An Overview of Bahktin’s Theory of Dialogue and Its Relevance in Textual Production

Citation: Hind Moayad Ismail (2017). An Overview of Bahktin’s Theory of Dialogue and Its Relevance in Textual Production. Yobe Journal of Language, Literature and Culture (YOJOLLAC), Vol. 5. Department of African Languages and Linguistics, Yobe State University, Damaturu, Nigeria. ISSN 2449-0660

AN OVERVIEW OF BAHKTIN’S THEORY OF DIALOGUE AND ITS RELEVANCE IN TEXTUAL PRODUCTION

HIND MOAYAD ISMAIL

Abstract

In recent years, the concept of Bahktin’s (1986) dialogue between the text and the reader and between the texts themselves has been treated with keen interest. As every text is dialogical, the paper employs content analysis to discuss three properties of the textual nature of a discourse: coherence, relevance, and intertextuality are to highlight their relevance in text production using discourse analysis theory.  The study findings establish that the relation between texts depend on the sequences of ideas by referring to the same relevant references that illustrate the main theme of the text, and the sequences of ideas from intertextuality relations between texts.

Keywords: dialogue, intertextuality, coherence, relevance, text.

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Dialogue is a dominant feature in both oral and written discourse as the main function of the language, is to convey meaning and at same time, facilitate communication between the discourse itself and language users involved (Heine, 1997:3). Dialogue represents exchanges at all levels between words in the language, people involved in successful language activities as Language use is goal oriented where people use language to accomplish purpose and goals.

Discourse refers to the study of units of language and language use that consist of more than a single sentence, but connected by some system of related topics. A discourse may be briefly defined as an utterance type of natural language which realizing a sequence of sentences, satisfies a number of properties. Besides appropriate grammaticalness of sentences at the syntactic level, there are pragmatic aspects of language such as context which plays an important role in the interpretation of a communicative act. There are also many important properties defining the textual nature of a sequence of sentences expressed by a discourse; such as coherence, relevance, and intertextuality, and these properties help reflect the dialogism aspect of language.

This paper therefore examines the three properties of the textual nature of a discourse: coherence, relevance, and intertextuality to argue how these properties help in producing new text and at the same time reflect the dialogism aspect of language.

2.0 METHOD

This study adapts content analysis of discourse using discourse analysis paradigm. The analysis focuses on discourse aspects of coherence, relevance, and intertextuality. The three aspects are parts of pragmatics and semantics of discourse. These pragmatic and semantic functions allow sentences’ structures and forms of language use to be reflected in the text. The examples will be from an article from the British Independent newspaper.

3.0 PURPOSE OF THE STUDY

Language is used primarily for communicative purposes and communication is always performed dialogically (Weigand 2009: 65). As discourse is dialogic, it is necessarily involved in some way, shape, or form in exchange. More specifically, it is also orientated to some other discourses, either as a rejoinder to some other discourse or as an invitation to response as stated in Bakhtin (1986): 

The dialogic orientation of discourse is a phenomenon that is, of course, a property of any discourse. It is the natural orientation of any living discourse. . . The word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it; the word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object . . . The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, orientated toward a future answer word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer's direction (Bakhtin 1986 Cited in Linell 1998:279-80).

From the point of view of Bakhtin, the present paper discusses the dialogic aspect of the discourse through analyzing its properties of coherence, intertextuality, and relevance.

4.0 OVERVIEW ON DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Discourse analysis is an aspect of linguistics that deals with the analysis of structures and functions of actual forms of language use (van Dijk 1980: 52). van Dijk (1980) states that discourse is an utterance type of natural language which realizes a sequence of sentences and satisfies a number of properties. These properties are not only related to the grammatical features, but also to the semantic and pragmatic aspects of the textual nature of the sequences of sentences which expressed by a discourse.

For Stubbs (1983:1) discourse analysis refers mainly to the linguistic analysis of naturally occurring connected speech or written discourse. Roughly speaking, it refers to attempts to study the organization of language above the sentence or above the clause, and therefore to study larger linguistic units, such as conversational exchanges or written texts. It follows that discourse analysis is also concerned with language use in social contexts, and in particular with interaction or dialogue between speakers.

