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My starting point is a dialogical notion of language that puts forth language activity as a dynamic process performed by subjects conceived as dialogical selves. Obviously, the language performance taking place at a specific moment is not pure momentaneity, not only unique but also well-known, it can be identified and recognized. What, then, grants the performance order and makes it non-arbitrary? To preserve the priority of the performance of language activity one has to conceive of a structuring moment other than some supra-individual system that is upstream to performance. This leads to the “in-between”: the principal assumption is that relata are constituted by an in-between, understood as a medium-generating relatedness, and thus the relata as such. Seeing language as that medium, I look at the way it functions, how it supplies forms as possibilities of generating a communicable and understandable subjectivity. Time is a key notion to this questioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific research in a dialogical paradigm highlights processes and insists on human beings’ relatedness. The basic move is thus a shift from the self-contained “I” to the related self, where the other is seen as the self’s pre-condition. This must be accompanied by a similar shift with regard to language: language has to be viewed as a genuinely dialogical and plural phenomenon. Through five target articles and four commentaries addressing themes across the articles, this special issue takes a close look at the relationship between language and the self and explores some of the topics surfacing within the dialogical perspective: the “in-between” of the related subjects; movements, such as in speaking, listening, thinking, and writing, as an inherent part of the dynamics of the selves’ relatedness. As a result, language gets a rhetorical, phenomenal volume, and the subject is conceived as a self by virtue of its language performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]