File Information
File: 05-lr/acl_arc_1_sum/cleansed_text/xml_by_section/metho/80/j80-3002_metho.xml
Size: 55,212 bytes
Last Modified: 2025-10-06 14:11:22
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?> <Paper uid="J80-3002"> <Title>Characterizing Indirect Speech Acts 1</Title> <Section position="5" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> 3. Preliminaries </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> We first introduce the model of actions on which the ISA rules will be based, and Section 3.2 looks at speech acts from the perspective of this model. Section 3.3 then discusses the request speech act as a basis for examples used throughout the paper.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> 3.1. An Outline of the Structure of Actions If we are to follow Austin and Searle in the belief that language is, fundamentally, action, then linguistic models must include a model of the structure of actions. Such a model of actions can be a unifying force American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 6, Number 3-4, July-December 1980 151 Gretchen P. Brown Characterizing Indirect Speech Acts within the larger model, since structural information can be used in a number of different ways. This sub-section gives a very general treatment of actions, just enough to support the ISA rules proposed. The account of actions is taken from the OWL-I representation scheme (Szolovits et al. \[27\] and Brown \[3,6\]), 3 and it has counterparts in work by Bruce \[7\], Schank and Abelson \[23\], Grosz \[14\], and Moore, Levin, and Mann \[18,19\]. Some of these approaches differ in the type of action modelled, and all of them differ in the details, but each of the approaches is open to the treatment of action representations as general knowledge. Thus, action representations are not merely programs for doing something, they are also knowledge structures that may be used by other processes.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> We start with the notion of a method, a representation of an action. Methods have three main parts: a header, argument specifications, and a procedural body. The header is the method's unique name. Argument specifications, organized by semantic cases, are used for type checking of inputs to the method (input cases) or to specify the form of results (output cases).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> The procedural body is divided into two parts: (optional) prerequisites and procedure steps.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="4"> Note that input cases are associated with methods, not surface English verbs. Input case specifications give constraints on the participants in the method, the materials used, objects manipulated, etc. (A suggested set of semantic input cases derived by William A. Martin can be found in \[4\].) An important type of input case constraint, the precondition, is discussed in the next subsection.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="5"> Besides input case specifications, we said that methods may have associated output case specifications, i.e. specifications of results. One important notion here is that of principal result, which is the main result of the method and, typically, the reason that the method is undertaken. For example, the action conveyed in &quot;Paint the block red&quot; has as principal result that the block is red. The paint brush may also end up red, but this is not the principal result.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="6"> Turning to the method's procedural body, we need to know that procedure steps may correspond to subactions, i.e. they may be used as calls to other methods. Beyond this, procedure steps have a good deal of interesting structure, discussion of which is not necessary for the purposes of this paper.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="7"> As for prerequisites, the ones that are of interest here are states. A stative prerequisite of an action is a condition that must obtain before that action is carried out. If the condition does not hold, then one must 30WL-I was developed by William A. Martin, Lowell Hawkinson, William Long, Alexander Sunguroff, William Swartout, Peter Szolovits, and the author. OWL has continued to develop since that time.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="8"> bring it about before carrying out the action. An example of a prerequisite is the requirement that an elementary course of study be completed before a more advanced one is undertaken.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="9"> 3.2. The Model of Actions Applied to Speech Acts Speech acts, because they are actions, can be represented by methods. Speech act representations therefore have semantic input cases, which typically include cases for the participants in the conversation and a case for what Searle calls the propositional content condition of the speech act (very roughly, what the speech act is &quot;about&quot;) \[24\]. Among the constraints on these input cases are preconditions. Preconditions are constraints on the beliefs, desires, or other intentions of the agent of the method (the participant responsible for the action) that should be satisfied before the speech act gets underway. Preconditions differ from prerequisites in that a failure to satisfy preconditions typically means that a method is eliminated from consideration as a possible plan; a prerequisite that is not satisfied merely adds extra steps to be performed. Preconditions will play an important role in the framing of ISAs; a sample set is given in the next subsection.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="10"> A concept that will be useful in talking about ISAs is the intended effect. The intended effects of speech acts are those effects that P1 (the agent of the speech act) intends to have on P2. The most important of these effects will be called the principal intended effect. For request, the principal intended effect is that P2 take responsibility for carrying out some action. For offer, it is that P2 accept the offer. &quot;Accept&quot; here includes not only a verbal acceptance, but also that P2 perform some action that complements Pl's offer, e.g., P2 takes food that is offered. The notion of intended effect comes from Verschueren \[28\], but it has been adapted somewhat. In particular, for uniformity, intended effects will be restricted to be actions only, not states. For example, the principal intended effect for state is that P2 come to know (as opposed to just know) that P1 believes something to be a fact.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="11"> Intended effects and principal intended effects can be related in a straightforward way to methods. Intended effects are actions precipitating certain method results (i.e. intended effects are the direct causes); principal intended effects are actions precipitating certain principal results. The results and principal results are not necessarily associated with the speech act method but are instead associated with higher level methods that include both the speech act and its prototypical linguistic and nonlinguistic responses.