For van Dijk and Schiffirn discourse comprehends monologic and dialogic forms of language use, text and talk, talk being here the dialogic form of language use covering conversation and dialogue. İn the same way Sinclair distinguishes documents and conversation as subparts of discourse, i.e. discourse can be written or spoken. Stubbs (1983) defines the term discourse analysis as “the linguistic analysis of naturally occurring connected spoken or written discourse. Levinson (1983:286), however, characterizes discourse as the method of “extending the techniques so successful in linguistics, beyond the unit of the sentence” (cited in Weigand 2009: 48).

In reading a text, we try to make sense of it. That is we attempt to arrive at a responsible interpretation of what the writer intended to convey. It is this effort to interpret and how we accomplish it, which are the key elements in investigated in the study of discourse (Lyons 1981: 105).

It is clear that all linguists connect dialogue with spoken language only as part of communication action or process. And no one referred to the dialogue relations between sentences as it is mentioned by Bakhtin which will be our study of this paper.

5.0 COHERENCE

Bakhtin (1986) refers to one of the fundamental dialogical principles, that is, sequentionality which is reflected in the coherence property of the text.  Each constituent action, contribution or sequence, gets significant parts of its meaning from the position in a sequence. That means that one can never fully understand an utterance or an extract if it is taken out of the sequence which provides its context. And this reflects the relation between text and context in the interpretation of meaning.

A discourse may be briefly defined as an utterance type of natural language which realizes a sequence of sentences which satisfies a number of properties. Besides, relative grammaticalness of sentences at the syntactic level, the most conspicuous property defining the textual nature of a sequence of sentences expressed by a discourse, is the semantic property of coherence. This coherence, which ideally holds both for monological and dialogical discourses, defines the delimitation of a discourse with respect to previous and following discourses in speech interaction (van Dijk 1980: 52).

And as part of coherence, cohesion primarily has to do with linguistic features in the text and what creates cohesion is not just the linguistic features within the text alone, but the fact that these features lead readers to perform certain mental operations in order to locate and take note of earlier or later parts of the text as they are going through it.

Let us take the following example from the article:

As pointed out by our Review of the Year, to be published in Saturday’s newspaper, the refugee crisis was one of the signature stories of 2015 and followed a remarkable trajectory.

This newspaper was the first to publish on its front page the image of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old whose body washed up on the shore near Bodrum in Turkey, and helped set a tone of compassion that extended right across Europe and led – eventually – to the British Government showing some decency.

The reference “this” in the second paragraph refers to what is mentioned in the previous paragraph referring to the “Saturday’s newspaper”, i.e. we need to refer back to the second text. There is also the using of cohesive devices like ‘whose’, ‘and’, and ‘eventually’ to define and add information and sequences about the child ‘Aylan’ and what happened to him and the sequences of this accident. So, here all prepositions are related to the same fact which is the child Aylan, and at the same time the child ‘Aylan’ is an example of the refugee crisis that supports the local coherence of the text.

Thus, cohesion is the quality in a text that forces you to look either backward or forward in the text in order to make sense of the things you read, and through your acts of looking backward and forward the text takes on a quality of  connectedness (Jones 2012: 49). 

Coherence is a matter of the ‘frameworks’ or sets of expectations that we bring to texts, in addition to what is actually in the text. Concrete features also must exist in the text which are often arranged in a certain order and conform to ‘trigger’ those expectations. For example, if a text is about shopping, it must have a certain structure (a list), certain kinds of words (generally nouns), and those words must represent things that I am able to purchase and these words will help to interpret the text (Jones 2012: 49).

Let us consider the following example from the article:

The International Organisation for Migration has said that the number of migrants and refugees crossing into Europe by land and sea illegally this year has crossed the million mark. Given that much more have done so legally gives some indication of the sheer volume – almost biblical in nature – of the recent exodus from the Middle East, driven largely though not exclusively by the disintegration of Syria.

In the above text, we have sequences of propositions that are referring to the same topic which is of refugees. In the first sentence/proposition, the speaker mentions words or ‘triggers’ about the situation such as ‘refugees’, ‘migrants’, ‘illegally’ and ‘Europe’ which explain the situation of refugees and their illegal immigration to Europe. To understand the second sentence, the reader must look backward or what is mentioned in the previous proposition; the speaker refers to the number of refugees through the words ‘many’, ‘volume’, and specifies ‘Syria’ as one of the countries in the ‘Middle East’.

