ABSTRACT
We identify Undirected Speculation as a category of available discourse moves in English dialogue. In an Undirected Speculation Utterance (USU), a speaker offers a question or inquisitive declarative – frequently of the form <I wonder Q> – without assuming that the hearer will acknowledge and potentially respond to this move. Unlike conventional interrogatives, USUs can be felicitously ignored by the hearer and all previously available conversational moves remain licit. We contrast USUs with discourse moves such as assertions and questions in terms of the effect of each discourse move on the dialogue and the felicitous response possibilities. We use Condoravdi and Lauer’s contextual conditions framework (2009) to derive the discourse effects of Undirected Speculation from the truth-conditional semantics of the sentence <I wonder Q>.
Our analysis advances the conversational scoreboard or dialogue gameboard tradition of dialogue modeling (Lewis 1979; Roberts 2012; Farkas & Bruce 2010; Malamud & Stephenson 2015).
We argue that the inquisitive component of a USU may have essentially the same denotation as a question, but affects the gameboard in a distinct way: the hearer is not obligated to address the question and therefore it cannot be the case that a USU is placed directly on the Table. In our revised model, the speaker uttering a polar USU is proposing two possible future gameboard states ({<(p∨¬p),…>,<…>}). In the first, the hearer responds to the question and so the inquisitive component of the USU is placed on the Table, and in the alternative, the hearer ignores the USU (e.g. by uttering something which is not a response to it) – thus the Table remains in its current (potentially empty) state. Upon the next discourse move, one of these projected states becomes the current state of the Table (according to the reaction of the hearer). We believe that Undirected Speculation demonstrates the need to develop richer mechanisms for capturing tentativity in dialogue and provides evidence for the incorporation of possible future states of the Table into the dialogue gameboard model.