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="12"> Once speech acts have been set within the action representation, we can define ISAs more closely to delimit the phenomena of interest. Speech acts conveyed by ISA forms are derivable from parts of, or 152 American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 6, Number 3-4, July-December 1980 Gretchen P. Brown Characl:erizing Indirect Speech Acts conditions associated with, the conveyed speech act(s).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="13"> Other implications of an utterance may arise from a particular co-occurrence of steps within larger patterns of dialogue, but these implications will not be considered to be conveyed speech acts. A very simple example of such an implication comes from a computer console session environment, where some users type &quot;Thank you&quot; in a place where others type &quot;Thank you&quot; followed by &quot;Good-bye&quot;. When &quot;Thank you&quot; occurs alone in such a situation, it will not be considered to be an indirect closing. Instead, the closing is seen as an optional step, which may be omitted in the presence of utterances that uniquely identify the place in the dialogue. Utterances that imply omitted steps do so based on relationships at a higher level of dialogue structure than individual speech acts.</Paragraph> <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section"> <SectionTitle> 3.3. Preconditions for Requests </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> Although the rules presented in the next section are intended to apply to speech acts in general, examples will be drawn primarily from request forms. Since the ISA rules depend in part on the preconditions of a speech act, the preconditions of the speech act request are discussed here; preconditions for ask, state, offer, and suggest appear in the Appendix. 4 In these preconditions and throughout the paper, P1 is the originator of the utterance (or written message) and P2 is the receiver. If subsequent related utterances are discussed, then P1 and P2 continue to refer to the same participants. Consider, then, the following preconditions for request: I. P1 wants P2 to take responsibility for carrying out the action.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> II. P1 believes that P2 can take responsibility for carrying out the action.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> III. P1 believes that P2 is willing to take responsibility for carrying out the action.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> IV. P1 believes that P2 is obligated to P1 (and possibly to others) to take responsibility for carrying out the action.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="4"> To clarify the terms used in the preconditions, I will outline some of the relationships that should be captured in a semantic network representation of them.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="5"> The internal semantic node believe has a superclass relationship to semantic nodes for idea-holding concepts, e.g., thinking, knowing, assuming, and hypothesizing. The different specializations (i.e. subclasses) of believe differ according to the strength of commitment to the belief. In addition, they differ according to 4 In the interests of readability, preconditions and ISA rules are presented in this paper informally. The model of actions and rules have been represented in OWL-I, which implies a number of commitments, many shared by other representation schemes of the late seventies. These commitments are discussed further in Sect. 5. whether the belief is open to confirmation against some external reality (i.e., facts), will eventually be open to confirmation (i.e., guesses and predictions), or is generally considered to be a matter of taste (i.e., opinions). The link between the various specializations of believe is the fact that beliefs can be partially supported by evidence, whether or not complete confirmation of the beliefs is ultimately possible. This excludes idea-holding actions such as dreaming.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="6"> In precondition I, the internal node want has a superclass relationship to semantic nodes for all goalholding concepts, e.g., desiring and hoping. &quot;Take responsibility&quot; is used in the preconditions to permit subcontracting. Whether P2 does all the action steps or not, P2 still remains responsible to P1 for the resuits. null In precondition II, &quot;can&quot; is meant to convey the general notion of enablement for actions. One specialization of the semantic node can is may, enablement through permission. The internal representation for &quot;can&quot; is discussed further in Section 5.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="7"> In the third precondition, the internal node for &quot;be willing&quot; has a superclass in common with want (perhaps called &quot;be inclined&quot;) but it differs in that if P2 is willing to do action A1, he or she is not disinclined to do it. That is to say, P2 does not necessarily have A1 as a goal, but P2 has no conflicting goals which, when weighed against A1, result in a decision against adopting A1 as a goal. Precondition III is worded &quot;P2 is willing to&quot; rather than &quot;P2 wants to,&quot; because P2 will not necessarily already have the action requested as a goal at the time that P1 makes the request.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="8"> Finally, we come to the notion of obligation in precondition IV. The concept of obligation assumed is a more specific version of the generalized obligation that Labov and Fanshel use for requests in \[16\]. Obligation to other people is seen here as coming in three types: role obligation, authority obligation, and the general obligation to be cooperative. Role obligations are associated with roles, which can be seen as patterns of behavior that can be assumed by individuals for varying periods of time. An example of a role obligation would be the requirement that a bank teller fulfill a request to make change. Authority obligations are slightly more difficult to identify, since, especially in contemporary American society, most authority arises from roles. Authority obligations based on age differences are probably the most prevalent examples.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="9"> The third type of obligation, the general obligation to be cooperative, seems to arise simply from a need, often in the form of a temporary inequality between individuals. The obligation applies in a range of situations. A typically mundane version of the obligation is that questions should be answered, i.e. that inequalities of knowledge should be corrected. A more serious American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 6, Number 3-4, July-December 1980 153 Gretchen P. Brown Characterizing Indirect Speech Acts version is the injunction to help someone in an emergency. Note that this obligation is not absolute (nor are role or authority obligations), and it may be overridden by other obligations. A point worth mentioning is that my notion of obligation includes the notion of Pl's right to invoke the obligation. (See \[16\], p. 78.) An obligation is seen as a three-place relationship between P1, P2, and the thing that P2 is obliged to do.