Dialogue Games.

Natural dialogue does not proceed haphazardly it has an easily recognized episodic structure and coherence that conform to a well developed set of conventions. This report represents these conventions formally in terms related to speech act theory and to a theory of action. The major formal unit, the Dialogue Game, specifies aspects of the communication of both participants in a dialogue. We define the formal notion of Dialogue Games and describe some of the important Games of English. Dialogue Games are conventions of interactive goal pursuit. Using them, each participant pursues his own goals in a way that sometimes serves the goals of the other. The idea of Dialogue Games can thus be seen as a part of a broader theoretical perspective characterizing virtually all communication as goal pursuit activity. We also define and exemplify the property of Motivational Coherence of dialogues. Motivational coherence can be used as an interpretive principle in explaining language comprehension. Actual dialogue games have a kind of causal connectedness that is not a consequence of their formal properties. This is explained in terms of a theory of action, which is also seen to explain a similar attribute of speech acts. Author