The Informal Counselling Sequences as Dialogic Gestalt

We report on a series of researches focused on a particular and recurring dialogic structure that we have defined as Informal Counselling. We have identified such dialogic structure by analysing a wide corpus of naturally-occurring conversations between people who are very close to each other (friends, partners, parent-children, siblings etc.). The concept of Informal counselling sequence will be defined. Then, the interest will be focused on some structural recursivity which shows this dialogical phenomenon and which permit us to study it as if it had a dynamic and internally organized Gestalt. In particular, we consider: (1) the internal structures of the Informal Counselling sequences; (2) the friend-counsellor’s conversational roles; (3) the “advice-giving” both as speech act and as conversational structured activity (on considering the syntactic-grammar organization and both contents and semantic-pragmatic structures).