Dialogicità

This study aims to highlight the pragmatic features of written texts that most reveal the author’s interaction with the reader, namely personal deixis and the set of linguistic and rhetorical strategies that globally correspond to the authorial metadiscourse, with special attention to ancient and contemporary Italian texts. The work discusses the semiotic and material peculiarities of written texts, focusing on the role of metadiscourse as a form of “anticipated feedback” from the author. Starting from the recognition of the different enunciative planes of the text (author-reader interaction vs. others’ interactions reported in the text), I will distinguish two different types of dialogicality (primary and secondary), observing how they interact whenever the author counter-argues with the reader. In the final part of the paper, I will briefly discuss how the greater or lesser explicitness of primary and secondary dialogicity may characterise the different discourse genres over time.