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Intrinsic misalignment in dialogue: Why there is no unique context in a conversation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2004

Jonathan Ginzburg
Jonathan Ginzburg*
Affiliation:
Dept of Computer Science, King's College London, LondonWC2R 2LS, United Kingdomhttp://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/ginzburg
*
ginzburg@dcs.kcl.ac.uk
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Abstract

Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) claim that conversationalists do not explicitly keep track of their interlocuters' information states is important. Nonetheless, via alignment, they seem to create a virtually symmetrical view of the information states of speaker and addressee – a key component of their accounts of collaborative utterances and of self-monitoring. As I show, there is significant evidence for intrinsic contextual misalignment between conversationalists that can persist across turns.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , April 2004 , pp. 197 - 199
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2004

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References

Notes

1. The authors point out the dearth of work in mechanistic psychology and theoretical linguistics (primarily by syntacticians) on dialogue. Since the late 1990s, however, there has been work by formal and computational semanticists precisely on developing theories of information states and their dynamics in dialogue – see, for example, work within the EU TRINDI project (Consortium 2000) and the annual SEMDIAL series of conferences on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue. Links to all previous conferences, starting in 1997, in Munich, are available from: http://cswww.essex. ac.uk/semdial/

2. The # symbol is used here, as standard in linguistics, to mark an infelicitous utterance.