Successful Strategies for Ambiguity Resolution in Dialogue

Everyday communication is characterised by the common phenomenon of ambiguity (WinterFroemel and Zirker, 2010), which occurs when more than one meaning is associated with one item (Ziegler, 2010). Many spatial terms, for example, can be interpreted in different ways and are thus inherently ambiguous (Schober, 1993). In dialogue, speaker and addressee must agree on one of the potential interpretations to enable understanding. Our study addresses referring strategies that interlocutors use to specify object location, and associated problems that may cause a failure of object placement. We present a qualitative analysis of the negotiation of a bedside table’s location as a case study for object placement in dialogue, contrasting the description of functional and non-functional spatial arrays.