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="10"> Note that the specific persons P1 and P2 need not be named explicitly in the obligation. For example, the obligation to drive carefully may be an obligation to society in general, and hence to any individual P1 by inclusion in the larger set. Given this formulation, P1 has the right to invoke the obligation to drive carefully because P1 is one of the parties to the obligation, even if P1 is not named explicitly.5 Philosophical controversy surrounds several of these terms, and a complete and detailed definition for any of them is a research project in itself. The comments on the terms used in the preconditions are sketchy, but the intent of the comments is to give the reader enough information to evaluate the approach to ISA characterization proposed in this paper.</Paragraph> </Section> </Section> <Section position="6" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> 4. A Set of General Rules for Indirect Speech Acts </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> If one looks carefully at a varied group of indirect speech acts, an outline of a common sense view of rational behavior begins to emerge. This common sense view can be used as a conceptual organization of ISA forms, an approach taken here in the presentation of a set of general rules for ISAs.</Paragraph> <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section"> <SectionTitle> 4.1. Some Basic Observations </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> We start with some very basic observations, none of which should seem particularly remarkable since the phenomena involved lie just below the surface, and sometimes right at the surface, of English (and other languages as well).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> Strategy 1. If you believe that a proposition holds, you can tell someone.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> Strategy 2. If you want to know whether a proposition holds, you can ask someone if it holds.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> Strategy 3. If you want to know whether a proposition holds, you can ask someone if it does not hold.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="4"> These three communication strategies are extensions of the observations made by Searle and built into Gordon and Lakoff's rule for requests. &quot;Can&quot; is used above to indicate that other options do, of course, exist; these are merely the options of interest for ISAs. 5 Reminders are one class of utterance in which P1 does have the right to invoke an obligation without being a party to it. This is not necessarily a problem for requests, however, because reminders can be treated as separate speech acts.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="5"> The three strategies can be augmented by what will be called here the better-knowledge principle: if both you and a conversational partner have a degree of knowledge about a proposition, the decision whether to tell what you know (or think) or ask what the other per-son knows (or thinks) can be made based on which participant has the better knowledge of the proposition. null Moving from information exchanges to actions in general, we can identify some basic factors in the process of undertaking an action (i.e. adopting the action as a goal, not necessarily with the intent of being the agent yourself).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="6"> 1. One should only undertake actions that are necessary.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="7"> 2. One should only undertake actions for which some desirable result or results can be expected. null 3. One should only undertake actions that one expects to be possible.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="8"> These three maxims, which will be referred to as the maxims of Necessity, Desirability, and Possibility, summarize factors that should be weighed in goal formation, the process of deciding to adopt some action as a goal. Necessity, desirability, and possibility of actions are not necessarily, of course, evaluated independently, but the maxims abstract away from the actual weighing procedure. Interpretation of these maxims is intended to be quite broad. &quot;Necessity&quot; is assumed here to include obligations, and &quot;possibility&quot; is assumed to include having permission.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="9"> Readers familiar with the classic work of Grice on conversational implicature \[13\] will recognize the approach that is being taken. Grice suggests four categories of maxims that are applicable to linguistic actions but which have analogues in other types of actions. The maxims given here are applicable to actions in general but apply to speech acts as a special case. The Maxim of Necessity above has a partial counterpart in Grice's category of Quantity. The other two maxims have no direct counterparts, and they suggest extensions to Grice's framework.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="10"> Given these basic observations about communication and action in general, the question is how they should be incorporated into a theory. One possible approach is to represent the observations at essentially the level of generality given, then derive ISA forms by a uniform inference process. Here, in contrast, the observations will be used as a conceptual organization and as a guide to rule specification. The resulting rules will be more specialized, but they will be at a level closer to the ISA forms that they describe.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="11"> The motivation for the choice of this approach can better be described after the rules have been presented. Accordingly, the rest of this section discusses 154 American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 6, Number 3-4, July-December 1980 Gretchen P. Brown Characterizing Indirect Speech Acts rules associated with the maxims of Necessity, Desirability, and Possibility.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="12"> 4.2. Rules Related to the Maxim of Necessity The Maxim of Necessity says that one should act only when necessary, avoiding extraneous actions.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="13"> The following rules account for speech act forms related to this maxim: P1 can convey a speech act indirectly by --Rule NECESSARY-ASSERT -- asserting that the intended speech act is necessary null e.g., the request &quot;I have to ask you to shut the door.