ABSTRACT
New ground has certainly been broken by Willbrand and Rieke concern- ing strategies of reasoning in spontaneous discourse. By setting aside assumptions that reasoning must be logically relevant, cognitively relevant, disagreement relevant, or planned, they have offered the reader a study of unplanned discourse that captures “what is being said for the first time with no preparation or forethought of either content or structure” (p. 416). Their method of collecting the data, through a series of discourse studies from which they would develop their theory, was also novel in that it allowed the subjects to respond to a request for reasons on a subject for which they had received no prior warning. In this way, the investigators obtained unplanned reasoning in spontaneous discourse.
