_ Convention_ was immediately recognized as a major contribution to the subject and its significance has remained undiminished since its first publication in 1969. Lewis analyzes social conventions as regularities in the resolution of recurring coordination problems-situations characterized by interdependent decision processes in which common interests are at stake. Conventions are contrasted with other kinds of regularity, and conventions governing systems of communication are given special attention.

Written in an outstandingly clear and lively style, this 1969 book provokes its readers to rethink issues they may have regarded as long since settled.

What is it for marks or sounds to have meaning, and what is it for someone to mean something in producing them? Answering these and related questions, Schiffer explores communication, speech acts, convention, and the meaning of linguistic items in this reissue of a seminal work on the foundations of meaning. A new introduction takes account of recent developments and places his theory in a broader context.

The article is the first Russian translation of the most well-known piece in conversation analysis, written by the founders of CA Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. It has become a milestone in the development of the discipline. The authors offer a comprehensive approach to the study of conversational interactions. The approach is based on the analysis of detailed transcripts of the records of natural conversations. The authors show that in the course of the conversation co-conversationalists use a number (...) of techniques to organize the turn-taking. These techniques are combined in four rules: the first option is the transfer of speakership via allocation of the next speaker by the current speaker; if this first option is not realized, turn-taking may happen via the self-selection by one of the participants; if the second option remains unrealized too, the current speaker continues speaking, with all three options being recurrently provided at all next transition relevant places. The result of the operation of these rules is an orderly conversation based on the principle “one speaker at a time.” According to the authors, this model is compatible with obvious observations concerning conversational practices that they make. The authors show that in every conversation there is a turn-taking system in operation, which provides for a flexible adaptation of the every conversation’s structure to any possible topics and any possible speakers’ identities. Such approach considers how the participants in social interactions order their communication with each other, achieving a sense of normally occurring interaction. (shrink)

A major goal of this work is to specify some steps of the process by which participants maintain coherency in their conversations.The underlying element of the analysis is a construct called a “context space.” Roughly, a group of utterances that refers to a single issue or episode forms the basis for a context space. Superficially, a conversation is a sequence of utterances; at a deeper level it is a structured entity whose utterances can be parsed into hierarchically related context spaces.As (...) a conversation proceeds, each conversant builds a discourse model that includes the conversation's context space structure, a notion of the present discourse topic, and a list of items being focused upon. Conversational coherency depends upon a lack of conflict between the respective models of the participants. Conflicts are prevented by speakers following high level syntactic and semantic relational rules that enable listeners to identify their discourse models. These rules, given in the study, are highly integrated with the view of conversation presented here—a hierarchy of related context spaces. (shrink)

Previous plan‐based models of dialogue understanding have been unable to account for many types of subdialogues present in naturally occurring conversations. One reason for this is that the models have not clearly differentiated between the varoius ways that an utterance can relate to a plan structure representing a topic. In this paper we present a plan‐based theory that allows a wide variety of utterance‐plan relationships. We introduce a set of discourse plans, each one corresponding to a particular way that an (...) utterance can relate to a discourse topic, and distinguish such plans from the set of plans that are actually used to model the topics. By incorporating knowledge about discourse into a plan‐based framework, we can account for a wide variety of subdialogues while maintaining the computational advantages of the plan‐based approach. (shrink)

The goal of this thesis is to model some of the cognitive structures and processes involve d in how people decide what to say in purposeful conversation. The main concern is to show how a speaker's knowledge of his/her hearer influences what s/he says. Utterances in such dialogues, where speakers can be presumed to be speaking for reasons, can best be viewed as the performance of "speech acts" (e.g., requesting). By modeling the process of deciding what to say as one (...) of problem-solving, we show that the same mechanisms used to plan non-linguistic actions are applicable to planning of speech acts. The methodology of this research employs a computer program that integrates beliefs, goals, problem-solving, and reasoning, with the use of language. The program does this by planning speech acts when it determines that to achieve its situational goals, it needs to influence someone else's behavior. The system is able to plan request speech actrions to influence its user's goals, and inform speech acts to influence his/her beliefs. In addition, it is shown that speech acts can be used to achieve subgoals of other such acts. For instance, in addition to requesting that the user perform some action, the system can also decide to supply him/her with information necessary to performing that action -- information that it believes s/he does not already have. Our model is extendable to the more general problem of planning multiparty speech acts -- ones where actions requested by the speaker involve acts to be performed by parties other than the hearer. [MORE]. (shrink)

Once assessments and continuers are focussed on as distinguishable phenomena it becomes clear that they differ from each other not just in the details of their sequential placement within an extended turn, but in other significant ways as well.First, though assessments can take the form of talk with clear lexical content (for example `Oh wow' and assessment adjectives such as ‘beautiful’), they can also be done with sounds such as ‘Ah:::’ whose main function seems to be the carrying of an (...) appropriate intonation contour, as well as gesturally (cf. M. Goodwin, 1980). In this they resemble continuers, which can be performed both with talk whose lexical status is not always granted, and with appropriate gestures such as nods. In view of the way in which both continuers and brief assessments are characteristically situated within a rather specialized environment, the ongoing talk of another, it is not surprising that they share these characteristics. Indeed in so far as these features provide minimal lexical and auditory interference with the other talk already in progress, they are precisely some of the adaptations that would be expected of action able to function in such an environment. Given such structural similarity in action that is also quite brief, the clarity with which assessments can be distinguished from continuers becomes interesting. If in fact these objects are doing different work in the same environment, the salience of their distinctness from each other becomes an important feature of the structure of each. In view of the economy and clarity that brief assessments require, it is all the more remarkable that many of them, through the details of the way in which they are pronounced and their intonation contour, are able to convey quite detailed, even intricate, information about their speaker's involvement in both the assessment and the talk of the moment.Second, while ‘uh huh’ seems to be restricted to placement in the midst of extended talk by another, assessments can occur at the completion of such extended turns as well. Indeed assessments are one of the prototypical ways of bringing an extended turn such as a story to completion. Such differential placement is quite compatible with what has already been noted about the organization of these phenomena. For example, insofar as a continuer treats the talk just heard as preliminary to further talk it would be quite inappropriate as a technique for marking completion of an extended turn. On the other hand by virtue of the way in which they appreciate the details of what has just been said without marking that talk as a prelude to something else, assessments are apt structures for doing terminal work on an extended sequence.Third, ‘uh huh’ seems to be an exclusively recipient action — indeed its work as a continuer is accomplished precisely through placement relative to more extended talk by another speaker. Assessments, however, can be done by speaker as well as recipient.Fourth, though analysis in the present paper has focussed on brief assessments (the type of assessment most similar in form to continuers), assessments unlike continuers can in fact take many shapes, some of them quite elaborate with, for example, extended sentences and even sequences of turns being devoted exclusively to the activity of doing an assessment.In sum, alternative types of action are available to recipients for constructing responses in the midst of another's extended talk. Though the responses themselves are typically brief, the presence of alternatives that can be placed in a variety of sequential positions provides recipients with resources that enable them to participate in speaker's emerging talk in a differentiated fashion, something which has consequences for speaker's actions as well. (shrink)