Toward a semantics for French short positive feedback utterances

Although feedback utterances are ubiquitous in dialogue and identified as a crucial aspect of language interaction, existing semantic/pragmatic proposals do not offer a comprehensive model for them. The present abstract argues for a two-step formal model using fairly standard semantics for lexical item entries and attempting to derive the pragmatic communicative functions from the semantics thanks to rich context modeling. The objective is not only the formal model per se but the possibility of using it as the backbone for a more empirical approach, in the spirit of (Gravano et al., 2012) or (Neiberg et al., 2013) but in which the usefulness of the semantic layer will be investigated.