Saying what you mean in dialogue: a study in conceptual and semantic co-ordination.

This paper explores how conversants co-ordinate their use and interpretation of language in a restricted context. It revolves around the analysis of the spatial descriptions which emerge during the course of 56 dialogues, elicited in the laboratory using a specially designed computer maze game. Two types of analysis are reported. The first is a semantic analysis of the various types of description, which indicates how pairs of speakers develop different language schemes associated with different mental models of the maze configuration. The second analysis concerns how the communicants co-ordinate in developing their description schemes. The results from this study would suggest that language processing in dialogue may be governed by local principles of interaction which have received little attention in the psychological and linguistic literature to date.