narratological studies that look at
other speech categories in fiction. A good example is Monika Fludernik’s (2003) book-length
study of free indirect discourse, where she also discusses fictional dialogue’s inherent tension
between mimeticism, i.e., its aim to be as true to life as possible, and its typification, i.e., its
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exaggeration of perceived ‘typical’ features of real-life conversation (Fludernik 1993, 19). ,
and more recently (e.g., Richardson 2010, McIntyre 2010), television and film. Similarly, t
Theories which draw on cognitive science (Palmer 2004) have shown how analysing
representations of what people say may provide insights into their thought processes and
mental functioning, whether that representation is in a novel, a film, or even a country and
western song (Palmer 2016). From a reader-response perspective, one could argue that we – at
least to a certain extent, albeit perhaps not always in exactly the same way – rely on similar
cognitive-linguistic and conceptual processing mechanisms when ‘reading’ (hearing, seeing)
dialogue across situations, genres and media (Mildorf 2013, 2014). It is therefore hardly
surprising that scholars have also turned to the study of dialogue in television and film (e.g.,
Richardson 2010, McIntyre 2010) and in other medial forms such as political interviews,
news reporting on television and in print media, talk shows and email messaging (see
contributions in Betten and Dannerer 2005, especially vol. 2). This potential crossmedia
continuity may significantly contribute to the pleasure we have in encountering characters in
dialogical interaction and in interpreting what they say. It is also testament to the importance
of dialogue in our lives – both real and virtual.
Kozloff’s (2000) typology of the main functions of dialogue in film offers a structured
approach which many of our contributors refer to in their analyses. The nine functions
identified by her include: anchoring the diegesis and characters; showing characters;
communicating narrative causality; enacting events; verisimilitude; guiding viewers’
emotions and evaluations; exploiting language for poetic, humorous or ironic effect; and
offering thematic messages or authorial commentary (Kozloff 2000, 33-34). Kozloff’s work
has also been influential in seeking to move the object of analysis beyond selective quotation
and one-liners chosen for their “pithy portability” (2013, xiv) to a more holistic consideration
of the ‘subtle characterisations or narrative import’ of dialogue. In the chapters that follow,
the focus is often on whole scenes rather than isolated utterances, allowing for more analysis
of talk-as-interaction and for discussion of the effects that scenes of dialogue may produce in
context. Several of the chapters also explore intertextual relations and aspects of production
particularly pertinent for audiovisual media such as television and film and for adaptations
across media where dialogue in performance may be considered alongside scripts and other
written sources.
The book is divided into three larger sections: Section I: “Creating Characters through
Dialogue,” Section II: “Involvement, Audience Design and Social Interaction,” and Section
III: “Playfulness and Narrative Functions of Dialogue.”
Chapter Outlines
Section I explores how dialogue is used in both literary and non-literary settings to create
characters and to endow those characters’ relationships with depth and meaning. In the first
contribution, “Pragmatics and Dramatic Dialogue: Reassessing Gus’s Role in Pinter’s The
Dumb Waiter,” Susan Mandala takes the case of Harold Pinter’s dialogues in the play The
Dumb Waiter as a starting point for reflections on how dramatic characters emerge through
their verbal interactions and how they position themselves vis-à-vis other characters. By
applying to the play both discourse and conversation analytic approaches that allow for the
systematic identification of speech acts in context, Mandala shows that, contrary to other
critics’ assessment, it is Gus who can be considered the more dominating character, as it is
Gus who actually steers the talk while at the same time allowing Ben to think he is still in
charge.
In her contribution “Character and Dialogue in 21st Century TV Drama: The Case of
Sherlock Holmes,” Kay Richardson starts out from the premise that dialogue in drama is
expected to be very economical, compared with real-life talk, but is also expected to work for
an audience in ways that do not (routinely) apply to unscripted conversation, for example, by
mediating aspects of the plot. Like Mandala, Richardson also attends to the limits of the
extent to which characterization can be achieved through dialogue and she particularly
addresses the difficulties involved in adapting literary characters to new media formats such
as TV drama. Her case study is the BBC adaptation of the well-known Sherlock Holmes
stories. Richardson illustrates the particular aspects of dialogue (involving both wording and
vocalisation) which help to establish the impression created of Sherlock for audiences, and
she separates these from non-linguistic aspects of performance and production which also
contribute to character effects.
