Aligning intentions: Acceptance and rejection in dialogue

Abstract

This paper presents an operational and grounded notion of intention in dialogue and links it to the commitments that speakers make in dialogue. We take these two concepts to then develop a conceptually sound way of doing formal pragmatics. Our model tackles a number of relevant phenomena: (i) we formally derive the illocutionary forces of the speech acts of asserting and rejecting a proposition; (ii) we give a suitable semantics to rejections of arbitrary speech acts, including rejections of rejections; (iii) we demonstrate how cooperativity is linked to how strongly the notion of speaker commitment is understood. That is, how tightly bound speakers are by their commitments directly influences how cooperative they are.