ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on work with technologies broader than digital. Communicative interactions contain all sorts of blends of activities in practice; literacy practices often involve talk. Linguistic theory must embrace language in all channels, including speech in face-to-face interactions and writ-ing in digital spaces. Although language is used in interactions that generally involve two or more people, it must also account for the production of language in solitude. No meaning floats untethered from those involved in communications interactions and the time and place of its situation. A dialogic approach allows for the conceptualisation of participants not only as active and co-productive but also as creatively drawing on their linguistic repertoires as cultural resources. They inherit texts but also renew and reshape them according to the needs of the time and the moment. The Bakhtinian diaogical approach to language highlighted the importance both of diachronic and of synchronic textual relationships in understanding language in use.
