Abstract
The first sentence in the preface of Edda Weigand’s book Dialogue: The Mixed Game makes clear that this author’s radical and ambitious intention in this work is to present “a completely new approach to language” (p. xi). The end result is a dense but innovative book that is both engaging and challenging. Weigand succeeds in proposing an innovative theory of language in use named the “mixed game model” that severs ties to traditional speech act theory in an attempt toward a more holistic understanding of human interaction. Her model is truly interdisciplinary and includes linguistic, sociological, and biological premises as the foundation for her claims.
The book is organized in four parts that must be read chronologically in a committed and methodical way if one is to follow the author as she formulates and reasons through her premises. Put differently, I do not believe that this book is one that can be mined by a language researcher who is searching for a new method with which to analyze some sequences of utterances. Most will find such a method infused in the later parts, and although the author is a skilled writer and offers adequate summaries of her ideas throughout, the book is one that is best considered as a whole.
In Part I, Weigand argues that the need of a theory of dialogic action games stems from the limitations inherent in the dominant approaches to the study of language. Weigand begins this section by dismissing one of the most roundly accepted characteristics of language: Saussure’s (1916/1983) notion of the sign as an arbitrary connection of meaning and symbol (1954). Weigand challenges what she calls the “dogma” of the sign on the basis that Saussure does not include the human being in his model but rather assigns agency to the sign as the carrier of meaning. She also rejects the notion that Chomsky’s (1965) theory of language competence gets researchers any closer in including the human subject, and she argues that the “ideal speaker” in Chomsky’s theory who used advanced grammatical sentences as patterns to generate new ones continues to limit the role of the human actor in the linguistic equation. She suggests that these types of theories have resulted in abstraction and generalization that ultimately reduce or simplify dialogue. In response, she puts forth a definition of dialogic action that explicitly notes that it “is not action by verbal means but action by the integrated use of communicative means, verbal, perceptual and cognitive” (p. 43). Weigand calls for a theory that can recognize in humans their cognitive ability to adapt to an ever-changing environment, that can account for this skill in biological terms and that accounts for the sociological needs of the actor.
Part II provides Weigand’s answer in response to the need outlined in Part I, and she completely develops the mixed game model in this section. She notes that the postulates of the mixed game model emerged “from the natural object of human beings’ actions and behaviour in dialogic performance and tries to derive an adequate methodology from it” (p. 125). Weigand continually reminds the reader that the human actor she is discussing is one who is not merely fluent in grammars and linguistic patterns but also a competent communicative actor who can adapt to an ever-changing world of possibilities. This human actor is the starting point of understanding dialogue, and in this section, Weigand outlines those aspects of the person that affect dialogue as human nature, environment, and culture. Human nature is described as the whole of integrated human abilities that are used by dialogic and goal-directed beings and specifically includes the notion that humans are fundamentally persuasive beings who are always seeking acknowledgement and inclusion from peers. Environment and culture influence the human actor, making them adaptable to the ever-changing contexts of social and natural life and answerable to an external system of values that derives from cultural norms.
In the remainder of Part II, Weigand takes these basic assumptions and designs a methodology called Probability Principles to understand the dialogic mixed game in which individuals strive to maintain their position in the face of an unpredictable environment. There are three probability principles that influence dialogic utterances, including constitutive, regulative, and executive principles. Constitutive principles are the components of verbal action games that comprise communication between two individuals and include the action principle (language is dialogic action), the dialogic principle (communication acts are all related to a preceding or subsequent communication act), and the coherence principle (the interaction of various communicative means within the communication act). These grounding constitutive principles flesh out the complexity of dialogue and suggest the limitations of other means of analyzing discourse. Regulative principles are grounded in human nature and mediate the communicative action by negotiating between self-interest (a focus on self) and respect (a focus on the social). Finally, executive principles include the ways that an individual conceives of the dialogue through planning and process strategies. Each of these principles is methodically dissected in the text, and although there is no room to explore each in detail, there are complete sequencing examples throughout this section.
Part III and Part IV of Weigand’s book deal with minimal action games and complex action games, respectively. Despite the controversial nature of the move, Weigand outlines a taxonomy of speech acts that consider types of minimal games including declaratives, explorative, directives, and representatives and also explores the propositional patterns that emerge from analysis of minimal action games through taxonomies. Part IV moves from simple taxonomy to complex extension of the action game and considers issues such as understanding, power, and other complexities of the lives of human beings. Finally, Weigand briefly considers the role of action games in literary studies, including means of expression, such as symbols and metaphors. These last parts serve as practical applications for the theory that is developed in the first two parts and bring Weigand’s theory into the realm of the everyday lived experience that is so vital to her project.
Ultimately, Weigand’s book expands the way that linguists understand dialogue by bringing the human actors engaging it to the forefront. Her theory is pragmatic to the core and heralds the return of humanist concerns to the study of linguistic dialogue studies. Because of the intense interdisciplinary composition of this theory, audiences interested in Weigand’s work will likely come from various fields. Of course, this book is relevant to theory development in the traditional field of linguistics in that it challenges and extends some of the paradigmatic ideas in that discipline. However, there are other audiences who may find the work relevant.
Those engaged in sociobiology will find Weigand to be an adherent to the notion that environment and culture work together in the evolution of the human species. So will those who approach the study of language from a sociological perspective that wants to understand human life as it is lived. Social psychologists interested in the role of language in development of social relationships will find material of interest as well. Furthermore, many scholars who focus on what Weigand refers to as American Speech Communication Studies will find Weigand useful. Despite an implication that American researchers are 50 years behind their European contemporaries in the study of dialogue and her explicit statement that this work “does not seem directly pertinent to my issue of language use in the mixed game” (p. 24), those who study dialogue within this field will find several philosophical concepts that align with Martin Buber and Mikhail Bakhtin and may offer possible avenues for analysis. However, those who study rhetoric and persuasion within speech communication will find themselves already familiar with many of the founding claims that Weigand makes about human nature and experience. For example, Weigand assumes a social construction of reality that is human centric. She is also heavily influenced by the work of Kenneth Burke (1950) and his notion of identification, which she prefers to call simple persuasion.
In all, Weigand has written a book that will undoubtedly provoke some and inspire others. Her willingness to challenge paradigmatic assumptions is to be lauded, and her insistence on the inclusion of a fully rational, skilled human actor is refreshing. Furthermore, unlike many books that claim interdisciplinary roots, Weigand’s writing in this book allows individuals from disciplines other than linguistics entrance into her complex ideas by developing her ideas logically and incrementally.