Now, I have said these are all meanings by which the speaker/writer can adjust the dialogic terms or status of an utterance. What do I mean by `dialogic terms' and in what ways do these resources achieve such a rhetorical outcome?
This notion of `dialogism' is inspired by the now widely influential view of the communicative process as set out in the work of Bakhtin/Voloshinov. (Bakhtin 1981, Voloshinov 1995) The following quotation sums up this perspective.
The actual reality of language-speech is not the abstract system of linguistic forms, not the isolated monologic utterance, and not the psychological act of its implementation, but the social event of verbal interaction implemented in an utterance or utterances. Thus, verbal interaction is the basic reality of language. Dialogue, in the narrow sense of the word, is of course only one of the forms - a very important form, to be sure - of verbal interaction. But dialogue can also be understood in a broader sense, meaning not only direct, face-to-face, vocalised verbal communication between persons, but also verbal communication of any type whatsoever. A book, i.e. a verbal performance in print, is also an element of verbal communication. ...[it] inevitably orients itself with respect to previous performances in the same sphere... Thus the printed verbal performance engages, as it were, in ideological colloquy of a large scale: it responds to something, affirms something, anticipates possible responses and objections, seeks support, and so on. (Voloshinov 1995: 139)
My point then, is that the resources included within Engagement are all `dialogistic' in this sense - they are all means by which speakers/writers represent themselves as engaging in a `dialogue' to the extent that they present themselves as taking up, acknowledging, responding to, challenging or rejecting actual or imagined prior utterances from other speakers/writers or as anticipating likely or possible responses from other speakers/writers. Or, to put it in other terms, they are dialogic in that, to different degrees and in different ways, they all acknowledge or invoke representations or points of view which are to some degree different from the representation/point of view currently being advanced by the text. It is with this alternative position, therefore, with which the speaker/writer presents themselves as engaged dialogically.
I will now consider more specifically the terms of dialogistic positioning which associated with the different sub-choices within Engagement.
