ABSTRACT
In this chapter we hope to contribute to a semiotics of dialogue, as adumbrated in Toolan (1985, 1988, and 1989), which proceeds 'from the assumption that verbal interaction is by its very nature a negotiation of positions (ideological, social, emotional)' (Toolan 1988: 249); and more specifically to contribute to an understanding of how the main protagonists of George Eliot's Middlemarch negotiate their ideological positions on a scale ranging from power at one end to mutuality at the other. In our attempt to grasp these notions, we found ourselves drawing eclectically upon a number of critical strands. First, our approach has been strongly inftuenced by the 'criticallinguistics' movement of Fowler, Kress et al., which uses Halliday's theory of language as social semiotic in order to understand the problematic relationship of texts to social knowledge and beliefs. This highly exciting and extremely productive development within linguistics has also spurred a new contextualized approach in stylistics.2 Starting as it does from the impossibility of separating text and context, it has highlighted the absurdity of any purely formalist stylistics which ignores the ideological substructure of language. Its aim is to uncover textually realized 'ideologies' or systems of knowledge and beliefs, with the ultimate educational goal of 'equipping readers for demystificatory readings of ideology-laden texts' (Fowler 1987: 485).
