A Computational Model of Social Perlocutions

The view that communication is a form of action serving a variety of speci c functions has had a tremendous impact on the philosophy of language and on computational linguistics Yet this mode of analysis has been applied to only a narrow range of exchanges e g those whose primary purpose is transferring information or coordinating tasks while exchanges meant to manage interpersonal relation ships maintain face or simply to convey thanks sympathy and so on have been largely ignored We present a model of such social perlocutions that integrates previous work in natural language gener ation social psychology and communication studies This model has been implemented in a system that generates socially appropriate e mail in response to user speci ed communicative goals