For Jones (2012: 53), coherence has to do with our expectations about the way elements in a text ought to be organized and the kinds of social actions (like immigration) that are associated with a given text. He points out that what makes a text a text is often as much a matter of the interpretative framework that the reader brings to the text as it is of anything internal to the text. So, the relationship between the words ‘migrants’ and ‘illegally’ becomes meaningful to a reader based on his or her understanding of what migration is and what it is used for. He also states that our expectations which depend on our knowledge to make sense of the texts come from our knowledge of the conventions associated with different kinds of texts. Some of this knowledge is part of larger conceptual frameworks that we build up based on our understanding of how the world works.

According to the kinds of coherence, van Dijk (1980) distinguishes between two kinds of coherence: local and global coherence. He states that “It is a crucial property of discourse that it is not only locally, but also globally coherent”. Local coherence is defined for relations between sentences of a textual sequence, while Global coherence is defined in terms of operations on whole sets of sentences, e.g. for the discourse as a whole, and Global coherence is also known, in more intuitive terms, as the theme, idea upshot or gist of a discourse or a passage of the discourse (Cited in van Dijk 1991:113).

The local coherence takes two forms, an intensional (meaning) and an extensional (referential) one. Intensional relations are functional and hold between expressing propositions, such as Generalization, Specification, Example, Explanation, and so on. On the other hand, coherence is not only based on meaning relations and based on conceptual knowledge but also defined in terms of causal, temporal, part-whole relations between the facts denoted by the sentences of the discourse. I.e. extensional coherence, as they are represented in the mental models of authors and readers. Therefore, a discourse is coherent if it has a mental model. For local discourse, coherence is multiply dependent on underlying mental model structures and more general socioculturally shared knowledge (van Dijk 2013:24).

Van Dijk (1991:112) believes that one important semantic notion used to describe meaning is that of the proposition, which may be roughly defined as the conceptual meaning structure of a clause .Thus, in Local coherence, we study how the subsequent propositions of the text are bound together and one of the major conditions of such local coherence of texts is that their propositions refer to facts that are related, for instance, by relations of time, condition, cause, and consequence. van Dijk (2000:90) also mentions that discursive sequences of propositions are coherent if they refer to facts that are related according to the mental models of language users, or if propositions are related functionally, as is the case for Generalizations, Specifications, Examples, Contrast, Explanations, and so on, and that Local coherence is often (though not always) signalled by connectors (cohesive devices) of various syntactic categories, such as conjunctions ( and , because , although ) and adverbs ( so , therefore , moreover , etc.). For examples:

As the numbers kept swelling, concerns about security came to the fore. It is doubtless true that there are many tens of millions of Europeans who believe immigration to their own countries is too high, that militant Islamism is the most pressing concern in the world today, that through a sheer demographic onslaught their countries are being Islamified – and that they ought to have been consulted before thousands if not millions of refugees were let into their country. The terror attacks in Paris accentuated these concerns, and in the eyes of many nationalists validated them.

For the text above, there are connectors used such as ‘as, and’ and nominal ‘that clause’ to show results, sequences, and add information about the situation which helps readers understand and interpret the text. Also, the same words are used to refer to the same topic such as ‘refugees, number, and immigration’. Then the writer relates the increasing of numbers of refugees to the militant Islamism and the ‘attack of Paris’. Consider the following example:

A huge diplomatic and political challenge in 2016 will be integrating these new arrivals, putting to work those capable, and keeping sectarian tensions and xenophobia under control. But it is so often the fundamental mistake of all discussion of immigration that it is seen through the prism of economics and social benefit. In fact, immigration is desirable because it rewards and incentivises those who go in search of a better life for themselves and their children. Similarly, Europe – and especially Germany – showed tremendous humanity in welcoming so many desperate people, the vast majority of whom will now feel a deep sense of gratitude and loyalty to their new hosts.

In the above text, we have also different connectors (cohesive devices) such as ‘and’ which gives the meaning of sequences of events, ‘but’ which gives the contrast between the propositions, and ‘because’ for reasoning to reflect what Europe is expecting to happen for their social and economic situations in Europe. There are different references used such as ‘those’, ‘desperate people’, ‘who, whom’, and ‘their’ referring to the refugees. We also have the adverb ‘especially’ used to specify ‘Germany’ the country that welcome the refugees in ‘Europe’ which is an example of  ‘Specification’, that is, the specification of ‘Syria’ as one of the countries in the Middle East, and ‘Germany’ as a country in Europe. Another example of coherence is the ‘Example’ of the child ‘Aylan’ which is given in the third text as an example of the refugee crisis.

