MÓDULO PROFESIONAL: “Formación en Centros de Trabajo” Código: 3072

As discussed in the previous chapter, participants in a dialogue can cooper- ate at different levels of the interaction. Here, we consider and illustrate

the differences between two of these levels: cooperation in maintaining the flow of the conversation, for instance by asking appropriate questions at appropriate times and by providing relevant answers in response to those questions, and cooperation in achieving the goals of an underlying task, for instance by helping uncover the truth on a certain matter or by making important information available to a wider audience.

Dialogue generally supports an underlying activity. For the moment we focus on dialogue where this consists of a task or set of tasks that the parti- cipants aim to complete with the assistance of verbal interaction. Examples of such activities include the assessment of a student’s knowledge via oral examination, the negotiation of the price of goods or services through bar- gaining, the gathering of evidence by means of courtroom cross-examination and many others.

The nature of the underlying activity and the associated social context impose constraints on the conversational behaviour considered acceptable for each dialogue participant. At the same time, conversational behaviour affects how successfully participants perform the underlying task. In the general case however, cooperation at one of these two levels of interaction does not directly translate to cooperation at the other level. This was illus- trated earlier by the case of the witness under interrogation in a US trial, who could acceptably decline to answer a question by appealing to the Fifth Amendment thus being non-cooperative in relation with the goals of the cross-examination. Non-cooperation at the conversational level can result in lack of cooperation at the level of the task – take as an example the same witness remaining silent, rather than answering or appealing to the Fifth Amendment. However, there are cases in which unconventional or un- expected conversational behaviour can contribute in the completion of the

underlying task. For instance, although sanctionable in courtroom cross- examinations, leading questions could help a sincere but forgetful witness remember important details that become evidence.

To illustrate the distinction further, recall the following fragment from Example 1.1 in Chapter1:

Turn Speaker Speech

(1) _Paxman (interrupting) Did you threaten to overrule him? (2) _Howard I, I, was not entitled to instruct Derek Lewis, and I

did not instruct him.

(3) _Paxman Did you threaten to overrule him?

(4) _Howard The truth of the matter is that Mr. Marriott was not suspended. I-

(5) _Paxman (overlapping) Did you threaten to overrule him? (6) _Howard -did not overrule Derek Lewis.

Howard’s responses do not constitute relevant answers to the interviewer’s question, nor do they work as explicit rejections. Therefore, they are non- cooperative at both levels of interaction, as they do not contribute to the common goals of the political interview task and also disrupt the dynamics of the conversation leading Paxman to pose essentially the same question over and over. Consider however, a fictional alternative in which Howard replies to the question by saying ‘I will not answer that question, as it is not relevant to whether I exceeded the powers of my office’ would not be cooperative in terms of helping achieve the goals of an interview – widening the spread information, uncovering the truth, clarifying pressing issues, etc. However, it would be contributing at the linguistic level as it helps in preserving the flow of the conversation, for instance by triggering a sub-dialogue to solve the disagreement or by convincing the interviewer to drop the question and move on.

As detailed in the previous chapter, the distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic (also called task-related, high-level or social) coopera- tion has been addressed before. Attardo (1997) revisits Gricean pragmatics, relating non-linguistic cooperation to participants’ behaviour towards real- ising task-related goals, and linguistic cooperation to assumptions on their respective behaviour in order to encode and decode intended meaning. From a computational perspective, Bunt (1994) relies on a similar distinction when defining dialogue acts. Also, Traum and Allen (1994) introduce discourse obligations as an alternative to joint intentions and shared plans, to allow for models of dialogues in which participants do not share the same high- level goals and where behaviour is also determined by “a sense of obligation to behave within limits set by the society” (Traum and Allen, 1994, p. 2).

Walton and Krabbe (1995) proposed a typology of dialogue based on the

initial situation triggering the exchange and participants’ shared aims and individual goals. Based on their work, Reed and Long (1997) distinguish cases where participants follow a common set of dialogue rules and stay within a mutually acknowledged framework from a stronger notion in which their individual goals point in the same direction. Boella et al. (1999) dis- cuss the role of intentions in cooperation and distinguish between dialogue and domain goals. Dialogue goals are further subdivided in conversational and linguistic goals, assuming that participants align their conversational goals avoiding to offend each other so that the dialogue proceeds smoothly. Linguistic goals relate to the production and interpretation of utterances.

With the above distinction clear, it must be noted that in the rest of the thesis we do not deal explicitly with non-linguistic cooperation. This means that we do not consider shared goals as part of our approach, nor do we include the reasoning of the participants in terms of each others’

private goals. The task-related goals of each party are considered private and whether they point in the same direction or are in conflict is orthogonal to how we deal with linguistic non-cooperation. From this point on, for the sake of brevity and unless explicitly indicated, the terms cooperation and non-cooperation will refer to the linguistic level. Further, these notions apply also to cases in which the underlying activity cannot be described in terms of tasks and goals. Arguably, exchanges such as small talk and phatic conversation do not qualify as task-oriented dialogues. However, these types of dialogue do serve social purposes (e.g. for politeness or to increase fa- miliarity between the parties) and therefore it is possible to identify a set of –usually tacit and culture-bound– rules or conventions on how to take part in them adequately allowing for the identification of non-cooperation regardless of the absence of tasks and goals.