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<Paper uid="P84-1085">
  <Title>A SY}~ACTIC APPROACH TO DISCOURSE SEMANTICS</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="414" end_page="415" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
III DISCOURSE CONSTITD-ENT UNITS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> A. Introduction.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> This section reviews some important ways in which clauses (being our elementary discourse constituent units) can be combined to form complex discourse constituent units (which, in most cases, may be further combined to form larger dcu's, by recursive application of the same mechanisms). For the moment, we are thus focussing on the basic discourse syntactic patterns which make it possible to construct complex discourses, and on the semantic interpretation of these patterns. Sections IV and V will then discuss the higher level structures, where the interactional perspective on discourse comes mote to the fore.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> To be able to focus on discourse level phenomena, we will assume that the material to be dealt with by the discourse granmu~r is a sequence consisting of clauses and operators (connectors and discourse markers). It is assumed that every clause carries the value it has for features such as speaker, clause topic, propositional content (represented by a formula of a suitable logic), preposed constituents (with thematic role and semantics), tense, mood, modality. (The syntactic features we must include here have semantic consequences which can not always be dealt with within the meaning of the clause, since they may involve discourse issues.) The semantics of a dcu is built up in parallel with its syntactic analysis, by the~same recursive mechanism. ~4hen clauses or dcu's are combined to form a larger dcu, their meanings are combined to form the meaning of this dcu. Along with registers for storing syntactic features and semantic parameters, each dcu has a register which is used to build up the logical representation of its meaning.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Since the syntactic and semantic rules operate in parallel, the syntactic rules have the possibility of referring to the semantics of the constituents they work on. This possibility is in fact used in certain cases. We shall see an example in section III C i.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Complex discourse constituent units can be divided into four structurally different types:  - sequences, which construct a dcu out of arbitrarily many constituents (e.g.: lists, narratives). - expansions, consisting of a clause and a subordinated unit which &amp;quot;expands&amp;quot; on it.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> - structures formed by a binary operator, such as &amp;quot;A because B&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;If A then B&amp;quot;.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> - adjacency structures, involving speaker change,  such as question/answer pairs and exchanges of greetings.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> In the next subsections, III B and III C, we shall discuss sequences and expansions in more detail. One general point we should like to make here already: sequences as well as expansions correspond to extensional semantic operations. The propositions expressing the meanings of their constituents are evaluated with respect to the same possible world -- the successive constituents simply add up to one description. (We may note that some of the binary structures which we shall not consider further now, certainly correspond to intensional operations. &amp;quot;If A then B&amp;quot; is a clear example.) null Since we will not discuss adjacency structures in any detail in this paper, the problem of accommodating speaker change and different illocutionary forces in the discourse semantics will be left for another occasion.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> B. Sequential Structures.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> We shall discuss three kinds of sequential structures: lists, narratives, and topic chaining. i. Lists.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> Perhaps the paradigmatic sequential structure is the list: a series of clauses CI,..., Ck, which have a s-~mm~tic structure of the form F(al) = v I ..... F(a k) = v k, i.e., the clauses express propositions which convey the values which one function has for a series of alternative arguments. For instance, when asked to describe the interior of a room, someone may give an answer structured like this: &amp;quot;When I come into the door, then I see, to the left of me on the wall, a large window (...).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> Eh, the wall across from me, there is a eh basket chair (...).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> On the right wall is a mm chair (...).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13"> In the middle of the room there is, from left to right, an oblong table, next to that a round table, and next to that a tall cabinet.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="14"> Now I think I got everything.&amp;quot; (Transcript by Ehrich and Koster (1983), translated from Dutch; the constituents we left out, indicated by parenthesized dots, are subordinated constituents appended to the ~ they follow.) The list here occurs embedded under the phrase &amp;quot;I see&amp;quot;, and is closed off by the phrase &amp;quot;Now I think I got everything&amp;quot;.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="15"> Often, the successive arguments in a list arementioned in a non-random order -- in the above case, for instance, we first get the locations successively encountered in a &amp;quot;glance tour&amp;quot; from left to right along the walls; then the rest.  Both the first and the next arc parse clauses which must have the semantic structure F(a) = v. (Whether a clause can be analysed in this fashion, depends on surface properties such as stress pattern and preposing of constituents.) Various registers are set by the first clause and checked when next clauses are parsed, in order to enforce agreement in features such as tense, mood, modality. The semantics of a new clause being parsed is simply conjoined with the semantics of the list so far.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="5" start_page="415" end_page="416" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