The writer mentions the words or references about the situations, which are known to the readers and which are also mentioned in the previous propositions through reading the text. Coherence is also reflected in the mental models of the readers and the shared knowledge between the writer and the readers that help readers understand the text easily, and all the propositions are connected to the same facts that are the situation of refugees in Europe, as well as the cohesion markers which are signals of the coherence of the text.

The sequence of sentences/propositions here is coherent; the writer is explaining the situation of refugees and the increasing of the number. The example of the child ‘Aylan’, the desperate people who are looking for new life in Europe and especially ‘German’.  So, the coherence here is clear through the connected between propositions and facts which are mentioned before and the facts or the knowledge the audience have about the situation in the world i.e. Syria, Iraq, and others.

In addition, the coherence is signaled by the conjunctions (and, but, as, because,.. etc.) which give sequence, contrast and condition to the propositions to be comprehended and interpreted by the writer and readers. Also, the global coherence (semantic unity) is clear by referring to the topic through words and sentences as well as the sequence of the sentences/propositions which summarizes the topic or the theme to be understood by the readers. Let us consider the following example below:

To many, crossing the million mark is a terrifying sign. To this newspaper – which believes in supporting refugees and migrants – it is a sign that though there is plenty of work to do, hope has been extended to many desperate people. That is something Europe can be proud of.

We find in the above example that the paragraph or the text refers to the same topic; refugees and their huge number in Europe. Through connectors, propositions are connected to the same facts which are related to the topic of the context of the situation; all propositions are related to each other since they explain or add information to the topic or the situation of ‘refugees’, and the sequences of the sentences reflect the relation between sentences and the ideas behind them.

6.0 RELEVANCE

By relevance in discourse and discourse comprehension, we will understand the result of an operation by which a reader/ hearer, or a method of analysis, assigns some degree of importance to some property of the discourse, and a hearer or a reader computes relevance by selecting the most obvious interpretation, and this process stops when the hearer achieves some kind of relevant interpretation (van Dijk 1979:113).

Importantly, however, when computing the full meaning of a discourse, we obviously don’t try to deploy everything we know or believe about the world or all the possible inferences that we could draw. We only make use of beliefs and inferences which are relevant to us. Thus, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson have argued that relevance, when properly characterized, is the key to understanding coherence and utterance interpretation generally (Radford 2009:398).

Van Dijk (1979:119) explains that in most cases the assignment of relevance is contextually determined. That is, the cognitive and social, communicative context defines what elements of a text are found important by a reader. Therefore, this does not mean that contextually relevant items may not as such be signaled in the text itself. It is in this contextual sense that we say that some property of a text is striking, unexpected, crucial, shocking, surprising, etc. He also mentions that it is clear that a definition of this kind of relevance should be given in terms of our knowledge of the world, and the expectations/ predictions derived from this knowledge. For example, if in a crime story, we read about a knife, we assume by convention and world knowledge that this knife may be the instrument (and hence the crucial condition) in a murder. It is also with respect to our knowledge that we pay specific attention to those properties of events which do not conform to the frame: e.g., a robber running out of a bank, a fire in the library, etc.

According to our examples of the article about refugees, we notice that the relevant information about the topic (refugees in Europe) helps the reader to understand and build possible information about the topic according to his/her cognitive knowledge in his/her mind.

The context of the article will determine the relevance information; the topic (refugee), the participants (refugees, Aylan), the place (Syria, Europe, German), etc. which help readers build their interpretations according to their knowledge of what is happening in Syria, Iraq, and other countries, so, the knowledge of the readers of the situation in the world and specifically in Syria make them pay attention to these references and information.

In the same way, van Dijk (1979:120) says that other components in our cognitive set of a given moment will define what is now relevant in the text. First of all, these contextually relevant items are part of a contextually established macro-structure of the text, e.g., properties of women in a story when the specific interest or task is the position of women in medieval literature. With respect to that theme, some detail may become particularly relevant because it is a typical example illustrating the main theme. Therefore, we can say that differential relevance is assigned to text features on the basis of what is considered relevant/ important in the world of the reader.

In our text,  we have words like (Syria, Turkey, Europe, Aylan, migrants, desperate people, safe ...etc.) all these words are considered relevant and important to the world of the readers, according to their knowledge of the situation and according to these words, they can draw possible inferences as a response to this information about the situation of refugees.