&quot; Rule NECESSARY-ASK -- asking whether the intended speech act is necessary null e.g., the request &quot;Do I need to ask you to shut the door?&quot; Rule EQUI-ASK -- asking whether an equivalent speech act (i.e., one with the same principal intended effect) has already been performed e.g., the request &quot;Did anyone ask you to take out the garbage?&quot;</Paragraph> </Section> </Section> <Section position="7" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> Rule FUTURE-EFFECT-ASK </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> -- asking whether the principal intended effect can be expected to occur without the speech act e.g., the requests: &quot;Are you planning to take out the garbage?&quot; &quot;Are you going to take out the garbage?&quot;</Paragraph> <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section"> <SectionTitle> Rule PAST-EFFECT-ASK </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> -- asking whether the principal intended effect of the speech act has already occurred e.g., the requests: &quot;Did you take out the garbage?&quot; &quot;Have you taken out the garbage?&quot; and, using additional rules (see Section 5), &quot;Is the garbage out?&quot; &quot;Assert&quot; is used in these and subsequent rules to inelude the speech acts of stating a fact and giving an opinion, i.e., those speech acts that Searle calls representatives \[26\].</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> The &quot;necessity&quot; rules exemplify the three communication strategies listed at the beginning of this section. NECESSARY-ASSERT exemplifies the first strategy, in which P1 tells what he or she knows about the necessity of the speech act. In NECESSARY-ASK, P1 asks whether the speech act is necessary (strategy 2), and in the last three rules, P1 asks whether the speech act is unnecessary (strategy 3).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> Note that there is no rule for the explicit version of the third strategy, e.g. for the form &quot;Is it unnecessary for me to <speech act>?&quot; This form is practically incomprehensible as a way to carry out the speech act, even though the reasoning involved is comparable to that for the EQUI-ASK form. Perhaps this gap refleets a preference for more specialized forms. The three strategy-3 rules for necessity, which are more specific, supersede the explicit &quot;Is it unnecessary...&quot; form.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> Gordon and Lakoff use a condition analogous to the FUTURE-EFFECT-ASK rule to account for the &quot;Will you <action>?&quot; request form. In this interpretation, the form asks if the request is unnecessary because P2 was going to perform the desired action anyway. While this approach is plausible on the face of it, some uses of the &quot;will&quot; form are not motivated by questions of the necessity of the action. Consider, for example, 4.1:</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section"> <SectionTitle> 4.1 Will you accept a ride to the airport? </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> One can view example 4.1 as P1 asking P2 whether the outcome of an offer by P1 will be successful (i.e., acceptance). This example can therefore be accounted for by the Maxim of Possibility; &quot;will&quot; forms are discussed further in Section 4.4.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> Finally, note that P1 is permitted to use an ISA only when P1 can reasonably expect P2 to decipher Pl's intent, i.e., to recognize the indirection. Neither the &quot;necessity&quot; rules nor any of the other rules to be presented here, however, include this information. It appears that this constraint is part of a more general constraint that P1 avoid ambiguity. That is, P1 is obligated -- to the best of his or her ability -- to frame any utterance (ISA or not) in such a way that P2 can understand the message that P1 intended to convey.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> See Grice \[13\] for discussion of an &quot;avoid ambiguity&quot; maxim.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> 4.3. Rules Related to the Maxim of Desirability Next we come to the Maxim of Desirability, which says that one should initiate actions for which some desirable result or results can be expected and avoid actions for which an undesirable result or results can be expected. Related to this maxim, we have the following ISA rules: P1 can convey a speech act indirectly by --</Paragraph> </Section> </Section> <Section position="8" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> Rule DESIRABLE-ASSERT </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> -- asserting that some desirable result or results can be expected or some undesirable result or results can be avoided for some intended effect of the speech act.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> e.g., the request &quot;I'11 be happier when you substantiate those figures.&quot; Here, the desirable result is the happiness of P1, and the intended effect of the request is that P2 substantiate the figures.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 6, Number 3-4, July-December 1980 155 Gretchen P. Brown Characterizing Indirect Speech Acts Rule DESIRABLE-ASK -- asking whether some desirable result or results can be expected or whether some undesirable result or results can be avoided for some intended effect of the speech act.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> e.g., the request &quot;Will more light come in if you move it a little to the right?&quot; Rule UNDESIRABLE-ASK -- asking whether some undesirable result or results can be expected from the intended speech act. e.g., the request &quot;Will you be offended if I ask you to loan me some money?&quot; For the first two rules, note that the intended effect need not be an immediate result of the speech act; it may be several times removed in the causal chain. Similarly, the desirable result need not be an immediate result of the intended effect.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="4"> The &quot;desirability&quot; rules exemplify the three linguistic strategies listed at the beginning of this section. Again, as for the strategy-3 &quot;necessity&quot; rules, DESIRABLE-ASSERT and DESIRABLE-ASK do not include the most general possible forms. For example, no rule has been given to permit example 4.2 to be interpreted as an indirect request that P2 be quiet. 4.2 I will be happier if I ask you to be quiet.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="5"> Whereas DESIRABLE-ASSERT is framed in terms of an intended effect of the speech act, example 4.2 refers to the speech act explicitly. The same hypothesis applies for this gap: the more specialized DESIRABLE-ASSERT has displaced the explicit, and more general, form exemplified by 4.2.