Exploring dialogism in discourse. Doxa, interdiscourse, dialogic inversion and environmental issues

The notion of dialogism has been widely explored in both discourse and argumentation studies. Through a combination of these two approaches, dialogism reveals its crucial role as a strategy functional to the positioning of the arguer, determined in contrast with the adversary. The paper investigates this aspect of dialogism, starting from the assumption that both dialogicity and argumentation are pervasive in discourse, and exploring the notion of interdiscourse. The discussion then focuses on polemic discourse, characterized by the impossibility of constructing a common ground, and on dialogic inversion as a strategy entailing the reinterpretation in one’s own terms of concepts and values typical of the adversary. The theoretical points are applied to the analysis of two different examples concerning typical issues of environmental discourse: the formula sustainable development, which belongs to the core lexicon of environmental policies and has been subject to different interpretations and evaluations; the neologism warmist, coined in opposition to denialist and conveying a context of contraposition between two incompatible viewpoints.