Symposium on Miscommunication

Clarification requests (CRs) are utterances that occur when the preceding utterance is not fully understood, exemplified in the reactions (1b) to the utterance (1a): [A:] Did Bo kowtow? [B:] What do you mean kowtow? CRs are a significant but understudied aspect of human interaction that is also of increasing practical interest (interaction that allows for partially successful communication is significantly enhanced over one that requires a complete restart of an attempted communicative act whenever it is not 100% successful.). In this talk I will sketch a model of conversational interaction that allows us to characterize the potential for CRs. I will explain how this allows us to improve over existing notions of semantic compositionality, point out the evidence CRs shed on the semantic/pragmatic borderline, and mention some intriguing corpus results about asymmetries in the CR potential between nouns and verbs. Dr. Patrick G.T. Healey Queen Mary University of London: “Communication as a Special Case of Misunderstanding” Abstract: Theories of communication in the cognitive sciences have tended to assume that successful dialogue is underwritten by some basic level of shared meanings. Theories of communication in the cognitive sciences have tended to assume that successful dialogue is underwritten by some basic level of shared meanings.