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="6"> 4.4. Rules Related to the Maxim of Possibility The third maxim proposed was the Maxim of Possibility: one should only initiate actions that one expects to be possible. This means that a speech act should only be initiated when: 1. P1 has the appropriate authority or permission for the speech act; and 2. it appears likely that the specific precondi- null tions associated with the action's method can be satisfied.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="7"> Only the second case, preconditions, will be considered here. The ISA forms derived from the first case all seem to belong to a class that Fraser has called hedged performatives, and which are well accounted for in \[11\].</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="8"> The approach taken for ISAs based on preconditions will be to distinguish three classes of precondition and formulate six rules using the classes distinguished. The classes will be based on the better-knowledge principle from the beginning of this section, specialized in terms of preconditions. The classes of precondition are as follows:</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="9" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> 1. Pl-based preconditions </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> Here P1 has inherently better knowledge of whether or not the topic of the precondition holds. The topic of preconditions that begin here with &quot;P1 believes that P2&quot; is considered to be the direct object of the initial &quot;believe,&quot; i.e., the rest of the precondition. For other preconditions, the topic is the entire pattern. Preconditions that are Pl-based represent intentional states of P1, i.e., beliefs, intentions, wants, desires, and degrees of willingness. An example is request I, P1 wants P2 to take responsibility for carrying out the action.</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="10" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> 2. P2-based preconditions </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> Here P2 has inherently better knowledge of whether or not the topic of the precondition holds. Preconditions that fit this category include Pl's beliefs about P2's intentional states. 6 An example of a P2-based precondition is request III, P1 believes that P2 is willing to take responsibility for carrying out the action.</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="11" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> 3. Unmarked preconditions </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> For these preconditions, determination of which participant has better knowledge of the precondition depends on properties of the context or its particular speech act. Examples are request II and IV.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> Using these precondition types, we can construct the following six rules for ISA forms.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> P1 can convey a speech act indirectly by --Rule P1-ASSERT: -- asserting a Pl-based precondition of the speech act; e.g., &quot;I want you to water the plants.&quot; (request I) &quot;I hope you will use common sense.&quot; (request I) Rule P2-ASK: -- an ask of the topic of a P2-based precondition of the speech act.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> e.g., &quot;Do you want to shut the door?&quot; (request III) Rule UNMARKED-ASK: -- an ask of the topic of an unmarked precondition of the speech act.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="4"> This rule applies in a context where P1 believes P2 has better knowledge of the condition in the precondition topic.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="5"> e.g., &quot;Is it your turn to do the dishes?&quot; (request IV) 6 An exception is the degree of knowledge of facts, which will be classified as an Unmarked condition. There are cases in which P1 is assumed to have better knowledge about what P2 knows or does not know than P2. Such an assumption underlies the use of the form &quot;You don't know <fact>&quot; as a way to state the fact. 156 American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 6, Number 3-4, July-December 1980 Gretchen P. Brown Characterizing Indirect Speech Acts Rule UNMARKED-ASSERT: -- asserting the topic of an unmarked precondition of the speech act.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="6"> This rule applies in a context where P1 believes P1 has better knowledge of the condition in the precondition topic.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="7"> e.g., &quot;It's your turn to do the dishes.&quot; This rule is applicable only when the speech act has preconditions that are exact matches or specializations of the four preconditions of request. e.g., &quot;Take a cookie.&quot; (offer IV-VII, in Appendix) null</Paragraph> <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section"> <SectionTitle> Rule COMPOSITE-ASK: </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> -- an ask about whether P2 will take responsibility for carrying out an action that is a goal of P1.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> This rule is applicable only when the speech act has preconditions that are exact matches or specializations of the four preconditions of request. e.g., &quot;Will you accept a ride to the airport?&quot; (offer IV-VII, in Appendix) The rules as written do not account for differences in tense and mood. That is, the UNMARKED-ASK rule accounts for example 4.3 but not 4.4 and 4.5.</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section"> <SectionTitle> 4.3 Are you able to drive Sarah to school? 4.4 Will you be able to drive Sarah to school? 4.5 Would you be able to drive Sarah to school? </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> Examples 4.4 and 4.5 can be handled as legitimate requests if we extend the rules to account for a wider range of tense and mood behavior. See \[4\] for suggestions. null The &quot;possibility&quot; rules given also do not derive &quot;not&quot; forms, i.e. strategy-3 rules related to whether an action is impossible.</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section"> <SectionTitle> 4.6 Shouldn't you shut the door? 4.7 Can't you shut the door? </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> Note, however, that the rules given can be used as patterns for producing rules that account for examples 4.6 and 4.7. Any of the rules above that involve an ask have rule counterparts with not inserted after the ask. 7 In terms of specific rules, UNMARKED-ASSERT may seem odd when applied to preconditions involving 7 This is a change from \[4\], where the &quot;not&quot; forms were seen as realizations of a different speech act, with different preconditions. The &quot;not&quot; forms are now seen as requests with a particular set of connotations. The motive for the change is to make the &quot;possibility&quot; rules consistent with the rules for the maxims of Necessity and Desirability by allowing the strategy of questioning whether a condition does not hold.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> capability, producing indirect requests such as example 4.8.