Dialogue Games

The ‘Mixed Game Model’ represents a holistic theory of dialogue which starts from human beings’ competence-in-performance and describes how language is integrated in a general theory of human action and behaviour. Human beings are able to adapt to changing conditions and to pursue their interests by the integrated use of various communicative means, mainly verbal, perceptual and cognitive. The core unit is the dialogic action game or ‘the mixed game’ with human beings at the centre acting and reacting in cultural surroundings. The key to opening up the complex whole is human beings’ nature. The Mixed Game Model demonstrates how the different disciplines of the natural and social sciences and the humanities are mutually interconnected. After a detailed overview of the state of the art, the fundamentals of the theory are laid down. They include a typology of action games which ranges from minimal games to complex institutional games. The description is illustrated by analyses of authentic games.

This essay constitutes yet another approach to the fields of inquiry variously known as discourse analysis, discourse grammar, text grammar, functional 1 syntax, or text linguistics. An attempt is made to develop a fairly abstract unified theoretical frame work for the description of discourse which actually helps explain concrete facts of the discourse grammar of a naturallanguage.2 This plan is reflected in the division of the study into two parts. In the first part, a semiformal framework for describing conversational discourse is developed in some detail. In the second part, this framework is applied to the functional syntax of English. The relation of the discourse grammar of Part II to the descriptive frame work of Part I can be instructively compared to the relation of Tarskian semantics to model theory. Tarski's semantics defmes a concept of truth of a sentence in a model, an independently identified construct. Analogously, my rules of discourse grammar defme a concept of appropriateness of a sentence to a given context. The task of the first Part of the essay is to characterize the relevant notion of context. Although my original statement of the problem was linguistic - how to describe the meaning, or function, of certain aspects of word order and intonation - Part I is largely an application of various methods and results of philosophical logic. The justification of the interdisciplinary approach is the simplicity and naturalness of the eventual answers to specific linguistic problems in Part II.

This dialogue game approach to the discourse analysis of the English interjection well aims at the formulation of rules which would be informative (marking some contexts of use as more natural than others), systematic (applicable in a mechanical or at least in a non-ad hoc way), and adequate (showing putative competitors to be either false to fact, too narrow or too wide, or demonstrably equivalent).

This book argues for a view in which processes of dialogue and interaction are taken to be foundational to reasoning, logic, and meaning. This is both a continuation, and a substantial modification, of an inferentialist approach to logic. As such, the book not only provides a critical introduction to the inferentialist view, but it also provides an argument that this shift in perspective has deep and foundational consequences for how we understand the nature of logic and its relationship with meaning and reasoning. This has been upheld by several technical results, including, for example a novel approach to logical paradox and logical revision, and an account of the internal justification of logical rules. The book shows that inferentialism is greatly strengthened, such that it can answer the most stringent criticisms of the view. This leads to a view of logic that emphasizes the dynamics of reasoning, provides a novel account of the justification and normativity of logical rules, thus leading to a new, attractive approach to the foundations of logic. The book addresses readers interested in philosophy of language, philosophical and mathematical logic, theories of reasoning, and also those who actively engage in current debates involving, for example, logical revision, and the relationship between logic and reasoning, from advanced undergraduates, to professional philosophers, mathematicians, and linguists.

With chapters on social media, videogames and human-machine communication, Dialogue across Media provides a comprehensive overview of the role of dialogue in contemporary media. Drawing on the expertise of scholars and practitioners from multiple fields and disciplines, including screenwriters, literary critics, linguists and new media theorists, each chapter provides an in-depth analysis of dialogue in action. Together, these chapters demonstrate the unique energy and versatility that dialogic forms can offer artists and readers alike, and the special role that dialogue plays in helping us to understand the complexities and contradictions of human interaction. Dialogue across Media provides an essential resource for students and specialists in many fields concerned with dialogue, including language and literature, media and cultural studies, narratology and rhetoric.

Using a novel model, this book investigates the psycholinguistics of dialogue, approaching language use as a social activity.

The Mixed Game Model represents a holistic theory of dialogue which starts from human beings competence-in-performance and describes how language is integrated in a general theory of human action and behaviour. Human beings are able to adapt to changing conditions and to pursue their interests by the integrated use of various communicative means, mainly verbal, perceptual and cognitive. The core unit is the dialogic action game or the mixed game with human beings at the centre acting and reacting in cultural surroundings. The key to opening up the complex whole is human beings nature. The Mixed Game Model demonstrates how the different disciplines of the natural and social sciences and the humanities are mutually interconnected. After a detailed overview of the state of the art, the fundamentals of the theory are laid down. They include a typology of action games which ranges from minimal games to complex institutional games. The description is illustrated by analyses of authentic games."

The main topic of this volume is natural multimodal interaction. The book is unique in that it brings together a great many contributions regarding aspects of natural and multimodal interaction written by many of the important actors in the field. Topics addressed include talking heads, conversational agents, tutoring systems, multimodal communication, machine learning, architectures for multimodal dialogue systems, systems evaluation, and data annotation.