Proceedings of the IADA Workshop "Word meaning in argumentative dialogue". Milan 2008, 15-17 May.

Editors’ Introduction.The publication of the Proceedings of the I.A.D.A. Workshop 2008 Word Meaning in Argumentative Dialogue aims at contributing in a relevant way to the understanding of lexical phenomena from an interactional and textual point of view. In fact the conference topic covers an important crossing between three research lines at least, first of all dialogue as the specific interest of the Association. Dialogue is meant in a polysemic way for referring to effective interaction analysis but also to its representations in literature and in the media, including polyphony effects in any communicative event, even in written ones. As Luisa Camaiora highlighted in her Foreword to these Proceedings, dialogue is a key-word in our multicultural social context, while “dialogue” analysis as a practice comes out to be more and more meaningful in nowadays professional, public and institutional contexts. Therefore it is also especially meaningful in the context of a modern languages Faculty as ours.The second research line mentioned in the conference title is argumentation. The intersection between dialogue and argumentation selects specific practices of dialogue as a reasonable and shared application of communicative activities. As outlined by the model of critical discussion in recent years, these practices obey to general inferential rules, in spite of relevant context-boundedness. In this perspective, a considerable number of participants developed various aspects of emotional and emotive argumentation. Third and last, the workshop title pointed to word meaning as the specific linguistic structure to be analyzed. This hint has been variously interpreted in the papers, as attention to be devoted to discourse markers, to specific lexical items or to translation aspects. The perspective adopted cannot be but a pragmatic and functionalist one. Nonetheless, each scholar contributed to the conference topic with peculiar methodological and theoretical sensitivity, as is a longstanding tradition in the history of our International Association. That is the cause of great variety and so to say heterogeneity in approach and in focusing. [...]Giovanni GobberSibilla CantariniSara CigadaMaria Cristina Gatti& Silvia Gilardoni