Conversational gameboard and discourse structure

This paper tries to bring closer two theories of human communication: Commitment stores and dialogue games Hamblin (Hamblin, 1970) introduced the notion of commitments stores whereby dialogue participants can keep track of (public) commitments that arise during the interaction. He also pointed out the rule-governed nature of dialogues, and tried to exhibit set of normative rules (dialogue games) which could prevent certain types of fallacies Discourse semantics The primary aim of this approach was to extend Montagovian compositional semantics to account for phenomena observed at the discourse level. This motivated a shift from static truth-semantics to an update semantics (that is, sentences are regarded as update functions on possible worlds). In this perspective, the semantic/pragmatic interface becomes the focus of attention. The case for a crossover. To begin with, one may ask why dialectical models are not enough to model human conversations. Very often, a turn is composed of several basic units. Under the assumption that the speaker obeys coherence principles (e.g. the so-called ”right frontier” of discourse structure (Asher and Lascarides, 2003)), it is for instance possible to define those discourse referents that can be used later in the dialogue. This, of course, can prove to be crucial when facing the interpretation of follow-up utterances and dialogue turns. It is clear that current dialectical approaches fall short of being able to account for these aspects, as they are simply not equipped with notions allowing to deal with this level of analysis. On the other hand, the very same observations can be made at the level of dialogue turns, thus emphazing the need to take into account dialogue structure.