Aspects of Dialogic Syntax: Examples from Yehoshua and Grossman

The paper opens with a definition of the minimal unit of dialogue as a pair of "speech moves" and points to the wide distribution of contextual elliptical sentences in a dialogue. It applies to dialogues the theory of "functional sentence perspective" by which each sentence is divided into given information—Theme—and new information—Rheme. The paper shows that a Rheme in one speech move can serve as a Theme in another speech move, which is an elliptical sentence, without its repetition. In such cases, the degree of "communicative dynamism" heightens, whereas repetitions or long speech moves cause a low degree of "communicative dynamism."

In this paper, I apply to dialogues the models suggested by Daneš for the description of the thematic progression in monologues. The graphic models help the reader grasp at a glance the different types of "thematic progression," and also capture at once the nature of dialogues, whether cooperative or argumentative. The dialogues described here are from novels by Yehoshua and Grossman.