Keeping your footing: Conversational completion in three-part sequences (original) (raw)
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Completions, Coordination, and Alignment in Dialogue
Dialogue & Discourse, 2010
Collaborative completions are among the strongest evidence that dialogue requires coordination even at the sub-sentential level; the study of sentence completions may thus shed light on a number of central issues both at the `macro' level of dialogue management and at the `micro' level of the semantic interpretation of utterances. We propose a treatment of collaborative completions in PTT, a theory of interpretation in dialogue that provides some of the necessary ingredients for a formal account of completions at the 'micro' level, such a theory of incremental utterance interpretation and an account of grounding. We argue that an account of semantic interpretation in completions can be provided through relatively straightforward generalizations of existing theories of syntax such as Lexical Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) and of semantics such as (Compositional) DRT and Situation Semantics. At the macro level, we provide an intentional account of completions, as well as a preliminary account within Pickering and Garrod's alignment theory.
Finishing each other���s... Responding to incomplete contributions in dialogue
A distinguishing feature of dialogue is that contributions can be fragmentary or incomplete. Such incomplete utterances may be later completed by another interlocutor. These cross-person compound contributions (CCs) have been hypothesised to be more likely in predictable contexts but the contributions of different sources of predictability has not been systematically investigated. In this paper we present an experiment which artificially truncates genuine contributions in ongoing text-based dialogues, to investigate the effects of lexical, syntactic and pragmatic predictability of the truncation point on the likelihood of one's interlocutor supplying a continuation. We show that what is critical is the actual and presumed accessibility of common ground, and that while people are sensitive to syntactic predictability, this alone is insufficient to prompt a completion.
Language in Society, 2015
This article considers a practice in French talk-in-interaction, formally characterized as other-repeats prefaced by the change-of-state particle 'ah'. The target practice accomplishes a claim of receipt, while at the same time indexing as somehow inadequate a previous turn by the receipt speaker. Evidence drawn upon includes: (i) the sequential locations of the examined phenomenon; (ii) ensuing developments of the sequence, wherein the indexed inadequacy is more explicitly acknowledged; and (iii) the discriminability of the focal practice with respect to alternative practices. Two phonetically distinguished variants of the practice, and their respective sequential projections (‘problematizing’ topicalization or ‘accepting’ closure), are discussed. This article contributes to the study of how intersubjectivity is managed and administered by participants, and to research on the management of accountability for producing ‘adequate’ turns and actions. Finally, it addresses ongoing discussions concerning the analysis of multiple actions (first- and second-order) conveyed simultaneously in single turns.
Extending the notion of pragmatic completion: The case of the responsive compound action unit
Journal of Pragmatics, 2011
An important rule of turn taking is that, once a person gains the right to speak they are normally entitled to produce a single unit of talk, such as a single word, phrase, clause, or sentence. Conversation analysis has long recognized that, and attempted to describe how, this normal entitlement can be modified by pragmatic exigencies. Along these lines, this article demonstrates that a particular type of initiating action (referred to as a status inquiry) makes conditionally relevant a particular type of compound action unit (Lerner, 1991) that minimally contains two ordered pieces of information, each of which occupies at least one sentential unit. Data are audiotapes of 193 calls between one of five customerservice representatives and customers calling an electronics organization to check on the status of equipment that they have previously sent in for repair. This article contributes to our understanding of how pragmatic concerns can uniquely structure participants’ understandings of what constitutes a possibly complete ‘unit’ of talk, as well as ‘allowable’ places for speakership.
This conversation analysis study focuses on sequences where speakers make a piece of information explicit (explicitation sequences). Among others, formulations (Heritage & Watson 1979) and candidate inferences (turns submitting an inference and requiring a confirmation in a second position) can initiate an explicitation. Based on a short analysis of conversational data in French this study shows that, despite their similarities, formulations and candidate inferences have different impacts on the grounding processes in conversation (Clark & Brennan 1991). More generally, this paper is concerned with the questions of inference and information in the co-construction of meaning in interaction.
The aim of this paper is to generate debate on how people draw out emergent forms and meanings from the prior utterance in naturally occurring conversations. A number of emergent realizations involve several co-constructions, such as (i)post predicate addition, (ii)split utterances, (iii)emergent utterances drawn out. This paper focusses on (iii), whereby people utter an expression similar to, subsumable under and inferable from the previous utterance, i.e., “reformation” of the original utterance. It is related to preference organization, where people align themselves to other people’s stance.
Unfinished turns in French conversation: Projectability, syntax and action
Journal of Pragmatics, 2008
This paper investigates syntactically-incomplete turns in French conversation. Despite their syntactic incompleteness, these unfinished turns are regularly treated as interactionally-complete and are responded to 'appropriately' with responses that show a clear understanding of the action(s) that these unfinished turns accomplished. This paper uses a conversation-analytic approach to explore how it is possible for turns to be unfinished in conversation and to examine the resources that enable unfinished turns to receive such unproblematic and appropriate responses. Data extracts from two-party telephone conversations reveal how speakers and recipients draw upon the ability of the beginning of a turn to project roughly what it may take for the turn to be completed (projectability). In turn, interactants monitor both the progressive development and the sequential placement of turns for the ways in which they contribute to the actions that these turns accomplish (action projection). The data reveal that disruption to the progressivity of unfinished turns is not random.
Whose turn is it anyway? Same-and cross-person compound contributions in dialogue
In natural conversation people sometimes build larger grammatical, semantic and pragmatic units out of multiple turns or installments. The incremental and collaborative character of these 'compound contributions' presents challenges for theories of natural language processing. Compounds produced over successive turns by one person have often been analysed in essentially the same way as compounds produced by multiple people. In some recent accounts this putative equivalence has been taken as evidence for the claim that within-and cross-person language processing are fundamentally interchangeable. However, in this paper we present an analysis of compound contributions in a corpus of ordinary dialogues which shows that same-and crossperson compound contributions are constructed in different ways and have different semantic and pragmatic effects on the organisation of dialogue. In particular, we show that they differ in the pragmatic environments in which they occur and that they have different consequences for subsequent turn-taking and interpretation. This asymmetry highlights the need for models of dialogue that account for not just the inherent incrementality of dialogue, but the different status of each contributor towards a turn-in-progress.