Speech Acts and Conversational Interaction

This book unites speech act theory and conversation analysis to advance a theory of conversational competence. It is predicated on the assumption that speech act theory, if it is to be of genuine empirical and theoretical significance, must be embedded within a general theory of conversational competence capable of accounting for how we do things with words in naturally occurring conversation, and it can usefully be seen as a synthesis of traditional speech act theory, conversation analysis, and artificial intelligence research in natural language processing. Michael L. Geis analyses a variety of naturally occurring conversations, presenting them within a framework of computational interest and within discourse representation theory. In particular, he offers an explicit mapping of semantic and pragmatic (i.e. speech-act-theoretic) meaning features and politeness features into so-called conventionalized indirect speech act forms.

• Proposes a new theory of speech acts • Synthesises traditional speech act theory, conversation analysis, and artificial intelligence research • Offers a foundation for a theory of conversational competence

1. The nature of speech acts; 2. Meaning and force; 3. The structure of communicative interactions; 4. Interactional effects; 5. Indirect speech acts; 6. Conventions of use; 7. The structure of conversation; 8. Utterance generation; References; Index.