Interactional Reconstruction in Real-Time Language Processing

This study documents and characterizes a phenomenon in noturolly-occurring conversation which I have termed InteractIonal reconstruction. lnteroctional reconstruction involves retroactive reinterpretation of on earlier utterance (or set of utterances) on the basis of a more recent utterance (or set of utterances). This work is meant to serve two functions: first, to enrich our theories of human communication: and second, to explore directions and implications for theories of meaning and discourse modeling within cognitive science. 1.1. INTRODUCTION This study represents an exploratory step in the direction of understanding one of the communicative processes in naturally occurring English conversations. This work is meant to serve two functions: first, to generally enrich our theories of human communication; and second, to suggest directions our modelings of human dialogue within intelligent systems should eventually take to be fully robust and user friendly. In the last 10 years, there has been something of a small revolution within cognitive psychology and linguistics concerning the model of communication generally assumed to be operative in human language processing. Since the time of Aristotle, the academically standard view of communication involved an active encoder who packed his/her thoughts into the appropriate words and sent those words to a passive decoder, who then unpacked the words and got out the thoughts stored therein. This model of communication , referred to as telementation by Harris (1981) and the conduit metaphor by Reddy (1979), sees the process of comprehension as effortless and The central i dea was vaguely concei ved while I was studying with Emanuel Schegloff at UCLA, and I would like to thank him for the val uabl e insights he offered and for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I would also like to thank Thompson for their comments on an earlier draft. Thanks are also due to Anders Ericsson for his comments and suggestions. Of course, 1 am solely responsible for the views expressed here.