Rhetorical Relations, Action And Intentionality In Conversation

This paper contains an investigation of the relationship between rhetorical relations and intentions. Rhetorical relations are claimed to I)e actions, and thus the prolmr objects of intentions, although some relations may occur ])e independent of intentions. Explicit identification of particular relations is shown to I)e not always m~cessary when l.his information~ can be cal)tnred in other ways, nevertheless, relations are often useful I)oth in plamfing aml r~cognil,ion. R h e t o r i c a l R e l a t i o n s a n d I n t e n t i o n s The re are a number of different types of relationships between l)roxima.te segments of language, as well as a number of terms used to dif |erent ia te groups of these types. For the present l)Url)oses I make no dis t inct ion (as do, e.g. [Sidner; Moser a.nd Moore]) 1)etw(,en afflictive and other types of discourse coherence relations. Since my pr imary interest is lit conversat ion ( ra ther than, say, single producer tex t ) , I also include relations between ut terances by (lilli:rent sl)eakers. Another dimension along which a dist inct ion couhl be made is what exactly i.s being related'/ Are relat ions between explicit spa.ns of language text or between elements of the expressed contents of texts or perhN)s mixes between these categories? Aga.in, I will not make any such dist inctions here, and simply use the t e rm rhetorical relations to refer to any of these relations. As with o ther types of linguistic meaning, there are bo th Semantic and Pragmatic views of rhetor ical relations. Semantic views concent ra te on whether or not a relat ionship can be inferred fl'om features of the discourse and whal: o ther in |b rmat ion can 1)e inferred when the relat ion hol(Is or does not . P r agma t i c views are more concerned with how a rela.ti(mshil) is establ ished and what effects this re la t ionship (or lack of relationshil) ) has on the c o n t e x t ) For the purposes of engaging in conversat ion and relat ing rhetorical relat ions to intelltiorts, I take the pragmat ic viewpoint as more central , a l though both are iml)ortant . From the pragmat ic viewpoint , rhetorica.] relations are the same general kind of thing as speech acts or actions in generM: al)stractions of agent-directed change in the worhl, in this case change in the conversat ional and metM sta te of the col.,versallts. The only difl'(qence between speech acts and rhetoricM relat ions is tha t the la t te r a.re exl~lMtly concerned with the linka.g¢, of separa te segments of language. ['I~'aum and Hinkehnan, 1992] presents a nmltistra.tal tlteory of Conversation Acts, *This material is ha.ted upon work supported in part by the NSF under research gr;tnt ltO. IRI-9(1[13841, by ONR under research grant no. N0{I014-9(I-J-1811, alld I)y DARPA/ONR under contract Nlllllll4-.q2-J-1512. l wouhl like to thank James Allen and Peter Heeman for helpfid discussions. 1This distinction iv also discussed by [Maylmry] a.s the distinction between rcl, tion.~ and act.i, although here I will use these terms more or less synollylnously.