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Hello and <br>
<br>
Thank you for your response and thank you for the references<br>
<br>
>There is also, if you are not already aware of that, a discussion
List<br>
>devoted to online research; if you are interested in it, I can send
you<br>
>details about it off-list.<br>
<br>
yes please, I would be very interested in this List<br>
<br>
>I agree that electronic discourse includes, like many other types
of<br>
>discourse if carefully investigated, many features associated with
orality.<br>
>However, I think the conclusion you arrived at would apply to the
kind of<br>
>data you investigated rather than to discourse in general. <br>
<br>
I agree completely. In fact, the text I analysed is a personal email
between two close friends. I discuss this point in my assignment,
that email messages can certainly cover a wide range of styles, from
formal written to casual speech-like. The casual speech-like ones
interest me most and my conclusion is in reference to this specific type
of email text.<br>
<br>
>I am not sure I understand "embedded dialogue" the way you
mean it.<br>
<br>
Of course I am such a beginner that I really don't know what I am talking
about, but I ran into some problems doing my text analysis and this led
me to rethink dialogue. When two friends are exchanging emails, are
they exchanging monologues? is it a straightforward dialogue? I had
problems defining dialogue. I decided that it was indeed a form of
dialogue, but each speaker embeds his or her turns into the
other's. For example, I have chosen to embed this after your
sentence above. Now in a personal, ongoing email, and I give what I
think is a good example of this in my assignment, it happens often only
to maintain a conversational style, or perhaps it is more involved that
even that. As an example, I might write to a friend "oh I had
a rough night last night, the baby woke up crying several times" and
then I continue writing about something else that I'm doing, and in my
friend's response, she will embed something like "oh that's too
bad" and then later on, type something else that is really something
we find in live conversation rather than in written dialogue,
*especially* since there is often a time lag. Further what we
are left with is no longer a chronological, linear order of utterances,
which is another problem I encountered in doing my assignment. The
first speaker's utterance is in fact chronologically after the second
speaker's utterance (which has been kept in the current message).
It gets intricately interwoven rather quickly.<br>
<br>
>"embedded dialogue" the thing I am doing now to reply to
the particular<br>
>point I am selecting? Or, is it the fact that electronic discourse
is<br>
>inherently dialogic?<br>
<br>
I think it's important to remember that electronic discourse means many
things, and so electronic discourse is no more inherently dialogic than
any other form of discourse, but again it depends on how one defines
dialogue. Is it a synchronous exchange/interaction? (and please
fogive me because I don't have enough experience or knowledge to be using
the right terminology). I give an example in my assignment of
something I would consider to be essentially monologic. It's the example
of the system administration people sending out an email message saying
"the server will be down Friday night from 2 am to 5 am" or
something like that. There is no intended exchange except the
communication of information Sender > Receiver. I am on a List
at work that is only for information, no one posts replies, it is simply
a forum to announce information, seminars, etc. But if we move
outside these examples into personal communication, we find that things
are less straightforward. I have been saving my personal email messages
for some time now for two reasons. One is that I realized I was creating
a sort of diary or journal of my life and reflections and I wanted to
keep that. The other is that I noticed a lot of interesting things going
on linguistically. I would certainly say that personal email discourse is
inherently dialogic. I would go further to say that it naturally evolves
into a recursive text.<br>
<br>
When I analyse an email text coming from a friend, it usually contains
'clips' from other messages that allow the flow of communication to
continue uninterrupted, it also saves time. I really don't know how
to treat the utterances. In a normal conversation between Bill and
Sue, Bill speaks, then Sue, then Bill, and so on. Now, I have Bill
speaking a long time, then Sue answering him throughout his utterance
while keeping parts of his speech in her messages, and so on. So,
how should each email text be treated? I think there are three
possibilities. <br>
One is that each writer is treated independently, so when Sue sends her
message, only what she said in her turn is analysed.<br>
Another is that each email message is treated as is, analysing the
content even though some of it is a quote of an earlier message.<br>
Thirdly, we could reconstruct each person's utterances, thereby
reconstructing utterance by utterance and topic by topic. This
would be a good amount of work, but I am certain it would be very
interesting. There are many choices (linguistic, personal,
physical-typing) that go into the make-up of any single personal email
message. <br>
Again, I just don't have enough education or experience to begin to know
the direction to take on this issue.<br>
<br>
> If this is what you mean, what is the link between<br>
>electronic discourse as dialogic and unconscious language? Is
everyday<br>
>language always unconscious? Is it unconscious in the Freudian sense
or in<br>
>the sense that it is beneath the level of cognitive awareness?
If<br>
>discussions on this and other lists were so, then nobody would ever
be taken<br>
>seriously in whatever they say.<br>
<br>
I agree, and you can be absolutely certain that I have tried to be very
conscious of what I am saying here, knowing that I am taking risks as a
beginner. However, I would say that personal email messages are
just as conscious/unconscious as the equivalent conversation I would have
face to face. In fact, I have experienced 'slips of the type' while
typing, (rather than slips of the tongue), and with friends I usually
have kept them in the message rather than deleting them so that my
'Listener/Reader' can share in the laugh. The interesting thing is
that with email, I could just as easily delete and restart. I think
that the conscious/unconscious degree is relevant in speech as well, my
conversation with my good friend over coffee is far less conscious than
my job interview is. There are many parallels between online and
offline discourse, but email messages differ, and I am speaking of
personal conversational style messages only, in the degree of embedding,
the recursive nature of the resulting text, and the efforts made to
capture an conversational 'turn-taking' style.<br>
<br>
I don't even know if any of this raises any interesting questions for
linguistic research, but I would appreciate some further understanding on
the notions of dialogue. I have read some of what Peter White has written
and I found it really interesting (<i>Dialogue and inter-subjectivity:
reinterpreting the semantics of modality and hedging</i>, to be
specific). I would like to add that my assignment is long since
submitted and so I am pursuing this for my own personal interests
now.<br>
<br>
I apologize for the length of this message, this is a personal interest
of mine, and I get carried away.<br>
<br>
good cheers to all,<br>
<br>
Lise</html>