</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section"> <SectionTitle> 4.8 You can open the door. </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> Such forms do occur, however, particularly in requests to children where there may be some question of the child's capability to perform the action requested.</Paragraph> </Section> </Section> <Section position="12" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> COMPOSITE-REQUEST and COMPOSITE-ASK </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> differ most from rules in previous theories because they are based on groups of preconditions. The COMPOSITE-ASK rule is of special interest. In Searle's scheme, the very common &quot;Will you <action>?&quot; form is derived from the propositional content condition of directives (the class that includes request). This approach seems to produce the correct forms, but it is basically a structural account, without strong semantic motivation. Instead, the approach taken here is to appeal to the Maxim of Possibility.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> The appearance of the four request preconditions in a set of preconditions indicates an action that P1 wants done. We can think of a speech act with this precondition subset as an act with a component request. By using a &quot;will&quot; form to perform the speech act, e.g. the offer example 4.1, P1 is asking a question about how P2 will respond to the offer, i.e., whether the component request will have a satisfactory response. When the speech act is itself a request, then the question in the &quot;will&quot; form is whether the speech act as a whole will have a satisfactory response.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> The distinction between Pl-based, P2-based, and Unmarked preconditions is probably uncontroversial; the question is whether the categories should be given a primary place in the theory. The reason that the better-knowledge split has been given a central place is that there is then a distinction between knowledge about a precondition that is independent of context (P1- and P2-based) and that which is not (Unmarked).</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> Instead of deriving the invariant knowledge from first principles each time, it is &quot;precompiled&quot; into the rules. This choice reflects an approach that will be discussed in Section 6.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="4"> 4.5. The Scope of the Rules Starting with a general evaluation of the scope of the rules, note that they do not account for such phenomena as sarcasm, jokes, or failure to make standard choices (e.g., P1 makes an utterance and has not decided whether it is a question or a request for a non-verbal action). Another phenomenon specific to speech acts that complicates theory building is what can be called force shift. This occurs when one speech act form is used to &quot;masquerade&quot; as another. For example, one may use a suggestion form such as &quot;How about picking up the blocks now?&quot; in an environment where authority and role relationships make it clear that the utterance is functioning as a command. In American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 6, Number 3-4, July-December 1980 157 Gretchen P. Brown Characterizing Indirect Speech Acts general, force shift seems to be used to give P1 the appearance of greater benevolence or to save face for P2.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="5"> What these phenomena have in common, I think, is their &quot;second order&quot; nature. All can be seen as presupposing a set of rules and then deviating from them. I expect these phenomena to be modelled by the mechanisms for rule application, not accounted for by individual rules alone. Since such mechanisms could be expected to build on, and interact with, the &quot;first order&quot; rule application mechanism, these phenomena have been considered beyond the scope of the current investigation.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="6"> The rules in this section are proposed to hold for speech acts in general. ISAs are not grounded solely in individual speech acts, as for Gordon and Lakoff, or even in types of speech acts as for Searle. Instead, they are related to a broader view of rational action analogous to that expounded by Grice. Speech acts, because they are actions, do have structural components that play an important part in the derivation of ISAs. The driving force behind ISAs, however, is the process of goal formation, i.e. the process of deciding whether to adopt a speech act as a goal. This process is reflected in the three maxims that were used as a conceptual organization for the presentation. This emphasis on the goal formation process is closely related to the work of Allen, Cohen, and Perrault \[1,8,21\]. The similarities and differences between the two approaches are discussed in Section 6.</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="13" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> 5. Relating Utterances to the General Rules </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> The general ISA rules in the last section were illustrated with English sentences, but nothing has as yet been said about the correspondence between particular utterances and rules. This section discusses in broad terms the nature of the correspondence, focusing on differences in complexity. Because the topic is difficult to present in a neutral way, it will be approached from the point of view of language recognition, i.e., matching utterances against rules. Much of what is said, however, is relevant for generation as well. Note that discussion in this section is restricted to the issue of proposing correct matches; issues related to choosing between alternative interpretations of an utterance (i.e., alternative matches) are deliberately avoided.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> (See, however, \[4\]).</Paragraph> <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section"> <SectionTitle> 5.1. Levels of Matching Complexity </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> Any discussion of matching rests on a set of assumptions about the representations involved. We briefly outline some of the assumptions made here, starting with a distinction between two levels of representation: surface and internal.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> Each utterance is expected to have (at least) a surface representation and an internal representation. Internal representations are also used for action structures, including preconditions, and for ISA rules and patterns. Internal representations are organized in a knowledge base according to a semantic network formalism. Surface representations closely reflect the surface form of an utterance, and only those distinctions forced by the parsing process are made. Thus, noun group references not needed by the parser may remain unresolved (e.g., &quot;I saw him&quot;). Choices among systematically ambiguous relationships of constituents and choices among ambiguous word senses also need not be made unless they are forced. ISA forms are preserved; e.g., &quot;Can you close the door?