The chapter “Look, Who’s Talking: Parent or Child? Transactional Analysis in the
Writing of Effective Screenplay Dialogue” by Craig Batty and Wilf Hashimi approaches
dialogue writing from the perspective of screenwriting practitioners and draws on terms and
models from psychotherapeutic counselling. Batty and Hashimi use Transaction Analysis
(TA) as one form of creating characters in dialogue which, they argue, can be fruitfully
adopted for the writing of screen dialogue. Transactional Analysis is a theory of personality
devised by Eric Berne, a Canadian psychiatrist, in the early 1960s. Berne ascribed specific
meanings to the words ‘Parent,’ ‘Adult,’ ‘Child,’ ‘Game,’ ‘Script’ and ‘Stroke.’ As Batty and
Hashimi argue, TA can be specifically used to build the compelling and credible
characterisation that is the hallmark of all engaging screenwriting: characters having
psychological depth that makes their interactions with the movement of the plot significantly
more attractive to the viewer.
Bronwen Thomas’ contribution “All Talk: Dialogue and Intimacy in Spike Jonze’s
Her,” focuses on a film where action is subordinate to character interaction, and where one of
the characters is a computer operating system. As well as exploring how this represents in
many ways an atypical case study, Thomas argues for the importance of considering aspects
of pre- and post-production for understanding the complex processes at work both in terms of
the film’s effects but also in terms of audience reception. Drawing on theories of dialogue
from literary criticism, narratology and linguistics as well as film studies, Thomas
demonstrates the ways in which the film reveals the ways in which the pleasures and tensions
of verbal interaction may be as much about concealment and solipsism as about intimacy and
revelation. She argues that dialogue in film more generally is not just about exquisitely staged
scenes or displays of auteurish experimentation, but plays an integral role in the audience’s
active engagement with the characters and their investment in their unfolding relationships.
The contributions subsumed under the second section “Involvement, Audience Design
and Social Interaction” address questions of audience design and dialogue as social
interaction, investigating in particular how dialogues can create involvement. The first
contribution by Aino Koivisto, “Studying Everyday Talk: News Announcements and News
Receipts in Telephone Conversation,” uses a conversation-analytical framework. As we
already pointed out above, dialogue in conversation can be considered the prototype of
dialogue. It is therefore apt to begin this section with a contribution on conversational
dialogue. Koivisto discusses the social actions of delivering news and informings as well as
responses to those actions. She shows that telling a piece of news is an interactional process
where the positioning of the informing and the way it is received by the recipient plays a
significant role in the final outcome of a news delivery sequence. Koivisto’s examples come
from Finnish telephone conversations. The role of the telephone as a medium is therefore also
taken into focus.
Jarmila Mildorf looks at the notion of “audience design” in literary interviews on the
radio in her chapter “Dialogic Interactions on Radio: Studs Terkel’s Literary Interviews.” She
analyses extracts from interviews conducted by Studs Terkel using discourse and
conversation-analytical frameworks. Her focus is on a sub-category of journalistic interviews,
namely the so-called “literary interview,” where writers are interviewed about their lives and
works. The literary interview can be considered a hybrid genre, particularly in its printed
version, because it mixes orality and the spontaneity of the interview situation with more or
less scripted text and a design imposed by the editorial process. One key question Mildorf
explores is to what extent writers, who arguably have great awareness of their (reading)
audiences, accommodate to these audiences and to their interlocutor in their literary
interviews.
Marina Lambrou’s contribution “Dialogism in Journalistic Discourse: An Analysis of
Ian McEwan’s ‘Savagely awoken’” also investigates dialogic structures in journalistic
writing, focusing on Ian McEwan’s response to the events surrounding 7/7 as a case study to
show how McEwan linguistically gears his article towards his reading audience. Drawing on
Bakhtin’s (1986 [1929]) idea that language use is dialogic and addresses people and a
particular context, Lambrou undertakes a stylistic analysis of McEwan’s response to identify
the main rhetorical strategies at play and in this way, understand the power and persuasion of
journalistic discourse.
In her chapter “Friends and Followers ‘in the Know’: A Narrative Interactional
Approach to Social Media Participation,” Alexandra Georgakopoulou takes into view dialogic
interactions in and through social media and shows how the generic conditions of these media
also lead to interaction preferences and ultimately influence participant relationships.
Georgakopoulou’s study sheds light on ‘Like’ and ‘Comment’ functions as interactional
resources on YouTube and on Facebook by identifying and analysing certain systematic
sequential arrangements between post and responses to it, which Georgakopoulou links to
specific social media practices. Alongside the preferences for specific responses and relations
engineered by social media platforms, the original posters themselves are shown to create
specific preferences for subsequent responses. These ‘projections of next turn’ are found to
intersect with both social media genre normativities and participant relations.
