Beyond the garden of a thousand flowers

Abstract Current dialogue research is characterized by remarkable theoretical diversity, described by Edda Weigand (2026) as a “garden of a thousand flowers”. While this plurality has enriched the field, it has also blurred the conceptual boundaries of dialogue. This paper argues that additive approaches risk obscuring dialogue as a distinct theoretical object. Building on dialogue theory developed within the tradition of the International Association for Dialogue Analysis (IADA), dialogue is conceptualized as the organizing principle of human communicative action. Drawing on Weigand’s concepts of the Minimal Action Game, competence-in-performance , and the architecture of meaning , the paper demonstrates how dialogue systematically integrates sequentiality, responsiveness, purpose, evaluation, persuasion, emotion, and verification into a coherent explanatory framework of human communication.