&quot; would have a surface representation that records its interrogative nature and that contains a surface item corresponding to &quot;can.&quot; An important implication of these attributes is that surface representation draws from a different vocabulary of semantic items than internal representation. For example, the surface item &quot;believe&quot; used in representing &quot;I believe you're fight&quot; is related to, but is not the same as, the internal item &quot;believe&quot; that corresponds to the general idea-holding concept from Section 3.3. Surface items do, however, have associated internal level definitions which specify the ways that they can be translated into internal level representations. These definitions include various potential translations; context is typically called on in each individual case to choose among alternatives and to specify details.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> The problem for ISA matching, then, is to relate the definitions of items in the surface representation of an ISA to ISA patterns. The ISA patterns are produced by applying the general rules from the last section to the method representations of particular speech acts. Matching will be discussed using as an example the pattern produced by applying rule UNMARKED-ASK to request precondition II: P1 asks whether P2 can take responsibility for carrying out action A.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> Consider, then, the following examples interpreted as indirect requests.</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section"> <SectionTitle> 5.1 Can you close the door? 5.2 Are you able to close the door? </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> Examples 5.1 to 5.3 can be handled by a set of general purpose matching rules that reflect hierarchical relationships in the knowledge base. The &quot;can&quot; in example 5.1 matches can in the above ISA pattern, since we can expect surface &quot;can&quot; to have internal can as a major part of its associated definition. (Other components in the definition might include the connotations of the lexical item.) Similarly, &quot;are you able&quot; in example 5.2 is an exact match, since we can also expect its associated definition to contain can as a component. In example 5.3, &quot;permitted&quot; has may as a component in its definition, and in the knowledge base may is a specialization (i.e., subclass) of can.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> The important point in these matches is that elements of internal level definitions of surface items are related to elements of ISA patterns via the hierarchical relationships of the knowledge base, i.e., via predefined classification links. Thus, proposing the request interpretation for examples 5.1 to 5.3 involves relatively well understood knowledge base manipulations.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> Example 5.4 is a typical utterance that is not accounted for by the ISA patterns given. The problem is that example 5.4, a question according to its interrogative form, contains &quot;please&quot;, a construct reserved for request and related speech acts. Utterances of this form have been much-discussed in the literature (e.g.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> Sadock \[22\], Searle \[25\], and Morgan \[20\]). The question is whether this form has evolved to the point that it is &quot;really&quot; a request only, no longer also a question. The interest is fueled by questions of the nature of meaning that are involved. Because I am interested in focusing on generalizations possible about ISAs, these issues will be omitted from discussion here. It is worth noting, however, that, whatever the ultimate theoretical disposition of these forms may be, they will probably have to be handled in a computational system by specialized patterns, to represent their unique properties. One such representation scheme, closely related to Morgan's notion of short-circuited entailment, is given in \[4\].</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="4"> The rest of the examples above, 5.5 through 5.9, can be related to the &quot;can&quot; request pattern in a regular fashion, but they require a richer set of matching relationships. Example 5.5 is typical of examples for which proposing a match may turn out to involve arbitrarily complex inference. To begin to account for example 5.5, we can posit some link between can in the ISA pattern and a representation for being in the appropriate spatial proximity to do an action. This link may be hierarchical, or part of a definition related to the internal node can, or both.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="5"> This treatment does not, however, fully solve the problem exemplified by example 5.5. There is still a good distance between the relationship of being at home with a dog and the idea of being in the fight range to perform the action of taking it for a walk.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="6"> The level of detail in the utterance is so much more specific than the level of detail in the pattern that we cannot expect a match by merely traversing precomputed links in a knowledge base. Another difference between 5.5 and the previous examples is that the knowledge needed to propose the match may go beyond information conveyed by the utterance to information from the surrounding context. Either of these two factors has the potential to turn the process of proposing interpretations for utterances such as example 5.5 into a full-blown inference process, with all the attendant difficulties in controlling the inference.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="7"> The rest of the examples can be expected to be more tractable, because we can take advantage of specialized links in the model of actions introduced in Section 3. Example 5.6 makes a &quot;can you&quot; request by asking whether P2 has an assignment (the hammer) for the instrument semantic case of the action (putting up a hook). Several different types of semantic cases can be queried in this way (see \[4\]); the structural model of actions supplies links between actions and their cases that can be traversed in this match.