For people to contribute to discourse, they must do more than utter the right sentence at the right time. The basic requirement is that they odd to their common ground in on orderly way. To do this, we argue, they try to establish for each utterance the mutual belief that the addressees hove understood what the speaker meant well enough for current purposes. This is accomplished by the collective actions of the current contributor and his or her partners, and these result in units of conversation called contributions. We present a model of contributions and show how it accounts for o variety of features of everyday conversations.

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Nixon, not long before he was deposed, was quoted as saying at a news conference, "I am not a crook. " We all saw immediately that Nixon shouldn't have said what he said. He wanted to assure everyone that he was an honest man, but the wording he used was to deny that he was a crook. Why should he deny that? He must have believed that his audience was entertaining the possibility that he was a crook, and he was trying to disabuse them of this belief. But in so doing, he was tacitly acknowledging that peoplewere entertaining this possibility, and this was something he had never acknowledged before in public. Here, then,

In conversation speakers design their utterances to be understood against the common ground they share with their addressees-their common experience, expertise, dialect, and culture. That ordinarily gives addressees an advantage over overhearers in understanding. Addressees have an additional advantage, we pro-pose, because they can actively collaborate with speakers in reaching the mutual belief that they have understood what was said, whereas overhearers cannot. As evidence for the proposal, we looked at triples of people in which one person told another person in conversation how to arrange 12 complex figures while an over-hearer tried to arrange them too. All three began as strangers with the same background information. As predicted, addressees were more accurate at arrang-ing the figures than overhearers even when the overhearers heard every word. Other evidence suggests that the very process of understanding is different for addressees and overhearers. 8 1989 Acadermc Press, Inc. People understand each other in conversations by gathering evidence about each other’s intentions. How do they do that? The traditional view, which we will call the autonom&s view, is that they listen to the words uttered, decode them, and interpret them against what they take to be the common ground of the participants in the conversation (e.g., Anderson,

this paper as well as the competence and interests of its author. Rather, I shall look at just one feature: how subjects differ from nonsubjects in the text. More specifically, I shall investigate the differences between subjects and nonsubjects with respect to one formal phenomenon, definiteness, and one discourse phenomenon, the information-status of the entities that the subjects and nonsubjects represent.

... In this paper, we argue that the main theories representing these two approaches, RST (Mann and Thompson 1988) and G&S (Grosz and Sidner 1986), make similar claims about how speakers' intentions determine a structure of their discourse. The similarity occurs because the nucleus-satellite relation among text spans in RST corresponds to the dominance relation among intentions in G&S. Building on this similarity, we sketch a partial mapping between the two theories to show that the main points of the two theories are equivalent. Furthermore, the additional claims found in only RST or only G&S are largely consistent. The issue of what structure is determined by semantic (domain) relations in the discourse and how this structure might be related to the intentional structure is discussed. We suggest the synthesis of the two theories would be useful to researchers in both natural language interpretation and generation.

This paper has three aims: (1) to generalize a computational account of the discourse process called CENTERING, (2) to apply this account to discourse processing in Japanese so that it can be used in computational systems for machine translation or language understanding, and (3) to provide some insights on the effect of syntactic factors in Japanese on discourse interpretation. We argue that while discourse interpretation is an inferential process, syntactic cues constrain this process, and demonstrate this argument with respect to the interpretation of ZEROS, unexpressed arguments of the verb, in Japanese. The syntactic cues in Japanese discourse that we investigate are the morphological markers for grammatical TOPIC, the postposition wa, as well as those for grammatical functions such as SUBJECT, ga, OBJECT, o and OBJECT2, ni. In addition, we investigate the role of speaker's EMPATHY, which is the viewpoint from which an event is described. This is syntactically indicated through the use of verbal compounding, i.e. the auxiliary use of verbs such as kureta, kita. Our results are based on a survey of native speakers of their interpretation of short discourses, consisting of minimal pairs, varied by one of the above factors. We demonstrate that these syntactic cues do indeed affect the interpretation of ZEROS, but that having previously been the TOPIC and being realized as a ZERO also contributes to the salience of a discourse entity. We propose a discourse rule of ZERO TOPIC ASSIGNMENT, and show that CENTERING provides constraints on when a ZERO can be interpreted as the ZERO TOPIC

This paper presents an analysis of purpose clauses in the context of instruction understanding. Such analysis shows that goals affect the interpretation and / or execution of actions, lends support to the proposal of using generation and enablement to model relations between actions, and sheds light on some inference processes necessary to interpret purpose clauses.

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This paper is concerned with how information structure should be optimally integrated into grammar. It proposes an analysis with the following characteristics: (1) information structure is an integral part of grammar since it interacts in principled ways with both syntax and phonology, (2) the representation of information structure in the grammar is independent of its particular structural realisation in different languages, and (3) there is a direct analogous implementation of the relationship between information structure and prosody in English-type languages and between information structure and the word-order dimension in Catalan-type languages. The framework utilised is HPSG. HPSG's multidimensional constraint-based architecture lends itself very well to expressing the mutual constraints on interpretation, syntax, and phonology that so diversely characterise focus-ground in different languages. The study of information structure, we argue, is essential in addressing fundamental questions regarding grammar architecture. Our point of departure is the assumption, expressed in e.g. Chafe 1976, Prince 1986, that what underlies the focus-ground distinction is a need to `package' the information conveyed by a sentence so that hearers can easily identify which part of the sentence represents an actual contribution to their information state at the time of utterance, and which part represents material that is already subsumed by this information state. In particular, we adopt the proposal in Vallduví 1992, 1994 that these `ways of packaging' can be viewed as updating instructions or, equivalently, as types of transitions between information states. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a brief overview of information packaging. Section 3 discusses the st...