Zohar Livnat

Dialogue, Science and Academic Writing

This book investigates the dialogic nature of research articles from the perspective of discourse analysis, based on theories of dialogicity. It proposes a theoretical and applied framework for the understanding and exploration of scientific dialogicity. Focusing on some dialogic components, among them citations, concession, inclusive we and interrogatives, a combined model of scientific dialogicity is proposed, that reflects the place and role of various linguistic structures against the background of various theoretical approaches to dialogicity. Taking this combined model as a basis, the analysis demonstrates how scientific dialogicity is realized in an actual scientific dispute and how a scientific project is constructed step by step by means of a dialogue with its readers and discourse community. A number of different patterns of scientific dialogicity are offered, characterized by the different levels of the polemic held with the research world and other specific researchers – from the “classic”, moderate and polite dialogicity to a direct and personal confrontation between scientists.

Rapport in Negotiation: The Contribution of the Verbal Channel

This study examined the contribution of verbal behavior to the creation of rapport in negotiation, while methodologically addressing the issue of dependence between dyadic measures, which is inherent to the concept of rapport, with the Actor-Partner Interdependence model. The approach adopted is substantially different from that of past research, which emphasized the contribution of nonverbal behavior to rapport and used averaged rapport to asses it. Drawing both from the theoretical concept of rapport and from Politeness theory, the authors developed the Verbal Rapport Assessment scale. The authors found that rapport is indeed encoded in the verbal behavior and that various verbal behaviors contribute to negotiators’ sense of rapport, as well as to the judgment of negotiators’ rapport behaviors. Likewise, the authors found that a negotiator’s sense of rapport was primarily affected by his partners’ verbal behavior and by the interaction between behaviors of both sides. These findings emphasize the importance of the verbal channel and the dyad in creating rapport in negotiation. Negotiation in the twenty-first century is often characterized by exclusively verbal interactions (via telephone, chat, and e-mails); negotiators from many different fields can benefit from these findings.