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="8"> For examples 5.7 to 5.9, we can again exploit the model of actions to propose matches. The three examples may have request interpretations where the actions intended are, respectively, that P2 stop smoking, pass the salt, and close the window. Note that none of the three examples describes these actions explicitly, and for that reason I have called utterances of this class implicit-action ISAs. These three examples represent three classes of implicit-action ISAs, which differ in the complexity of the search needed to propose a match. For example 5.7 there is essentially no search; the implicit action is merely that P2 stop or avoid the action named. Example 5.8 names a prerequisite of the implicit salt passing action. Recall from Section 3.1 that prerequisites are among the basic parts of methods. Other components of actions, including semantic input cases, steps, and principal resuits, may also be used in implicit-action ISAs. All of these are related to the action by the explicit links of the method representation. Finally, example 5.9 alludes to the intended action by stating a basis for the action, i.e., a condition seen as sufficient to warrant the action. &quot;Basis for action&quot; can be related to the structural links of methods (see \[4\]), but the relationship between the condition named in the utterance and the implicit action is relatively complex. Implicitaction ISAs are discussed in more detail in \[5\].</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="9"> We have, then, classes of utterances that obey relatively constrained matching relationships and classes that could involve an arbitrary inference process to propose interpretations. In between is a set of utterances for which proposal of interpretations can utilize structural links within action representations. Difficult problems of search and knowledge structuring remain American Journal of Computational Linguistics, Volume 6, Number 3-4, July-December 1980 159 Gretchen P. Brown Characterizing Indirect Speech Acts unsolved, but the links identified at least specify the types of paths that we can expect to see in matches of ISA patterns.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="10"> 5.2. Embedded ISAs In the discussion of matching, the initial assumption was that matching of surface representations occurred against patterns produced by single applications of rules to speech act methods. This assumption makes no provision for embedded forms. Some evidence does exist for this approach. For example, Sadock \[22\], in another context, observes that 5.10 is not a request for the hearer to move over, even though the similar form 5.11 is.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="11"> 5.10 Tell me if you can move over.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="12"> 5.11 Can you move over? In terms of the rules presented in Section 4, a request interpretation for 5.10 could only come from an embedded rule application: the UNMARKED-ASK rule applied to request II, resulting in ask, then the COMPOSITE-REQUEST rule applied to four of the preconditions of ask (see the Appendix). Forbidding such a double application effectively blocks a request interpretation, leaving only the information-seeking alternative.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="13"> This straightforward solution, augmented by various classes of exceptions, was adopted in \[4\]. The embedded examples that have accumulated since, however, are too numerous to be accounted for simply as exceptions. Consider the following indirect requests: 5.12 I wonder if you can move over.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="14"> 5.13 I believe it's your turn to do the dishes.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="15"> For 5.12, the internal level definition of wonder would include the following information: P1 wonder if <action or state> 1. P1 wants to know if <action or state> 2. P1 is speculating if <action or state> Example 5.12 is eharacterizable by applying rule P1-ASSERT to ask I (P1 wants to know the answer to the question) after applying rule UNMARKED-ASK to request II. Example 5.13 is eharacterizable by applying rule P1-ASSERT to state I (P1 believes X is a fact) after applying rule UNMARKED-ASSERT to request IV.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="16"> These examples, and others like them, seem to be best accounted for by politeness conditions. 8 In particular, I suggest the following hypothesis: embedding of general ISA rules is permitted when it furthers the politeness intentions of P1, either to heighten polite8 &quot;Politeness&quot; is used here quite broadly to include not only observation of the conventions of etiquette, but also the expression of respect for the other participant and the expression only of emotions harmonious with the social expectations associated with the conversational environment.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="17"> ness or to lessen it. These processes are referred to here as mitigation and aggravation, respectively. (The terms are borrowed from Labov and Fanshel \[16\] but apply to a somewhat broader range of phenomena here.) Embeddings within rules that are unmarked for politeness are forbidden, as are embeddings where the rules involved have conflicting politeness markings.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="18"> Evidence for this hypothesis is found in comparing example 5.12 to 5.14: 5.14 I want to know if you can move over.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="19"> Example 5.14 is derivable from the same set of rules as 5.12, but 5.12 conveys a request force while 5.14 does not. The reason for this, I suggest, is that the UNMARKED-ASK rule is a mitigator: questions, in general, promote politeness by giving P2 an opportunity to answer, allowing P2 to refuse to accept Pl's goals in uttering the speech act. &quot;I wonder&quot; is similarly undemanding: the emphasis is more on the speculation process P1 is involved in than the &quot;wanting to know&quot; aspect. In contrast, the &quot;I want to know&quot; in 5.14 works in the direction of aggravation. A goal stated explicitly leaves P2 very little room to refuse P1 without doing so explicitly. In narrowing P2's options, P1 has lowered the level of politeness. Example 5.12, then, with both rule applications working in the direction of mitigation, is a permitted embedding. Example 5.14, with one rule application producing mitigation and one aggravation, is blocked as an indirect request.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="20"> This approach can also be used to explain the block on embedding in example 5.10. The COMPOSITE-REQUEST rule realized with an imperative is not a mitigator, while the UNMARKED-ASK rule realized with a question is. Thus, the indirect request interpretation is blocked.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="21"> The examples presented make a case for the use of politeness conditions to govern ISA rule embedding, but it must be emphasized that more work is needed.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="22"> Despite the work on politeness conditions, much of this area is not well understood. (For three different perspectives on the implications of ISA choices, see Lakoff \[17\], Davison \[9\], and Ervin-Tripp \[10\].) Conelusive proof or disproof of the hypothesis awaits an analysis of the implications of ISA choices at a level of detail and completeness that is not yet available.</Paragraph> </Section> </Section> class="xml-element"></Paper>