In addition, the properties of the refugees and what happened to them are considered relevant since they are examples that illustrate the main theme. So, the readers pay attention to these properties and respond to these relevant utterances and get some information to build their inferences and interpretations by depending on the grammatical devices, lexical items that facilitate their inferences as well as their shared knowledge with the writer of what is happening to the refugees in Europe and the reaction of the European countries.

Relevance theory is defined by Saeed (2011:473) as “an approach to communication based on the view that people are predisposed to pay attention to phenomena in their environment when doing so is likely to bring about improvements in their belief system. In other words, we tend to pay attention to stimuli which we expect will turn out to be relevant to us.”

Wilson and Sperber (2012:176) refer that the criterion proposed in relevance is based on a fundamental assumption about human cognition: that human cognition is relevance-oriented, and that we pay attention to information that seems relevant to us. In our communication, every utterance starts out as a request for the hearer’s attention. And as a result, it creates an expectation of relevance. Therefore, it is around this expectation of relevance that our criterion for evaluating possible interpretations is built.

Wilson and Sperber (2012: 176) state that:

Relevance is defined in terms of cognitive effects and processing effort. Cognitive effects are achieved when newly presented information interacts with a context of existing assumptions by strengthening an existing assumption, by contradicting and eliminating an existing assumption, or by combining with an existing assumption to yield a contextual implication. The greater the cognitive effects, the greater the relevance will be.

Most recent approaches to pragmatics start from the Gricean assumption that the hearer, in interpreting an utterance, is looking not just for some arbitrary interpretation, but for the one overtly intended by the speaker. Relevance theory shares the Gricean assumption that hearers are looking for the overtly intended interpretation of an utterance (Wilson and Sperber 2012: 176).

Thus, of the Grice’s maxims is that of Relation, how the utterance is relevant to the situation. Utterances are typically very uninformative out of context and can be interpreted in all sorts of different ways. And for Wilson and Sperber, the central idea of Relevance Theory, is that an utterance is relevant to a hearer when the hearer can gain positive cognitive effects from that utterance,  that is some useful information. In addition, relevance theory maintains that speakers comply with the communicative principle of relevance, central to relevance theory is the idea that we perform inferences all the time in order to understand utterances, and it is interesting that languages have special grammatical devices in addition to the shared knowledge that can be seen as facilitating this inferencing (Radford 2009: 398-399).

7.0 INTERTEXTUALITY

The term ‘intertextuality’ was coined by Kristeva in the late 1960s in the context of her influential accounts for western audiences of the work of Bakhtin. Bakhtin points to the relative neglect of the communicative functions of language within mainstream linguistics, And more specifically to the neglect of ways in which texts and utterances are shaped by prior texts that they are ‘responding’ to, and by subsequent texts that they ‘anticipate’. For Bakhtin, all utterances, both spoken and written, from the briefest of turns in a conversation To a scientific paper or a novel, are demarcated by a change of speaker (or writer), and are Oriented retrospectively to the utterances of previous speakers (be they turns, scientific articles, or novels) and prospectively to the anticipated utterances of the next speakers (Cited in Fairclough 2006: 101-102).

Fairclough (1996: 36-42) refers to the external relations i.e. relation between a text and other (external) texts, how elements of other texts are intertextually incorporated and ,since these may be other people’s text  i.e. how the voice of others are incorporated, how other texts are alluded to, assumed, dialogued with, and so on. He states that intertextuality accentuates the dialogicality of a text, the dialogue between the voice of the author of a text and other voices (ibid: 41). Texts are dialogical in the sense that “any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances” (Bakhtin 1986:69).

Other linguists such as Jones (2012:8) define intertextuality as “the relationship between one text and other texts, a process of making sense of a text”. He states that texts often refer to or somehow depend for their meaning on other texts. For the intertextuality, the utilization of the second text depends on the knowledge of one or more previous texts. The sense and relevance of one text depend upon knowing about a paragraph and applying the content to the evolving situation. The writer must consult the prior text continually, and text receivers will usually need some familiarity with the latter. Let us have the following example:

1) The International Organisation for Migration has said that the number of migrants and refugees crossing into Europe by land and sea illegally this year has crossed the million mark. Given that much more have done so legally gives some indication of the sheer volume – almost biblical in nature – of the recent exodus from the Middle East, driven largely though not exclusively by the disintegration of Syria.

2) As pointed out by our Review of the Year, to be published in Saturday’s newspaper, the refugee crisis was one of the signature stories of 2015, and followed a remarkable trajectory.

