The fine structure of conversational interaction is of significant interest for wide swathes of the behavioural sciences: linguists, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, literary scholars, artificial intelligence researchers must all contend with issues relating to the nature of meaning and its sharing among interlocuters, the possibility of repair — the wide range of corrective actions that occur when ‘trouble’ arises in interaction — and the characterization of coherence in interaction. This book presents the results of attempting to create a precise, grammatically rooted, theory of co ... More

The fine structure of conversational interaction is of significant interest for wide swathes of the behavioural sciences: linguists, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, literary scholars, artificial intelligence researchers must all contend with issues relating to the nature of meaning and its sharing among interlocuters, the possibility of repair — the wide range of corrective actions that occur when ‘trouble’ arises in interaction — and the characterization of coherence in interaction. This book presents the results of attempting to create a precise, grammatically rooted, theory of conversation motivated by data from real conversations. It develops KoS, one of the most detailed theories of context in conversation, and uses this to analyze a variety of linguistic constructions characteristic of spoken interaction, many of which have not been previously analyzed formally. KoS has descriptive reach from the micro-conversational (e.g., self-repair at the word level) to macro-level phenomena such as multi-party conversation and the characterization of distinct conversational genres. It draws on extensive corpus studies of the British National Corpus, on evidence from language acquisition, and on computer simulations of language evolution. KoS provides accounts of the opening, middle game, and closing stages of conversation. KoS also offers a new perspective on traditional semantic concerns such as quantification and anaphora. It suggests a new methodological criterion — stronger than traditional compositionality — regulating allowable semantic denotations. All in all, KoS provides a highly detailed theory of relevance, taking in the illocutionary, metacommunicative, metadiscursive, and genre-based components of this complex notion. This book challenges orthodox views of grammar by arguing that grammar and interaction are intrinsically bound. It argues that, unless we wish to exclude from analysis a large body of frequently occurring words and constructions, the right way to construe grammar is as a system that characterizes types of talk in interaction.