Abstract
My contribution discusses the construals of personal/social identity as they appear in the communicative transactions of three novel protagonists. In my use of the term, reflexive construal represents both the act of shaping and interpreting identity while it is still in progress within an ongoing communicative event.
Herein, denotational/referential and interactional success (see Agha 2007) are two discrete phenomena whose co-occurrence is realised through the dynamism of differing degrees of referential appropriateness and semiotic effectiveness that are in the relation of reciprocal proportion. I attempt to outline a semiotically mediated model of social role inhabitance, focusing on two types of dialogue as the key linguistic factor correlating with the occurrence of varieties of social personae in the process of identity negotiation.
These varieties are the representations of the protagonists’ potential social authenticities within the framework of fictional texts. My data seem to suggest that communicative dynamism in its textually extended pattern is maintained by the interdependence between the dialogue organisation and message structure.
Alteration to the typical pattern of the former will result in alteration in the pattern of the latter, while maintaining the basic principle of distribution of degrees of communicative dynamism among the elements of these organisation types.