Your little house is my palace”: towards a dialogic conception of referentiation

Abstract

Much has been discussed about the inconsistency of the empirical referent and the need to use a processual conception of referentiation. However, the processual perspective presents inconsistencies because it does not use a methodology that really analyzes the discourse and does not take into account the dialectical perspective that involves referential stability and instability. This article aims at discussing the relations between the notions of dialogism and referentiation, trying to investigate under which circumstances one can say referentiation has a dialogical nature. The analysis tries to correlate the lexicogrammar choices to refer to the social voices that orient them, so that one can explain the discourse objects. The study indicates that the notion of referential instability can be better understood when one sees it in correlation to referential stability, since the lexicogrammatical changes found in texts can indicate not only referential instability but also referential stability.