From Pragmatics to Dialogue

In pure dialogues, the speakers address their words to recipients who concentrate on listening, while in pseudo-dialogues the recipients are not able to listen, or prefer not to listen. The speaker may be fully aware of the recipient’s mental absence. The aim of the chapter is to study how pseudo-dialogues are used in everyday communication. We differentiate four main categories of pseudo-dialogues based on the role of the recipient: a human recipient who is present in the situation but whose ro