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 intersection of 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. 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 current professional, public and institutional contexts. 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 general inferential rules, in spite of relevant context-boundedness. Third and last, the workshop title points to word meaning as the specific linguistic structure to be analyzed. This element has been variously interpreted in the papers, as attention to be devoted to discourse markers, to specific lexical items or to translation aspects.