2. Narratives.
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Narratives may be seen as a special case of lists -- successive event clauses specify what happens at successive timepoints in the world described by the narrative. Narratives are subdivided into different genres, marked by different tense and/or person orientation of their main line clauses: specific past time narratives (marked by clauses in the simple past, though clauses in the &amp;quot;historical present&amp;quot; may also occur), generic past time narratives ( marked by the use of &amp;quot;would&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;used to&amp;quot;), procedural narratives (present tense), simultaneous reporting (present tense), plans (use of &amp;quot;will&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;shall&amp;quot;; present tense also occurs). We shall from now on focus on specific past narratives. The properties of other narratives turn out to be largely analogous. (Cf. Longacre (1979) who suggests treating the internal structure of a discourse constituent and its &amp;quot;genre specification&amp;quot; as two independent dimensions.) clause:</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> specific past narrative All clause-processing arcs in this network for &amp;quot;specific past narratives&amp;quot; require that the tense of the clause be present or simple past. The event arc and the event arc process clauses with a --~i non-durative aspect. The circumstance arc processes clauses with a durative aspect. (The aspectual category of a clause is determined by the semantic categories of its constituents. Cf. Verkuyl, 1972.) The event arc is distinguished because it initial- 1 izes the register settings.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> * Notation: All diagrams in this paper have one initial state (the leftmost one) and one final state (the rightmost one). The name of the diagram indicates the category of the constituent it parses.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Arcs have labels of the form &amp;quot;A:B&amp;quot; (or sometimes just &amp;quot;A&amp;quot;), where A indicates the category of the constituent which must be parsed to traverse the arc, and B is a label identifying additional conditions and/or actions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The specific past narrative network has a time register containing a formula representing the current reference time in the progression of the narrative. ~,~en the time register has a value t, an incoming circumstance clause is evaluated at t, and it does not change the value of the time register. An event clause, however, is evaluated with respect to a later but adjacent interval t', and resets the time register to an interval t&amp;quot;, later than but adjacent to t'. (Cf. Polanyiand Scha, 1981) To show that this gives us the desired semantic consequences, we consider an abbreviated version of a detective story fragment, quoted by Hinrichs (1981):  (El) He went to the window (E2) and pulled aside the soft drapes.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> (Cl) It was a casement window (C2) and both panels were cranked down to let in the night air.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> (E3) &amp;quot;You should keep this window locked,&amp;quot; he said. (E4) &amp;quot;It's dangerous this way.&amp;quot;  The E clauses are events, the C clauses are circumstances. The events are evaluated at disjoint, sucsessively later intervals. The circumstances are evaluated at the same interval, between E2 and E3. To appreciate that the simultaneity of subsequent circumstance clauses in fact is a consequence of aspectual class rather than a matter of &amp;quot;world knowledge&amp;quot;, one may compare the sequence &amp;quot;He went to the window and pulled aside the soft drapes&amp;quot; to the corresponding sequence of circumstance clauses: &amp;quot;He was going to the window and was pulling aside the soft drapes&amp;quot;. World knowledge does come in, however, when one has to decide how much the validity of a circumstance clause extends beyond the interval in the narrative sequence where it is explicitly asserted.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> Specific past narratives may also contain other constituents than clauses. An important case in point is the &amp;quot;flashback&amp;quot; -- an embedded narrative which relates events taking place in a period before the reference time of the main narrative. A flashback is introduced by a clause in the pluperfect; the clauses which continue it may be in the pluperfect or the simple past.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> clause: f-event clause: ~0 @ O f-init , pop&gt; O ~ clause: f-circumstance flashback The first clause in a flashback (f-init) is an event clause; it initializes register settings. The reference time within a flashback moves according to the same meachanism sketched above for the main narrative line.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> After the completion of a flashback, the main narrative line continues where it left off -i.e., it proceeds from the reference time of the main narrative. A simple example: Peter and Mary left the party in a hurry.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> Mary had ran into John and she had insulted him.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> So they got into the car and drove down Avenue C.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="6" start_page="416" end_page="416" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
3. Topic Chainin~
