Misunderstanding Engagement, Dialogism And Heteroglossia And Misrepresenting Both Bakhtin And Kristeva

Martin & Rose (2007: 48-9):

The final region of appraisal we need to consider has to do with the source of attitudes: who are the evaluations coming from? … 

This potential for sourcing what is said was one of the factors that got the Russian linguist Bakhtin (1981) thinking about the dialogic nature of discourse, even in texts we traditionally think of as monologues. The French discourse analyst Kristeva introduced the term heteroglossia (‘different voices’) for this notion of multiple voicing in all kinds of discourse. Here we will use the term heterogloss where the source of an attitude is other than the writer, and monogloss (‘single voice’) where the source is simply the author.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This misconstrues the system of ENGAGEMENT as merely the identification of the appraiser as either speaker (author) or someone else.  As the Appraisal website makes clear, the system of ENGAGEMENT encompasses:

Resources for positioning the speaker's/author's voice with respect to the various propositions and proposals conveyed by a text; meanings by which speakers either acknowledge or ignore the diversity of viewpoints put at risk by their utterances and negotiate an interpersonal space for their own positions within that diversity.

[2] This confuses dialogism (Bakhtin 1981) with dialogue between characters in a text.  From the glossary of The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin:

Dialogism is the characteristic epistemological mode of a world dominated by heteroglossia. Everything means, is understood, as a part of a greater whole — there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others. Which will affect the other, how it will do so and in what degree is what is actually settled at the moment of utterance. This dialogic imperative, mandated by the pre-existence of the language world relative to any of its current inhabitants, insures that there can be no actual monologue. One may, like a primitive tribe that knows only its own limits, be deluded into thinking there is one language, or one may, as grammarians, certain political figures and normative framers of "literary languages" do, seek in a sophisticated way to achieve a unitary language. In both cases the unitariness is relative to the overpowering force of heteroglossia, and thus dialogism. 

[3] This is factually incorrect.  'Heteroglossia' is Bakhtin's term.  It was the term 'intertextuality' that Bulgarian-born Kristeva introduced. [Note that this is the second edition of Working With Discourse.]

[4] This misconstrues heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1981) as the existence of more than one speaking character in a text.  According to the glossary of The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, heteroglossia is:

The base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions — social, historical, meteorological, physiological — that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve. Heteroglossia is as close a conceptualisation as is possible of that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide; as such, it is that which a systematic linguistics must always suppress.

[5] This is even inconsistent with the misunderstandings of engagement, dialogism and heteroglossia above, since the author of a text necessarily straddles both categories: as 'single voice' and as one of the 'different voices'.  In any case, as the Appraisal website makes clear:

A basic distinction, then, under engagement is that between meanings which acknowledge in some way the heteroglossic diversity associated with all utterances (the heteroglossic) and those which ignore that diversity (the monoglossic).

For some of Martin's misunderstandings and misapplications of Bakhtin, see here.