Contributing to Discourse

TLDR

Contributing to discourse requires more than saying the right thing at the right time; it demands orderly addition to shared common ground. The authors aim to demonstrate that speakers establish mutual belief of understanding for each utterance and present a model of contributions that explains everyday conversational features. The mechanism is the collective actions of a contributor and partners that produce conversational units called contributions, modeled to account for everyday conversation features.

Abstract

For people to contribute to discourse, they must do more than utter the right sentence at the right time. The basic requirement is that they add to their common ground in an orderly way. To do this, we argue, they try to establish for each utterance the mutual belief that the addressees have understood what the speaker meant well enough for current purposes. This is accomplished by the collective actions of the current contributor and his or her partners, and these result in units of conversation called contributions. We present a model of contributions and show how it accounts for a variety of features of everyday conversations.