According to the example above, we notice that in the second text, the information or the sentences depends on the knowledge of which in turn refers to one of the stories about the refugee crisis in 2015. The text here borrowed words from the previous one, such as the word ‘refugee’ to build a new text which is about the ‘Saturday’s newspaper’, and at the same time, the text remains relevant to the previous one by mentioning information about the same topic.

In addition to above, Gee (2011:165) points out that when one text quotes (direct and indirect quotation), refers to, or alludes (words taken from other sources) to another text (in the sense, what someone else has said or written), this is called “intertextuality”.

According to Bakhtin (1986), all texts involve some degree of intertextuality and he argues that every text (or utterance) is dialogical, in the sense that it gains its meaning in relation to other texts. Bakhtin (1981) talked about the “dialogic” qualities of texts (Johnstone, 2008:164).

Bakhtin argues that we cannot speak or write without borrowing the words and ideas of other people, and nearly everything we say or write is in some way a response to some previous utterance or text and an anticipation of some future one. Thus, we might, for example, quote them verbatim , paraphrase them , or refer to them in an indirect way, and we might characterize them in certain ways using different “reporting” words such as “said”, or ‘insisted”, or “claimed” (Cited in Jones 2012:14).  Consider the following example:

The International Organisation for Migration has said that the number of migrants and refugees crossing into Europe by land and sea illegally this year has crossed the million mark. Given that much more have done so legally gives some indication of the sheer volume – almost biblical in nature – of the recent exodus from the Middle East, driven largely though not exclusively by the disintegration of Syria.

The above text refers to the refugees and their increasing number because of the bad situation in the ‘Middle East’, especially in ‘Syria’. We notice the using of the indirect verb “said” and this is an example of what Bakhtin states about the aspect of dialogism i.e., referring to things indirectly as a response to some previous things said by others. After the verb “said” we have information said by the ‘international organization for Migration’.

Kristeva (1980) coined the term intertextuality on the basis of Bakhtin’s work. Thus, Kristeva, as does Bakhtin (1935/1981), sees all texts as being constituted out of, and understood in relation to, other texts in the same social formation. For Kristeva (who shares Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism), the process of meaning depends on the dialogue between the text and the reader and between the texts themselves. She points out that intertextuality assumes an examination of the interconnections between texts that situates the making of meaning in and through a dialogic process that occurs between the text and audience. This process expands the purview of what a text is from being a written form to encompass culture and history. The autonomy of the text becomes questionable by making it permeable through a process of inter-coherence where text generates structural connections between itself and other texts. Let’s have a look at the following example:

1) As pointed out by our Review of the Year, to be published in Saturday’s newspaper, the refugee crisis was one of the signature stories of 2015, and followed a remarkable trajectory.

2) This newspaper was the first to publish on its front page the image of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old whose body washed up on the shore near Bodrum in Turkey, and helped set a tone of compassion that extended right across Europe and led – eventually – to the British Government showing some decency.

We notice that the second text above applies the content of the previous texts referring to the same newspaper mentioned in the previous text (2nd) which is the ‘Saturday’s’. The second text adds information about the Syrian child ‘Aylan’ whose body is found on the ‘Bodrum’s shore’ affecting of this accident in ‘Europe’. This situation is relevant and familiar to what is mentioned in the previous text and at the same time makes connection with it.

Kristeva (1980:66) elaborates the literary word in terms of a horizontal and vertical axis. In the horizontal dimension, the communication takes place between the author and the reader and while in the vertical dimension, the text communicates with a frontal and synchronic literary corpus, i.e., intertextuality refers to how texts build on texts that are paradigmatically related to them in various ways and how texts build on texts with which they are related sequentially, in other words, the texts (or utterances) which they follow and precede.  Kristeva (1986) coined the term “intertextuality” for the ways in which texts and ways of talking refer to and build on other texts and discourse (Johnstone 2008:164).

The communication between author and reader is always paired with an intertextual relation between words and their prior existence in past texts. As Kristeva stated: “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (Kristeva 1980:69). She also mentions that intertextual analysis allows us to see the ‘bigger picture’ of a text in terms of what its meanings are and how they relate to other meanings held in the society as framing a particular text. In this way, it can be seen to display socially established patterns of meaning that are held against the larger background of the potential of all the meanings that could be held (Johnstone 2008:164).

