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The representation of the speech acts

 

The knowledge about speech acts and the way they relate to each other is stored in the speech acts library, represented in an action hierarchy based on a formalism similar to that by Kautz (1990). In particular, we set apart the decomposition hierarchy (boxed arcs in the figures) and the generalization-specialization hierarchy (thick arrows).gif When the decomposition includes a single step, the relation between the two actions is a generation relation (Pollack, 1990). The leaves of the hierarchy, surf-imperative, surf-yn-question, surf-wh-question, surf-assertion correspond to the different syntactic types of sentence, namely imperatives, declaratives and interrogatives (two small portions of the library are reported in Figure 1 and 2. There, the surface types are circled by thick ovals).

The actions of the hierarchy are characterized by the following features:

The recursiveness of natural language implies that illocutionary force indicating devices can be nested inside each other; so, complex utterances including different speech acts can be built and interpreted in a compositional way. For example, the sentence:

2) Vorrei chiederti se puoi dirmi dove si trova la biblioteca.

[I would like to ask you whether you can tell me where is the library.]

is composed of an external surface statement with conditional mood ( vorrei, ``I would like"), an explicit performative ( chiedere, ``to ask") and an indirect request expressed by an inner yes/no question ( se ..., ``whether ...").gif Because of the freedom in the composition of sentences, the speech acts library contains some cyclic paths (see the ask-if action that, in figure 2, occurs in its own definition).



next up previous
Next: The speech act Up: Indirect Speech Acts and Previous: Introduction



Guido Boella Dottorando
Thu Oct 31 15:35:12 MET 1996