At the close of Thomas Kyd's play The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1590), the problem of speech is located in the context of a social interaction between hero, actor and audience. The dialogue between the characters Balthazar and Hieronimo suggests that the language is oriented towards the audience, whose understanding is an important consideration in the construction of an utterance. Balthazar feels anxious about the audience's inability to understand Hieronimo's play: ‘This will be a mere confusion, / And hardly shall we all be understood’ (Kyd 1989, 4.1.179– 180). Hieronimo comforts Balthazar by pointing out that ‘the conclusion / Shall prove the intention, and all was good’ (Kyd 1989, 4.1.181–2). Thus both Balthazar and Hieronimo recognize the orientation of speech towards response.

A similar concern with the social nature of discourse pervades all of the Bakhtin Circle's thinking about language. Whether in Bakhtin's extended investigations of dialogic interactions in the book on Dostoevsky, in the essays collected in The Dialogic Imagination (1981) or in Voloshinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1986), their thoughts stress the irremediably social nature of any kind of verbal communication. Voloshinov writes that