Notes on Dialog and Cooperation
Jens Allwood · 1997
This paper describes some of the basic cooperative mechanisms of dialog. This is done by firstly, providing a characterization of cooperation and secondly, providing a brief overview of the mechanisms of dialog and thirdly, showing how regular features of dialog such as adjacency pairs are constituted through cooperation. 1. Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the ways in which dialog is cooperative in nature. In order to achieve this, I will first discuss the concept of cooperation, then briefly describe some fundamental features of dialog, in order finally to exhibit the cooperative nature of normal dialog. 2. Cooperation, communication and activity The nature of cooperation has been debated at least since Peter Kropotkin's (1902) treatise on mutual aid. In the field of language and communication, an important contribution was made in Grice (1975) where an explication of communication as cooperative was made through the proposal of 4 maxims of rational communication which Grice, inspired by Kant, called the maxims of quality, relation, quantity and