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Inferring Acceptance and Rejection in Dialog by Default Rules of Inference

ATT Research Laboratories

This paper discusses the processes by which conversants in a dialog can infer whether their assertions and proposals have been accepted or rejected by their conversational partners. It expands on previous work by showing that logical consistency is a necessary indicator of acceptance, but that it is not sufficient, and that logical inconsistency is sufficient as an indicator of rejection, but it is not necessary. I show how conversants can use information structure and prosody as well as logical reasoning in distinguishing between acceptances and logically consistent rejections, and relate this work to previous work on implicature and default reasoning by introducing three new classes of rejection: IMPLICATURE REJECTIONS, EPISTEMIC REJECTIONS, and DELIBERATION REJECTIONS. I show how these rejections are inferred as a result of default inferences, which, by other analyses, would have been blocked by the context. In order to account for these facts, I propose a model of the common ground that allows these default inferences to go through, and show how the model, originally proposed to account for the various forms of acceptance, can also model all types of rejection.

Key Words: default inference • dialog • implicature • information structure • prosody

Language and Speech, Vol. 39, No. 2-3, 265-304 (1996)
DOI: 10.1177/002383099603900306


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