Martin & Rose (2007: 220):
The three principal texts we have used in the book up to now were essentially monologues. At certain points however both Helena and Tutu became more conversational. Helena, for example, talks to God, asking a series of questions about her husband’s disintegration and exclaiming about how she feels:
'God, what's happening? What's wrong with him? Could he have changed so much? Is he going mad? I can't handle the man anymore! But I can't get out. He's going to haunt me for the rest of my life if I leave him. Why, God?'
And Tutu addresses his readers with questions about the integrity of the Truth Commission:
Can it ever be right for someone who had committed the most gruesome atrocities to be allowed to get off scot-free, simply by confessing what he or she has done? Are the critics right; was the Truth and Reconciliation process immoral?... So is amnesty being given at the cost of justice being done?
Helena doesn’t get an answer from God, and Tutu has to answer his own questions in the argument that follows. So a conversation never really develops. But in spoken discourse, both the feelings we discussed in Chapter 2 and the ideational meanings we presented in Chapter 3 are indeed negotiated between speakers. The system of resources that enables this to-and-fro of dialogue is called NEGOTIATION.
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[1] To be clear, a dialogue involves a conversation between two or more speakers. This can occur at different orders of experience. For example, the dialogue may be first-order experience: people talking to each other, or second-order experience: people in a text talking to each other.
(Tutu's questions are, of course, rhetorical questions.)
[2] To be clear, what people negotiate are interpersonal meanings: propositions and proposals. The mistaken notion that ideational meanings are negotiated derives, in part, from Martin's (1992: 391, 488) misunderstanding of metafunctions as interacting modules.
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