Language As Dialogue: From Rules to Principles of Probability

With her theory of €˜Language as Dialogue€™, Edda Weigand has opened up a new and promising perspective in linguistic research and its neighbouring disciplines. Her model of €˜competence-in-performance€™ solved the problem of how to bridge the gap between competence and performance and thus substantially shaped the way in which people look at language today. This book traces Weigand€™s linguistic career from its beginning to today and comprises a selection of articles which take the reader on a vivid and fascinating journey through the most important stages of her theorizing. The initial stage when a model of communicative competence was developed is followed by a gradual transition period which finally resulted in the theory of the dialogic action game as a mixed game or the Mixed Game Model. The articles cover a wide range of linguistic topics including, among others, speech act theory, lexical semantics, utterance grammar, emotions, the media, rhetoric and