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Another sequential structure is the topic chaining structure, where a series of distinct predications about the same argument are listed. A topic chain consists of a series of clauses C., ..., C k, with a semantic structure of the form~.(a),..., Pk(a), where &amp;quot;a&amp;quot; translates the topic NP'slof the clauses. In the first clause of the chain, the topic is expressed by a phrase (either a full NP or a pronoun) which occurs in subject position or as a preposed constituent. In the other clauses, it is usually a pronoun, often in subject position. An example: Wilbur's book I really liked.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> It was on relativity theory and talks mostly about quarks.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> I got it while I was working on the initial part of my research.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> (Based on Sidner (1983), example D26.) The topic chain may be defined by a very simple transition network. ~ clause: tcn clause: \ ./ clause:</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The network has a topic register, which is set by the first clause (parsed by the tcl arc), which also sets various other registers. The tcn arc tests agreement in the usual way. As for the topic register, we require that the clause being parsed has a constituent which is interpreted as co-referential with the value of this register. The semantics of a topic chain is created by simple conjunction of the semantics of subsequent constitueHts, as in the case of the list.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Lists, narratives and topic chains differ as to their internal structure, but are distributionally indistinguishable -- they may occur in identical slots within larger discourse constituents. For an elegant formulation of the grammar, it is therefore advantageous to bring them under a common denominator: we define the notion sequence to be the union of list, narrative and topic chain.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> C. Expansions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> Under the heading &amp;quot;expansions&amp;quot; we describe two constructions in which a clause is followed by a unit which expands on it, either by elaborating its content (&amp;quot;elaborations&amp;quot;) or by describing properties of a referent introduced by the clause (&amp;quot;topic-dominant chaining&amp;quot;).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> i. Elaborations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> A clause may be followed by a dcu (a clause or clause sequence) which expands on its content, i.e. redescribes it in more detail. For instance, an event clause may be expanded by a mini-narrative which recounts the details of the event. An example: Pedro dined at Madame Gilbert's.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> First there was an hors d'oeuvre.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> Then the fish.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13"> After that the butler brought a glazed chicken.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="14"> The repast ended with a flaming dessert...</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="15"> The discourse syntax perspective suggests that in a case like this, the whole little narrative must be viewed as subordinated to the clause which precedes it. We therefore construct one dcu which consists of the first clause plus the following sequence. .....</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="16"> An illustration of the semantic necessity of such structural analyses is provided by the movement of the reference time in narratives. The above example (by H. Kamp) appeared in the context of the discussion about that phenomenon. (Cf. Dowty, 1982) Along with other, similar ones, it was brought up as complicating the idea that every event clause in a narrative moves the reference time to a later interval. We would like to suggest that it is no coincidence that such &amp;quot;problematic&amp;quot; cases involve clause sequences belonging to known paragraph types, and standing in an elaboration relation to the preceding clause. The reason why they interrupt the flow of narrative time is simple enough: their clauses are not direct constituents of the narrative at all, but constitute their own embedded dcu.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="17"> To describe elaborations, we ~redefine the notion of a clause to be either an elementary one or an elaborated one (where the elaboration can be constituted by a sequence or by a single clause).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="18"> sequence O e-claus~ 0 ~ &amp;quot;+-~0 e-clause clause If a clause C is followed by a dcu D, D may be parsed as an elaboration of C, if C and D may be plausibly viewed as describing the same situation. (Note that this is a relation not between the surface forms of C and D, but between their meanings C' and D'.) When constructing the semantics for the complex clause, this semantic coherence must also be made explicit.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="7" start_page="416" end_page="417" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
2. Topic-Dominant Chaining.
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Another phenomenon which gives rise to a similar structure is &amp;quot;topic-dominant chaining&amp;quot;. Within a clause with a given topic, certain other constituents may be identified as possibly dominant*.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> A dominant constituent may become the topic of the next clause or sequence of clauses. We suggest that such a continuation with a new topic be seen as expanding on the clause before the topic-switch, and as syntactically subordinated to this.clause. This subordinated constituent may either be a single clause or another topic chain sequence.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Similarly, a clause may be followed by a relative clause, the relative pronoun referring to a dominant constituent of the embedding clause. Also in this case, the relative clause may be the first clause of an embedded topic chain.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3">  with extraction phenomena within the sentence. See, e.g., Erteschik-Shir and Lappin (1979).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4">  (We thus introduce an alternative network for clause into the grammar, in addition to the one given before. ) The dominant constituents of the e-clause are stored in a register; the topic of the topic chain, as well as the relative pronoun of the tel. clause must be interpreted as coreferential with one of those constituents. The topic of topic tail (a &amp;quot;headless&amp;quot; topic chain) must in its turn corefer with the relative pronoun.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The semantics consists of simple conjunction.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Both variants of topic-dominant chaining allowed by the above network are exemplified in the following text (Sidner, 1983; example D26):  (I) Wilbur is a fine scientist and a thoughtful guy.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> (2) He gave me a book a while back (2') which I really liked.