When can you finish someone else's...? Influencing the production of compound contributions in dialogue

Abstract:

A distinguishing feature of dialogue is that contributions can be fragmentary or incomplete. Such incomplete utterances may be later completed by another interlocutor. These cross-person compound contributions (CCs) have been hypothesised to be more likely in predictable contexts but the contributions of different sources of predictability has not been systematically investigated. We present an experiment which artificially truncates genuine contributions in ongoing text-based dialogues, to investigate the effects of lexical, syntactic and pragmatic predictability of the truncation point on the likelihood of one's interlocutor supplying a continuation. Results show that what is critical is the actual and presumed accessibility of common ground, and that while people are sensitive to syntactic predictability, this alone is insufficient to prompt a completion. The more general conclusion is that expectations and their fulfilment are not some peripheral extra-grammatical phenomenon, but constitute the core of our linguistic-competence.

Research areas:

• Dialogue
• Compound contributions

Year:

2013

Type of Publication:

In Proceedings

Book title:

Proceedings of the worshop on discourse expectations: Theoretical, experimental and computational perspectives

Address:

Tübingen, Germany

Month:

June