Dialogues and Dramas in Everyday Life

Abstract

Michael Holquist (1990), one of the commentators on Mikhail Bakhtin’s monumental work, stated flatly that “human existence is dialogue,” and Ivana Markova (2003) declared that “dialogism is the ontology of humanity.” Bakhtin (1985;1986) himself said that such dialogues are conducted by using “speech genres.” From another angle Kenneth Burke asked, “What is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?” and claimed – and showed – that this question can be best answered by using what he called the “grammar of motives,” which consisted of a hexad of terms: act, attitude, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. In this chapter, I examine, by using various examples, how the Burkean grammar is used in the construction of one speech genre or the other to achieve rhetorically effective dialogic communication.

Citation

Perinbanayagam, R. (2019), "Dialogues and Dramas in Everyday Life", The Interaction Order (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 50), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 29-70. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-239620190000050002