Perspectives on Dialogue in the New Millennium

Description

The formal treatment of the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue became possible through a series of breakthroughs in foundational methodology. There is broad consensus on a couple of issues, like the fact that some variety of dynamic theory is necessary to capture certain characteristics of dialogue. Other matters still are disputed. This volume contains papers both of foundational and applied orientation. It is the result of one of a series of specialized Workshops on Formal Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue that took place in 2001. One can therefore truly say that it mirrors both the state of the art at the end of the past millennium and research strategies that are pursued at the beginning of the new millennium. The collected papers cover the range from philosophy of language to computer science, from the analysis of presupposition to investigations into corpora, and touches upon topics like the role of speech acts in dialogue or language specific phenomena. This broad coverage will make the volume valuable for students of dialogue from all fields of expertise.