Communication as commitment sharing: speech acts, implicatures, common ground

By Bart Geurts. Theoretical Linguistics, 2019

152 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The main tenet of this paper is that human communication is first and foremost a matter of negotiating commitments, rather than one of conveying intentions, beliefs, and other mental states. Every speech act causes the speaker to become committed to the hearer to act on a propositional content. Hence, commitments are relations between speakers, hearers, and propositions. Their purpose is to enable speakers and hearers to coordinate their actions: communication is coordinated action for action coordination. To illustrate the potential of the approach, commitment-based analyses are offered for a representative sample of speech act types, conversational implicatures, as well as for common ground.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/acdb4bbae2e42ffc5f6ef8bffba1a3693520e34a