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> (3) It was on relativity theory (4) and talks mostly about quarks.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> (5) They are hard to imagine (6) because they indicate the need for elementary field theories of a com plex nature.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> (7) These theories are absolutely essential to all relativity research.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> ( 8 ) Anyway (8') I got it (8&amp;quot;) while I was working on the initial part of my research.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> (9) He's a really helpful colleague to have thought  of giving it to me.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13"> (Indentation indicates subordination with respect to the most recent less indented clause.) This embedding of constituents by means of topic-dominant chaining would explain the &amp;quot;focus-stack&amp;quot; which Sidner (1983) postulates to describe the pronominal reference phenomena in examples like this.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="8" start_page="417" end_page="418" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
IV DISCOURSE UNITS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We now leave the discussion of the basic syntactic/semantic mechanisms for building discourse out of clauses, and turn to the higher levels of analysis, where considerations involving the goals of the interaction start to come in. First of all, we shall discuss the entities which Wald (1978) calls Discourse Units*, corresponding closely to the entities which Longacre (1983) simply calls &amp;quot;Discourses&amp;quot;. Discourse Units (DU's) are socially acknowledged units of talk, which have a recognizable point or purpose, and which are built around one of the sequential dcu's discussed in section III B.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Discourse Unit types which have been investigated include stories (Labov, 1972; PTald, 1978; Polanyi, 1978b), descriptions of various sorts (Linde, 1979; Ehrich and Koster, 1983), procedural discourse and hortatory discourse (see various references in Longacre (1983)).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> * Wald restricts his notion to monologic discourse fragments. It seems reasonable to generalize it to cases where more than one speaker may be involved.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Because of the pragmatic relation between the Discourse Unit and the surrounding talk (specifically, the need to appear &amp;quot;locally occasioned&amp;quot; (Jefferson, 1979) and to make a &amp;quot;point&amp;quot; (Polanyi, 1978b), the central part of the Discourse Unit usually is not a piece of talk standing completely on its o~ feet, but is supported by one or more stages of preparatory and introductory talk on one end, and by an explicit closure and/or conclusion at the other. This may be illustrated by taking a closer look at conversationally embedded stories -- the paradigmatic, and most widely studied, DU type. specific past ~ance settinu narrative dcu:exit O )O -~ 0 ~C 20 stor~ A typical story is initiated with entrance talk which sets the topic and establishes the relation with the preceding talk. Often we find an abstract, and some kind of negotiation about the actual telling of the story.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Then follows the &amp;quot;setting&amp;quot; which gives the necessary background material for the story*. Then follows the &amp;quot;core&amp;quot;: a specific past narrative, relating a sequence of events. The story is concluded with &amp;quot;exit talk&amp;quot; which may formulate the point of the story quite explicitly, connecting the storyworld with more general discourse topics.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> For instance, one story in Labov's (1972) collection has as its entrance talk an explicit elicitation and its response to it: O: What was the most important fight that you remember, one that sticks in your mind...</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> A: Well, one (I think) was with a girl.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> There is an extensive section describing the setting: &amp;quot;Like I was a kid you know. And she was the baddest girl, the baddest girl in the neighborhood. If you didn't bring her candy to school, she would punch you in the mouth;&amp;quot; and you had to kiss her when she'd tell you.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> This girl was only twelve years old, man, but she was a killer. She didn't take no junk; she whupped all her brothers.&amp;quot; Then, the event chain starts, and finally ends: &amp;quot;And I came to school one day and I didn't have any money. ( .... ) And I hit the girl: powwww! and I put something on it. I win the fight.&amp;quot; The story is explicitly closed off: &amp;quot;That was one of the most important.&amp;quot; Not every specific past narrative may be the core of a story. Because of the interactional status of the story (its requirement to be &amp;quot;pointful&amp;quot;) there are other properties which are noticeable in the linguistic surface structure -- notably the occurrence of &amp;quot;evaluation&amp;quot; (Polanyi, 1978b) and of a &amp;quot;peak&amp;quot; in the narrative line (Longacre,l~83). * That the necessary background material must be given before the actual event sequence, is attested by a slightly complicated storytelling strategy, described in Polanyi (1978a) as the &amp;quot;True Start&amp;quot; repair: the storyteller first plunges right into the event sequence, then breaks off the narrative line and restarts the telling of the story, now with the insertion of the proper background data.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9">  The structural description of stories, given above, should probably be further elaborated to account for the phenomenon of episodes: a story may be built by consecutive pieces of talk which constitute separate narrative dcu's. At the level of the story DU, the meanings of these narratives must be integrated to form a description of one storyworld rather than many.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> In English and other Western European languages, the Discourse Unit seems to be a largely interactional notion. Its constituents are pieces of talk defined by the independently motivated dcugrammar. The DU grarmnar only imposes constraints on the content-relations between its constituent dcu's; it does not define structures which an adequate dcu grammar would not define already.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> In other languages of the world, the situation seems to be somewhat different: there are syntactically defined ways for building DU's out of dcu's, which were not already part of the dcu grammar.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> For details, one should investigate, for instance, the various works referred to in Longacre (1983). Also in this body of work, however, one can find numerous cases where the structural difference between a DU (&amp;quot;Discourse&amp;quot;, in Longacre's terms) and the corresponding sequential dcu (&amp;quot;paragraph&amp;quot;, in his terms) is not very clear.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="9" start_page="418" end_page="418" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
