Le dialogique et le dialogal dans le courrier des lecteurs

The aim of this paper is to present press column Readers’ letters through dialogical elements in texts of this column. We would like to show in which situations and with what objectives the authors of the letters refer to texts written before. Interdiscursive dialogic is used the most frequently but we have also found some examples of interlocutive dialogic. In this case, the author anticipates a possible answer from his interlocutor. The references to other letters serve as a background to show the opinions of the author. Often, he defies his predecessors’ opinions, but the opposition is not very outright and is frequently expressed by the concessive argumentative scheme : “Admittedly P but Q”. The second problem which we want to mention is the presence of interactive elements in readers’ letters. Authors use apostrophes (vocative forms), 2nd person forms of verbs, imperative verbs, 2nd person pronouns, possessive pronouns appropriated to the interlocutor, polite formulas typical for conversation. The specificity of readers’ letters shows some ambiguity between monologue and dialogue. We should also notice a great variety of texts in this column. In our corpus, we often find typical comments and even real letters. The form of the letter frequently depends on newspapers’ or magazine’s convention. Our text corpus contains about 100 examples of press column Readers’ letters from different French or Swiss newspapers and magazines (Tribune de Genève, L’Hebdo, La Recherche, Que choisir, L’Express, Femme actuelle, Causette).