Argues that a major difficulty in formalizing linguistic dialogue interaction is the uncertainty arising from various factors. Advances proposals for capturing at least some of those factors in logical representations: topic/subtopic arrangement; semantic allocation; participants' competence; discourse goals; semantic, psychological, and pragmatic…

Explores the hypothesis that speech acts cannot be located without bringing in knowledge beyond that of the textual referent itself. Points out that speech acts are made up of sentence context pairs through which one must search for a formal motion of context as a framing of speech activities. (FL)

Discusses the process of understanding of intent by which participants, through the comparative interpretation of a series of cues and symbols as they are revealed in speech, develop categories for a contextual model of communication. Argues that discourse is essentially dialogic and phenomenologically realizable. (FL)

Contends that the organization of comments made by one discourse participant on the contributions of another reveals a hierarchy of relevance and informativity. Illustrates this with discourse samples subjected to a particular method of analysis. (FL)

Discusses the sources of information in oral language. Uses converging evidence from prosody, pausing, structural and semantic parallelism, and stylistic analysis to argue for a series of hypotheses about the units that organize the construction of narrative discourse. Provides examples and appendixes. (JD)

Proposes that dialogue provides children with opportunities to participate with adults in creating linguistic relationships of which they would be incapable alone. Reports the findings of a study of dialogues between mothers and their young children. (FL)