Perspectives on language and discourse

Language can be conceptualized in basically two ways, as system and structure, or as

discourse, practice (praxis) or communication. If one gives priority to the former, we can
talk about a formalistic framework; here, linguistic expressions can be treated in abstracto.
Priorities to the latter yield a more funcionalistic paradigm; its focus on communicative
meanings and functions makes it necessary to take contexts into account.

In this chapter it will be looked the language as discourse. So, it is proposed to deal with
phenomena like discourse, communication, thought, interaction, language use, linguistic
practices, etc., as primary, rather than as parasitic on language structure. That is, D-aspects
are primary, and S-units must be seen as decontextualized abstractions, generalizations
sometimes (implicity) made by language-users but in many cases virtually “made”.

Structure and discourse can also be construed as 'potential' VS. 'actual'; linguistic items are
associated with meaning potentials, whereas in situated discourse we encounter the actual
meanings made by people who communicate in real life. Discourse and discursive practices
are themselves highly structured. It is possible to generalize across singular situations to
define pattems, sequential structures, routines, recurrent strategies and situation definitions
(framings), activity types and communicative genres, as well as more traditional linguistic
units and rules. But this is largely structure within discursive practices, rather than structure
apart from, above and before discourse. Within a comprehensive dialogism, structuralist
and functionalist perspectives could penetrate and complement each other.

Discourse is a stretch of concrete, situated and connected actions. Formalist and

functionalist views of language imply two fundamentally different approaches to discourse
and communication: monologuism and dialoguism. The theory of language structure
defines various linguistic units, basically as expression types with various abstract syntactic
and associated (similarly abstract) ‘semantic’ representations, which are assumed to be
“used” in discourse by “competent” speakers.

'Monologism' and 'dialogism' as epistemologies or analytical frameworks should be kept

distinct from, on the one hand, 'dialogicality' and, on the other hand, 'monologue' and
'dialogue'. Dialogicality (or, as some prefer it, 'dialogicity') is the noun used to refer to
certain properties that are, at least according to dialogism, characteristic of and essential in,
in the first place, dialogue and, more generally, all human cognition and communication.
These properties, which will be extensively explored in this book, include sequential
organization, joint (social-interactional) construction, and interdependence between acts
(local units) and activities (global units and abstract types). These principIes can be seen as
elaborations of what Mikhail Bakhtin would term 'the dialogical principIe' (in the singular)