Paul Piwek’s contribution “Dialogue with Computers” returns to human-machine
communication in real-life laboratory settings and discusses the challenges that human
dialogue creates for such communication and for the design of computer programmes in
artificial intelligence. Piwek identifies three principal strands in research on computational
dialogue generation: (1) the construction of dialogue agents that are intended for
communication with human interlocutors; (2) the construction of dialogue agents that
primarily have conversations with each other; (3) the construction of a dialogue generation
systems that produce dialogue performances of two or more characters for a human audience.
For each strand, Piwek discusses representative approaches and explains their underlying
research goals, dialogue genre, functions and practical applications. This is followed by a
discussion of the common themes and trends in research on computational dialogue
generation.
The four contributions in section III (“Playfulness and Narrative Functions of
Dialogue”) attend to dialogue’s ludic qualities as well as its potential narrative functions,
highlighting the fact that dialogue’s creativity and playfulness can be employed both in
artistic genres and in real-life settings to allow for expressive freedom and to support
narrativity. Lars Bernaerts investigates dialogue in radio drama, where it plays a major role
for propelling and carrying the plot and also becomes interesting because it is limited to the
aural. His contribution “Dialogue in Audiophonic Fiction: The Case of Audio Drama”
describes the specific constraints and affordances of the audiophonic dialogue, which
combines elements of dialogue in fiction with elements of dialogue in drama and film. The
specificity of audiophonic dialogues is demonstrated in an analysis of a radiophonic piece
based on the literary work The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch. Bernaerts examines
the source text alongside its adaptation, thus foregrounding both the differences and
similarities between the textual and the aural, between the literary and the radiophonic
dialogue.
In his chapter “Dialogue in Comics: Medium-Specific Features and Basic Narrative
Functions,” Kai Mikkonen focuses on text-image relationships in comics and has a closer
look at how dialogue is presented and what narrative functions it assumes in this visual and
largely pictorial medium. Mikkonen starts out from the multimodal character of the
representation of conversational exchanges in comics/graphic narratives. He focuses on the
interaction between the utterance and elements of the narrative drawing, i.e., the graphic
showing of conversational interaction in comics are facial expressions, gestures, body
language and shape, and participant involvement. Equally, the expressive functions of
typography and onomatopoeia, or imitatives, as well as graphic style, panel framing, and page
layout, are shown to play a major role.
Sebastian Domsch takes into focus “Dialogue in Videogames.” He emphasizes the
ludic dimension of dialogues in video games, where a game master can be said to interact
with a player. As Domsch points out, dialogue is hardwired into the very matrix of video
games, not only because they are an interactive medium, but because they are an active one:
not only do they react to input by players, but they can offer their own input. Domsch shows
dialogue to be found on every level in games as narratives, and his contribution looks
systematically at the relationship between ludic and dialogic structures and at the various
forms that dialogue has taken in video games historically.
The case of video games raises interesting questions concerning the tension between
creativity and a more scripted nature of dialogue, a tension that can also be found in live roleplay games, which are analysed by Frans Mäyrä in his chapter “Dialogue and Interaction in
Role-Playing Games: Playful Communication as Ludic Culture.” The dialogue in role-playing
games serves multiple purposes, some of which are related to its functional role in mediating
in-game clues or actions, some in the role of language in the collaborative construction of a
shared fantasy. Mäyrä surveys studies that have looked deeper into the actual language and
interaction patterns in fantasy role-playing games and that have unearthed a complex layering
or “framing” of dialectic positions related to “real-world” roles, game-system level roles as a
game player, and in-game or game fantasy level roles as fantasy role-playing characters.
Against this background, the chapter then provides illustrative examples and analyses of
typical and inventive applications of dialogue in role-play.
Closing Remarks
This introduction has outlined some of the theoretical foundations and questions that have
shaped the study of dialogue to date, and addressed some of the reasons for its relative neglect
and marginalisation. We hope to have demonstrated that working across traditional scholarly
disciplines, and exploring how dialogue works across media, provides a rich new direction for
future studies. All of the contributions to this volume display the authors’ enthusiasm for
exploring the unique energy and versatility that dialogic forms can offer artists and readers
alike. In bringing together scholars from different disciplines and exploring such a wide
variety of case studies, we hope to show how important dialogue remains as a way of
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representing the complexities and contradictions of human attempts at expression and
interaction.
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