Abstract
One of the success stories of formal semantics is explicating responsive moves like answers to questions. There is, however, a significant lacune concerning the characterization of initiating utterances, which are strongly tied to the conversational activity [language game (Wittgenstein), speech genre (Bakhtin)], or—our terminology—conversational type, one is engaged in. To date there has been no systematic proposal trying to account for the range of possible language games/speech genres/conversational types and their global structure. In particular, concerning the range of subject matter that can and needs to be discussed and by whom—ultimately a semantic analogue of Laplace’s demon. We suggest that the subject matter problem for conversational types is a central task for any semantic theory for conversation. This paper develops a theory of conversational types, which embedded in the theory of conversational interaction KoS, enables this problem to be tackled for a wide range of conversational types drawn from the British National Corpus classification of conversational domains. The theory we develop treats conversational types as first class, not metatheoretical entities, in contrast to explications of corresponding notions in game theoretic approaches. We demonstrate that this allows us to explicate the possibilities interlocutors have to refer to and seek clarification about the types of conversations they are engaged in.
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Notes
KoS is not an acronym, but an island in the Dodacanese archipelago. One could relate this name, nonetheless, to Conversation Oriented Semantics.
The name originates in the British National Corpus genre taxonomy (Lee, 2002).
For distributions of non-sentential utterances in different conversational types, see Wong and Ginzburg (2018).
Whether all its dimensions should allow for such variation is an interesting question. Thus, whereas distinctness in subject matter seems a dimension which needs to be open, the number of participants, for instance, should not—conversational types can specify a fixed number of participants (2 or 4 players and one referee for a tennis match). At the same time, it does not seem to be the case that just any distinctness in number of participants will lead to individuating of a new type. For instance, lectures with six participants or lectures with seven participants are not ceteris paribus to be individuated as different types. But we will not resolve this important issue here.
See, in particular, Chapter 11 of Osborne and Rubinstein (1994).
Here grounding, following Clark (1996), refers to the process of establishing presuppositions that utterances are mutually understood.
How to extend such rules to multi-party conversation is discussed in Ginzburg (2012, Section 8.1).
Recall from the assertion protocol that asserting p introduces p? into QUD.
In fact, for simplicity one could assume, as did Ginzburg (2012), that conversation-finally QUD needs to be empty. Given data about resumption of conversations, discussed by Ginzburg and Lücking (2020)—e.g., a question left hanging at the end of a conversation being answered when the interlocutors meet again— this assumption cannot be maintained.
A useful feature of TTR (which distinguishes it from most versions of typed feature structures (Carpenter, 1992) is that
The basic idea of merge for record types is illustrated by the examples in (i), (ii).
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(i)
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(ii)
For a full definition which makes clear what the result is of merging any two arbitrary types, see Cooper (2012).
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(i)
In fact, this rule can be generalized for moves that do not introduce an issue, but we will not explore this here.
There is an apparent technical question here: since conversational types on the definition we gave above make reference to conversational rules, do they make reference to this conversational rule as well? In such a case there is the risk of circularity, which although not necessarily technically malign (Barwise & Moss, 1996) seems uncalled for here. However, we make reference here only to the final state associated with the conversational type, not the entire conversational type. One could, nonetheless, claim that the predicate Projectable should make explicit reference to the conversational rules that will be used to reach from the current DGB to the final one. But this seems like an instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, where we assume that the agent is using the conversational rules posited here.
Assuming the arguments given in Ginzburg (2012) that parting presupposes that at least a minimal amount of interaction took place.
This can be implemented in several ways, via a reformulation of the rule of Fact Update / QUD Downdate, which is where QNUD gets updated.
This might be better viewed as a complex move.
Should we assume that such interactions need to be covered by (a minor variant of) Bakery—strictly speaking Café), same QNUD, mildly different setting— conversational type? Or should we assume that such cases illustrate the dynamicity of conversational types, which after significant use potentially mutate into more abbreviated interactions (Garrod & Doherty, 1994; Healey & Mills, 2006)? We will not try to resolve this issue here. One could, for instance, analyze such cases in terms of the Brief Encounter type in conjunction with a description of the expected sequence of event types that do not involve dialogue.
We are somewhat loosely using a ‘universal quantifier’ based condition here. This can be made precise in TTR in a number of different ways, most obviously in the standard explication of universals using dependent types, following Ranta (1994).
Given the deep learning revolution in NLP, current approaches to question classification have changed, see e.g., Han et al. (2022) for discussion and exemplification.
See discussion in Ginzburg (2012, Section 8.3).
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Acknowledgements
We thank Paul Dekker, Susanne Trissler, and three anonymous reviewers for Linguistics and Philosophy for very helpful comments which have improved the paper significantly. Portions of the paper have been presented at seminars at CLASP, Gothenburg, ZAS, Berlin and at Université Paris Cité. We thanks participants at those venues for their useful comments.
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Order of authorship is alphabetical. This work is supported by a public grant overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR) as part of the program “Investissements d’Avenir” (reference: ANR-10-LABX-0083). It contributes to the IdEx Université de Paris - ANR-18-IDEX-0001. We also acknowledge a senior fellowship from the Institut Universitaire de France to the alphabetically first author.
Appendix: Basic Notions of TTR
Appendix: Basic Notions of TTR
Fundamental notions of TTR (Cooper, 2012, 2023) are the notion of a judgement and the notion of a record.
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The typing judgement a : T classifies an object a as being of type T.
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Records: a record is a set of ordered pairs of labels and objects of the form (58a), with the requirement that any label occur only once as the first element of one of the fields. A concrete instance is exemplified in (58b). Records are used here to model events and states, including utterances and dialogue gameboards.Footnote 24
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Record types: a record type is simply a record where each field represents a judgement rather than an assignment, as in (59).
The basic relationship between records and record types is that a record r is of type RT if each value in r assigned to a given label \(l_i\) satisfies the typing constraints imposed by RT on \(l_i\). More precisely,
To exemplify this, (61a) is a possible type for (58b), assuming the conditions in (61b) hold. Record types are used to model utterance types (Saussurean/Formal Grammar signs) and to express rules of conversational interaction.
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Ginzburg, J., Wong, KC. Language games and their types. Linguist and Philos 47, 149–189 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-023-09393-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-023-09393-2