Meaning and Dialogue Coherence: A Proof-theoretic Investigation (workshop paper version)

This paper presents a novel proof-theoretic account of dialogue coherence. It focuses on cooperative information-oriented dialogues and describes how the structure of such dialogues can be accounted for in terms of a multi-agent hybrid inference system that mixes natural deduction with information transfer and observation. We show how the structure of dialogue arises out of the interplay between the inferential roles of logical connectives (i.e., sentence semantics), a rule for transferring information between agents, and rules for information flow between agents and their environment. Our order of explanation is opposite in direction to that adopted in the game-theoretic semantics tradition, where sentence semantics (or a notion of valid inferences) is derived from (winning) dialogue strategies. The approaches may, however, be reconcilable, since we focus on cooperative dialogues, whereas the latter concentrates on adversarial dialogue.