V I~ERACTIONS AND SPEECH EVENTS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The system we present here is intended to analyze the verbal material occurring in one Interaction. By an Interaction we mean a social situation in which a set of participants is involved in an exchange of talk. Each of the participants knows to be taking part in this situation, a~d assigns to the others the same awareness. By focussing on one interaction, we single out, from all the talk that may be going on at one place at the same time, the talk which belongs together because it is intended to be part of the same social situation. (Cf. Goffman, 1979) The set of participants of an Interaction determines the possible speakers and addressees of the talk occurring in it. Similarly, the physical time and place of an interaction provide the referents for indexicals like &amp;quot;now&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;here&amp;quot;. A simple two person Interaction would be described as an exchange of greetings, followed by a piece of talk as defined by a lower level of the grammar, followed by an exchange of farewells.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Greetings and farewells are the only kinds of talk which directly engage the Interaction level of description -- they correspond to signing on and signing off to the list of participants.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> An &amp;quot;unframed&amp;quot; interaction between &amp;quot;uninterpreted&amp;quot; people is a rare event. People use a refined system of subcategorization to classify the social situations they engage in. These subcategories, which we shall call Speech Event types (cf. Hymes, 1967, 1972), often assign a specific purpose to the interaction, specify roles for the participants, constrain discourse topics and conversational registers, and, in many cases, specify a conventional sequence of component activities. null The most precisely circumscribed kinds of Speech Events are formal rituals. Speech Event types characterized by gran~nars which are less explicit and less detailed include service encounters (Merritt, 1978), doctor-patient interactions (Byrne and Long, 1976), and casual conversations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The structure of talk which is exchanged in order to perform a task will follow the structure of some goal/subgoal analysis of this task (Grosz, 1977). In Speech Event types which involve a more or less fixed goal, this often leads to a fixed grammar of subsequent steps taken to attain it. For instance, students looking at transcripts of the ongoings in a Dutch butchershop, consistently found the following sequential structure in the interaction between the butcher and a customer: i. establishing that it is this customer's turn.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> 2. the first desired item is ordered, and the order is dealt with, .... , the n-th desired item is ordered and the order is dealt with.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> 3. it is established that the sequence of orders is finished.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> 4. the bill is dealt with.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> 5. the interaction is closed off.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> O dcu:2 0 dcu:l 30 dcu'2~OU'~cn'~O~Cn~4&amp;quot; &amp;quot; ~ &amp;quot; 90 dcu:5 ~O butchershop interaction Each of these steps is filled in in a large variety of ways -- either of the parties may take the initiative at each step, question/answer sequences about the available meat, the right way to prepare it, or the exact wishes of the customer may all be embedded in the stage 2 steps, and clarification dialogs of various sorts may occur. In other words, we find the whole repertoire of possibilities admitted by the dcu gralmnar ( particularly, the part dealing with the possible embeddings of adjacency structures within each other).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> Thus, we note that the arcs in a Speech Event diagram such as the above do not impose syntactic constraints on the talk they will parse.The labels on the arcs stand for conditions on the content of the talk -- i.e., on the goals and topics that it may be overtly concerned with.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> An important Speech Event type with characteristics slightly different from the types mentioned so far, is the &amp;quot;casual conversation&amp;quot;. In a casual conversation, all participants have the same role: to be &amp;quot;equals&amp;quot;; no purposes are preestablished; and the range of possible topics is open-ended, although conventionally constrained.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="10" start_page="418" end_page="419" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
VI I~ERRUPTION REVISITED
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> One Speech Event type may occur embedded in another one. It may occupy a fixed Slot in it, as when an official gathering includes an informal prelude or postlude, where people don't act in their official roles but engage in casual conversation. (Goffman, 1979) Or, the embedding may occur at structurally arbitrary points, as when a Service Encounter in a neighborhood shop is interrupted for smalltalk.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The latter case may be described by tacitly adding to each state in the Service Encounter network a looping arc which PUSIIes to the Casual</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>