Methods for studying dialogue

Linguistics as a subject has traditionally focused more on monologue and, often, written language rather than spoken interactive dialogue. However, use of language in spontaneous face-to-face verbal interaction is more fundamental than written or planned monologue. Everyday language use is thoroughly social, and it is now becoming widely accepted that language acquisition is only possible within interactive settings. Currently, there is also growing interest in language use and social interaction in the Internet, virtual communities, and social media settings, which are fast expanding while imposing fast linguistic changes and new challenges for effective linguistic practices and technology development. Urgent questions have now emerged in many academic disciplines: How do people coordinate their communicative efforts with others to achieve their goals fast and efficiently together? Why is face-to-face conversation so easy? In conversation – the prototypical form of language use – the ideal “fluent”, sentential speech of careful text-writing is rare. However, formal linguistic theories mostly ignore the modelling of human interaction and most current models of natural languages are in principle unable to deal with the empirical phenomena involved in the analysis of conversational dialogue data.

Building on the phenomena and theories studied in Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics courses, this course will provide further elaboration of the issues arising when investigating the language use during interaction. For this purpose, we will examine data and methods from experimental pragmatics and Conversation Analysis that seek to empirically investigate the predictions of philosophical and linguistic pragmatic theories like Austin’s, Grice’s, and Searle’s among others. We will cover both everyday conversation and task-oriented dialogue, focusing on how the participants establish and maintain mutual understanding. For modelling these processes, we will investigate the psychological and social foundations of the analysis of dialogue through current debates in theories of collaborative joint action. In trying to apply traditional pragmatic theories to conversational data it will be shown that many theoretical and computational linguistics problems are transformed by adopting the joint action perspective. Moreover, it will be shown that this point of view has significant implications for psychological, sociological, and philosophical studies of human cognition, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence.