Ulla Tuomarla

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 role in the interaction is secondary; a physically remote human recipient; a non-human recipient (a dog, a computer, etc.); a speaker who speaks to himself/ herself (no other recipients than oneself). In most cases, the manner of speaking in pseudo-dialogues largely resembles that of pure dialogues. Examples of the usage of pseudo-dialogues are taken from the St. Petersburg One Day of Speech Corpus.

Preface
Dialogic Language Use 3: Miscommunication and Verbal Violence was the third international,  multilingual  symposium  in  a  series  related  to  dialogic  language  use and its phenomena. The symposium was organized by the Modern Language Society which celebrated its 125th anniversary on the occasion, and approximately 100 participants attended the event at the House of Science and Letters in Helsinki
on 15–17 August, 2012. This third conference addressed the darker side of dialogic language  use:  misunderstanding,  disagreement,  swearing,  insults,  slander,  and  various forms of verbal abuse. These everyday dialogic phenomena form a part of our reality just like the less threatening, less negative aspects of communication, and  the  study  of  verbal  aggression  is  currently  a  dynamic  sphere  of  linguistic 
research. Though the phenomenon of verbal aggression is not new, the emergence  of  new  media  has  possibly  facilitated  aggressive  communication  in  the  public sphere.  Computer-mediated  communication  may  allow  participants  to  remain anonymous, which may then lower the threshold for attacks and provocations.

Miscommunication  and  verbal  violence  have  been  investigated  in  a  range  of  texts  in  this  volume:  plays,  literature,  communication  on  different  levels  of  the  education  system,  the  media,  social  media,  politics  and  historical  texts. Perspectives of several research traditions and approaches have been applied, such as those of sociolinguistics, translation studies, pragmatics, conversation analysis and  discourse  analysis.  Modern  technology  is  strongly  represented  in  these 
studies. The thematic division of the volume reflects the variation and diversity in the research frameworks and perspectives and the data that were used. The volume consists of three sections. The first section includes linguistic studies of the media and new technology, the second section focuses on diachronic approaches, and the third section includes a selection of papers connected by their focus on different
types of discourse in society.

Plenary lectures were given at the symposium by Professor Ruth Amossy (Tel-Aviv), Professor Derek Bousfield (Central Lancashire), Professor Arnulf Deppermann  (Mannheim),  Professor  Tony  McEnery  (Lancaster),  Professor  Claudine Moïse  (Grenoble  3)  and  Professor  Monika  Schwarz-Friesel  (Berlin).  The  papers of Depperman and Amossy are published in this volume, and we thank the plenary
speakers for accepting our invitation to speak at the symposium. The contributions are available on the web page of the Modern Language Society (www.helsinki.fi/jarj/ufy) and on the conference web page (http://blogs.helsinki.fi/dialog3).

We would like to thank the following people for their invaluable help: Maria Paloheimo, the secretary of the organizing committee who was largely responsible for the practical aspects of conference organization; Tuuli Holttinen, who assisted in  conference  organization  and  in  the  publication  process  of  this  volume;  Marja  Ursin,  the  editorial  secretary  of  the  Modern  Language  Society  who  designed 
the  layout  of  the  volume;  and  all  the  student  assistants  who  made  sure  that  the conference ran smoothly. We would also like to express our gratitude to the Emil Öhmann Foundation, the University of Helsinki, the city of Helsinki, the French Institute  of  Finland  and  the  Federation  of  Finnish  Learned  Societies,  without  whose support this conference could not have been organized.

Helsinki, 10 June 2015
Ulla Tuomarla
Juhani Härmä
Liisa Tiittula
Anni Sairio
Maria Paloheimo
Johanna Isosävi