A dialogical perspective of interaction: the case of people with deaf/blindness

Abstract

This article considers dialogicality as a dynamic ontology and epistemology, and as interaction in concrete daily situations. These two features of dialogicality are presented in selected examples involving communication of people with congenital deaf/blindness and their carers. Since people with deaf/blindness cannot use verbal language in their dialogues, they make themselves understood to their partners by using a variety of innovative non-verbal strategies. For example, they improvise, repeat touching gestures, overextend meanings of signs, guess meanings of co-participants, and otherwise. Each dialogical situation is a unique single case, in which participants use simultaneously different modalities of communication and attempt to balance their subjective and intersubjective activities.