Deixis and Gloss Practices. When the Web speaks of itself

Gloss practices and formulations are meta-communications whose objects are the context in which a conversation takes place and the ongoing conversation itself, respectively. In everyday life we use gloss practices and formulations to introduce relevant context’s features into the discourse and to steer the interaction. Gloss practices have a deictic nature, i.e. they depend on the context of use (time, place, interlocutors, objects, the conversation itself ). Building on the hypothesis that we can interpret the interaction between a human being and a machine in terms of a dialogue, the paper inquires whether there are gloss practices and formulations in “web-dialogues” and (being the answer to the first question a positive one) what are their peculiar characteristics. Conclusions and lines for future research are eventually presented.