Abstract

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.

Citations