Utterance Units and Exchanges in Spontaneous Japanese Dialogue
Masahito Kawamori, Akira Shimazu · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · 1999
In dialogue, speakers are engaged in various types of speech acts other than just those frequently encountered such as question, command, promise. The speaker often tries to make sure that his interlocutor has received the information that he is conveying, that his intentions are understood, and that his attitudes toward his interlocutor and the general surrounding environment are clear. Especially in spontaneously spoken discourse or dialogue, these various speech acts are not necessarily expressed in full-fledged well-formed sentences; they are often couched in rather fragmentary, truncated semi-sentences or phrases. In an analoguous manner to Parsons' subatomic event structures, we call these speech acts corresponding to non-full-fledged sentences SUBATOMIC SPEECH ACTS. We show in this paper how these subatomic speech acts are used to form mutual beliefs and to coordinate discourse. We use examples from actual Japanese spoken dialogue to demonstrate that our theory accounts for some of the characteristic phenomena in discourse and assigns correct interpretations and explanations to these phenomena.