Edited dialogues: redundancy replaced with relevance?

The notion of redundancy is a relational concept which is linked to the notion of relevance. However, relevance is a relational concept as well. A dialogical turn is not relevant or redundant per se, but only with regard to the dialogical context: its participants, setting, temporal scope, goals, and particularly genre. The relevance of a turn or its redundancy can be assessed only against the genre expectations. While in most media interviews, and particularly in news interviews, it is the interviewer who controls an interaction as for its adherence to the Maxims of Quantity and Relation, there are media chats in which an invited guest is given the right to take the floor for a potentially unlimited turn, the relevance of which lies within the guest’s turn itself. The aim of my paper is to present a case study of such a relaxed TV interview which draws on a genre of reflective story-telling. I also demonstrate that elements which are considered relevant in the context of spoken discourse may be taken as redundant if represented on a printed page (and also vice versa). The discursive practices of decontextualization and recontextualization applied to the chat are related to the fact that relevance and redundancy are assessed differently in the conditions of oral and written space.

Research highlights
► Relevance or redundancy can be assessed against genre expectations.
► In genre of autobiographic storytelling maxims of CP have to be modified.
► Relevance and redundancy are assessed differently in oral and written texts.