Collective States of Understanding
Arash Eshghi, Patrick G. T. Healey · 2007
This paper uses an analysis of ellipsis in multi-party interaction to investigate the relative accessibility of dialogue context/common ground to direct addressees and side participants.The results show that side-participants frequently make direct use of the common ground established between a speaker and addressee despite the fact that, by definition, they did not directly collaborate with the speaker on constructing it.Different individuals can thus reach the same level of grounding through different levels of feedback.We conclude that mutliparty dialogue leads to distinct collective states of understanding that are not reducible to the component dyadic interactions.