1) As the numbers kept swelling, concerns about security came to the fore. It is doubtless true that there are many tens of millions of Europeans who believe immigration to their own countries is too high, that militant Islamism is the most pressing concern in the world today, that through a sheer demographic onslaught their countries are being Islamified – and that they ought to have been consulted before thousands if not millions of refugees were let into their country. The terror attacks in Paris accentuated these concerns, and in the eyes of many nationalists validated them.

2) A huge diplomatic and political challenge in 2016 will be integrating these new arrivals, putting to work those capable, and keeping sectarian tensions and xenophobia under control. But it is so often the fundamental mistake of all discussion of immigration that it is seen through the prism of economics and social benefit. In fact, immigration is desirable because it rewards and incentives those who go in search of a better life for themselves and their children. Similarly, Europe – and especially Germany – showed tremendous humanity in welcoming so many desperate people, the vast majority of whom will now feel a deep sense of gratitude and loyalty to their new hosts.

3)To many, crossing the million mark is a terrifying sign. To this newspaper – which believes in supporting refugees and migrants – it is a sign that though there is plenty of work to do, hope has been extended to many desperate people. That is something Europe can be proud of.

The above texts are related together through intertextuality, in the first one, the increasing number of the refugees brought fear to the people in Europe stating that their countries will be Islamified, in addition to the terror ‘attacks in Paris’. In this text, we have the same reference of the ‘refugees’ and the sequences of their presence in Europe.

In the second text, also the same topic and references of the ‘refugees’, ‘desperate people’, etc. Their existence makes challenges of how the European countries will control and defend the situation ‘economical and political’ from the refugees in their countries, who are ready to express their deep gratitude and loyalty towards their new hosts and a better life.

For the last text (3) referring to the same newspaper, deals with the same reference, fear of their increasing numbers, the new hope and life the refugees are in search of; all these references deal with the same topic and are relevant and familiar to the main theme of the text, through to the coherence of the whole article, and the readers and their cognition of the situation and what are happening in the world.

The context of situation of the article is also important in defining the elements that are important in the article for the readers, for example the readers know about the properties of the situation in Syria that made people flee to Europe and caused the refugee’s crisis and which illustrate the main theme in the article that help reader draw inferences from the information which are acceptable such as the desperate life of the refugees which enables the reader to interpret the article’s main theme. Also, as mentioned by van Dijk, the knowledge of the readers which is part of the context help them interpret the article in related to the topic, participants, and the references mentioned by the writer.

According to intertextuality, we have relations between texts which make the text as one unit through dealing with the same topic and relevant references. The horizontal and paradigmatic intertextuality are clear through the sequential relations; how the texts are related to each other, and how texts build on other texts which are related to them. Consider the following examples below:

1) As the numbers kept swelling, concerns about security came to the fore. It is doubtless true that there are many tens of millions of Europeans who believe immigration to their own countries is too high, that militant Islamism is the most pressing concern in the world today, that through a sheer demographic onslaught their countries are being Islamified – and that they ought to have been consulted before thousands if not millions of refugees were let into their country. The terror attacks in Paris accentuated these concerns, and in the eyes of many nationalists validated them.

2) A huge diplomatic and political challenge in 2016 will be integrating these new arrivals, putting to work those capable, and keeping sectarian tensions and xenophobia under control. But it is so often the fundamental mistake of all discussion of immigration that it is seen through the prism of economics and social benefit. In fact, immigration is desirable because it rewards and incentives those who go in search of a better life for themselves and their children. Similarly, Europe – and especially Germany – showed tremendous humanity in welcoming so many desperate people, the vast majority of whom will now feel a deep sense of gratitude and loyalty to their new hosts.

3) To many, crossing the million mark is a terrifying sign. To this newspaper – which believes in supporting refugees and migrants – it is a sign that though there is plenty of work to do, hope has been extended to many desperate people. That is something Europe can be proud of.

For the above examples, the first text refers to the refugee crisis, the second text deals with what the ‘Saturday newspaper’ said about this crisis. The third text relates the ‘refugee crisis’ with the ‘militant Islamism’ and with the ‘attack of Paris’. Then, the second text also concerns the same newspaper and the accident of the Syrian refugee children. The last text (3) deals with how the European countries will face the ‘immigration crisis’ and how the ‘German’ welcome the desperate people to give them new life. Finally, the sixth text also refers to the ‘newspaper’ and how it will deal with the refugee crisis and it refers also to the refugees as desperate people and how they find new hope.

