La fagocitazione dell’interlocutore: dialoghi a una voce sola nella finzione letteraria. Osservazioni sulla sintassi dialogica del dialogo 'spaiato'

Echoing, or partially repeating what has been previously said by one’s own interlocutor, seems to be a quite pervasive strategy of spontaneous dialogues. Repeating and incorporating parts of the other speaker’s utterances into one’s own is not just one of the easest way to keep discourse going. It is also a way of giving one’s own contribution to it while explicitly taking into account (in order to accept, reject, or question) what the other has just said or asked. However, little attention has been paid so far to the role that echo-constructions in general (and their more or less elaborated syntactical integration with the following clause) can have for the understanding of both discourse structure and discourse grammar.
The aim of this article is to observe how some kinds of echoes work in dialogues and how they can be grammaticalized in different types of constructions, thus providing further evidences for the emergent and dialogical nature of grammar. Data are mainly taken from a small set of written novels and short stories that adopt a very peculiar strategy of depicting dialogues between two or more participants. The peculiarity consists in this: only the utterances of a single participant are explicitly reported, leaving the task of reconstructing the missing dialogical turns (of the other participants) to the reader. This often funny sort of amputated or un-paired dialogue makes full use of the different echo constructions which are so frequent and taken for granted in spontaneous spoken conversations that they tend to go unnoticed. On the other hand, they are strategically foregrounded by the authors who exploit the “amputated” dialogue technique. We are thus unexpectedly provided with a very rich repertoire of echoic structures which show different degrees of syntactic complexity. All these constructions are dialogically founded in real conversations, in which, through repeated use, some of them are actually grammaticalized into new forms and meanings.