Language Use / Dimensions du dialogisme / Dialogischer Sprachgebrauch. (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki, tome LXVI.) 2006. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. ISBN 951-9040-22-6. 454 pp.
Reviewed by Angela Schrott (University of Kassel)Combining a selection of papers given at the symposium on Dialogic Language Use: Address in Focus held at the University of Helsinki in 2004, the volume represents the enormous diversity characteristic of current research on dialogic interactions. In fact, openness and variety are programmatic for the volume that gathers 26 contributions dealing with dialogic language use in different languages, cultures and time periods. The broad definition of "dialogic language use" as "textual interaction between text participants" (p. 1) allows for two different interpretations of "dialogue": as conversational interaction and as the dialogicity of language in general. Moreover, the volume not only brings together current research projects on dialogic interaction in different languages (focusing on English, German, and French) but also combines the different traditions that characterise English, German, and Romance philology in the fields of pragmatics and dialogue analysis. Thus, French linguists following Benveniste (1966) emphasise the parameters of "coénonciation" and "(inter)subjectivité", pointing out the general dialogicity of language; German scholars tend to concentrate on textual genres and dialogue forms; and studies on English are strongly influenced by modern corpus linguistics. In order to allow a more detailed presentation of the different research projects and their methodologies, a representative choice of articles will be discussed in this review.The contributions in the first part, "Focus on Theories and Methods", deal mostly with historical and diachronic issues where research on dialogic interaction raises particularly complex methodological questions (key-words would be the "simulation" of orality and the "authenticity" of spoken language in written texts). The introductory article by Horst J. Simon ("Reconstructing historical orality in German -What sources should we use?", pp. 7-26) discusses sources that may permit at least a partial reconstruction of historical spoken language. According to Simon, what "good" sources have in common is that they represent -for different reasons -communicative immediacy (pp. 9-10). The article highlights model dialogues in early foreign-language textbooks and chooses a textbook written in Venice in 1424 (authored by Georg von Nürnberg) for a close philological analysis. The model dialogues in German and Italian represent bargaining