Speech Acts and Conversational Interaction

By Michael L. Geis

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 052102529X
• ISBN13: 9780521025294
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"