Therefore, what we mentioned above explains the relation between the texts in terms of how each text supports and builds the other; how they deal with the same topic and how references to the previous texts remain relevant in the newly produced text. We notice that from the first text to the last one, the refugee crisis is mentioned.  For example, in the second text we have the ‘Saturday’s newspaper’ and in the third or the text that follows, it explains what's in this newspaper is related to what was said in the previous one.  And this is also an example of Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism between the third and the second text.

For the idea of dialogism, there are different dialogue relations; a dialogue process occurs between readers and the text or the writer (horizontal relation) when the readers are familiar with the topic, that is about the refugee crisis and this familiarity comes from the relevance of the topic to the knowledge the readers have about the culture and history of the situation and through using familiar references which mentioned previously and reflect the shared knowledge between the writer and the readers. Another relation is between the author and the text or the texts themselves (vertical relation), his/her experience helps the creation of the next or the new text by borrowing words or ideas from previous texts or utterances as a response to the previous ones, i.e. each text depend for their meaning on other text as we mentioned in our example references like (newspaper, refugee, desperate people…) to gain their meaning.

8.0 CONCLUSION

According to the analysis, we can conclude that the dialogism aspect is reflected through the three properties of discourse: coherence, relevance, and intertextuality, and at the same time these properties help to build a new text.

For the first property which is ‘coherence’, the sequences of ideas and how the utterances are connected by cohesive devices, there is a dialogue relation between utterances (previous and followers).

In the second property which is ‘relevance’, we have the using of relevant references that are familiar to the readers and to the topic of the text, so there is a dialogue between the readers and the texts i.e. how they pay attention and respond to the relevant information to build interpretations).

For the third property, intertextuality shows how text supports and builds the other; how they deal with the same topic and how references to the previous texts remain relevant in the newly produced text. It reflects a dialogue between the texts themselves/text and writer and between the readers and texts.

Finally, it is clear that the relation between texts depend on the sequences of ideas by referring to the same relevant references mentioned before that illustrate the main theme of the text, and the sequences of ideas and relevant references are part of the intertextuality relations between texts. Therefore, it is obvious that these three properties are interested in building a new text. In addition, it is clear that the knowledge device or the cognition of the participants and their shared knowledge with the author play an important role in building a good interpretation of the situation since this knowledge is one of the categories of context model.

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Appendix

Refugee Crisis: Integrating a million asylum seekers is a daunting task for Europe

1-The International Organisation for Migration has said that the number of migrants and refugees crossing into Europe by land and sea illegally this year has crossed the million mark. Given that many more have done so legally gives some indication of the sheer volume – almost biblical in nature – of the recent exodus from the Middle East, driven largely though not exclusively by the disintegration of Syria.

2-As pointed out by our Review of the Year, to be published in Saturday’s newspaper, the refugee crisis was one of the signature stories of 2015 and followed a remarkable trajectory.

3-This newspaper was the first to publish on its front page the image of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old whose body washed up on the shore near Bodrum in Turkey, and helped set a tone of compassion that extended right across Europe and led – eventually – to the British Government showing some decency.

As the numbers kept swelling, concerns about security came to the fore. It is doubtless true that there are many tens of millions of Europeans who believe immigration to their own countries is too high, that militant Islamism is the most pressing concern in the world today, that through a sheer demographic onslaught their countries are being Islamified – and that they ought to have been consulted before thousands if not millions of refugees were let into their country. The terror attacks in Paris accentuated these concerns, and in the eyes of many nationalists validated them.

A huge diplomatic and political challenge in 2016 will be integrating these new arrivals, putting to work those capable, and keeping sectarian tensions and xenophobia under control. But it is so often the fundamental mistake of all discussion of immigration that it is seen through the prism of economics and social benefit. In fact, immigration is desirable because it rewards and incentivises those who go in search of a better life for themselves and their children. Similarly, Europe – and especially Germany – showed tremendous humanity in welcoming so many desperate people, the vast majority of whom will now feel a deep sense of gratitude and loyalty to their new hosts.

To many, crossing the million marks is a terrifying sign. To this newspaper – which believes in supporting refugees and migrants – it is a sign that though there is plenty of work to do, hope has been extended to many desperate people. That is something Europe can be proud of.

Culled from:

http://www.independent.co.United Kingdom/voices/refugee-crisis-integrating-a-million-asylum-seekers-is-a-daunting-task-for-europe-a6783741.html. Wednesday 23 December 2015