Utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not self-sufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another… Each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related by the communality of the sphere of speech communication… Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies on the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account.
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Problem of Speech Genres
