Mijaíl Bajtín (Mikahil Bakhtin)

(Russia, 1895-1975)
SPEECH GENRES (Géneros discursivos)

“Las diversas esferas de la actividad humana están todas relacionadas

con el uso de la lengua […] el uso de la lengua se lleva a cabo en forma
de enunciados (orales y escritos) concretos y singulares que
pertenecen a los participantes de una u otra esfera de la praxis
humana. Estos enunciados reflejan las condiciones específicas y el
objeto de cada una de las esferas no sólo por su contenido (temático) y
por su estilo verbal, o sea por la selección de los recursos léxicos,
fraseológicos y gramaticales de la lengua, sino, ante todo, por su
composición o estructuración […] cada esfera del uso de la lengua
elabora sus tipos relativamente estables de enunciados, a los que
denominamos géneros discursivos” (Bajtín XXX, p. 4)
An opinion piece
“Once again, this is an example of the
government not matching up to its initially
ambitious language..”

“ The outcome is a crude and cruel system that

has relegated the human toll of separation to
the bottom of government priority lists”
An academic article/chapter/paper
“This article focuses on practical reasoning
political discourse and argues for a better
integration of argumentation theory with critical
discourse analysis (CDA)”

“In Martin's terms (1996, 2000), ideational

meaning is associated with particulate structure,
textual meaning with periodic structure and
Interpersonal meaning with prosodic structure,
schematised in Figure 1.10”
Whatsapp message
 HETEROGLOSSIA (Heteroglosia)
• ‘the language we use in personal or textual discourse is itself
composed of many languages, which have been all used before. At
any moment, our discourse will be synchronically informed by the
contemporary languages we live among, and diachronically
informed by their historical roles and the future roles we anticipate
for them’ (Vice, p. 46)

• ‘all languages of heteroglossia, whatever the principle underlying

them and making each unique, are specific points of view on the
world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world
views, each characterized by its own objects, meaning and values’
(Bakhtin, 1981, p. 291-2).

• ‘as a result of the work done by all these stratifying forces in

language, there are no “neutral” words and forms [...] for any
individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract
system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot
conception of the world’ (Bakhtin, 1981, 293)
• All speakers of a language are immersed in heteroglossia.
Somehow, we speak what others speak: ‘in real life people
talk most of all about what others talk about –they
transmit, recall, weigh and pass judgement on other
people’s words, opinions, assertions, information; people
are upset by other people’s words, or agree with them,
contest them, refer to them and so forth’ (Bakhtin, 1981:
338).

• ‘when a member of a speaking collective comes upon a

word, it is not as a neutral word of language, not as a word
free from the aspirations and evaluations of others,
uninhabited by other’s voices. No, he receives the word
from another’s voice and filled with that other voice. The
word enters his context from another context, permeated
with the interpretation of others. His own thought finds the
word already inhabited’ (Bakhitn, 1984, p. 202).
• ‘as a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as
heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual
consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself
and the other. The word in language is half someone
else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker
populates it with his own intention, his own accent,
when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own
semantic and expressive intuition. Prior to this
moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a
neutral and impersonal language [...] but rather it
exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s
contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from
there that one must take the word, and make it one’s
own’ (Bakhtin, 1981:, 293-94).
 DIALOGISM (Dialoguismo)
• ‘dialogism describes the way languages
interact, while heteroglossia describes the
languages themselves’ (Vice, p. 20)

• Dialogism refers to ‘‘the mixing of intentions

of speaker and listener’, the creation of
meaning out of past utterance, and the
constant need for utterances to position
themselves in relation to one another’ (Vice,
p. 45)
• The word´s internal dialogism:

• ‘every word is directed toward an answer and

cannot escape the profound influence of the
answering word that it anticipates. The word in
living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented
toward a future answer-word: it provokes an
answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the
answer´s direction. Forming itself in an
atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at
the same time determined by that which has not
yet been said but which is needed and in fact
anticipated by the answering word’ (Bakhtin,
1981: p. 280).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 1981, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, en The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays by Bakhtin, ed. por Michael Holquist, trad.
de Caryl Emerson y Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas
Press), pp. 259-422

Bajtín, Mijaíl, 1982, El problema de los géneros discursivos, en Estética

de la creación verbal, (México: Siglo Veintiuno Editores) pp. 4-29

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 1984, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press)

Vice, Sue, 1997, Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester

University Press)