unsignaled concession (credentials); RST and dialogue

[Bill Mann]

replying to stede:

[[Bill wrote:
>In one of the early papers there was a Concession example as follows: >You have
excellent credentials.
>I am looking for someone with excellent experience.

Mmmh, maybe it's my non-native ear; I find it difficult to extract the
incompatibility and to increase positive regard for either statement. Is there
supposed to be stress on 'experience' in the second one?]]

Yes.  The thing was supposed to evoke a job interview in which the applicant is
being rejected.  Stress would be on the requirement that contrasts with the one
held by the applicant.

Concerning dialogue:

I think that RST might work well applied to monologues that occur within a
dialogue situation, particularly for careful speakers.

I don't expect RST to be insightful enough for dialogue more generally.  It
lacks a treatment for the negotiations that go on when a speaker's goal has been
satisfied.  It has some holistic structure, largely unexplored, for monologue,
but I would not expect it to cover interactive beginnings and endings well.  It
has not been developed to handle "repairs,"  corrections, nor any change of
belief orintentions that affects the further course of dialogues.  It does not
deal with the speaker-hearer relation in an insightful way.  For dialogues with
visual contact, where for example statement of Evidence by A is accompanied by
amusement or doubt on the face of B, it is doubly deficient.

And if speaker-hearer dialogue is not covered, then neither is dialogue with
passive observers, and of course multiparty interaction is out of sight.

However, there is certainly cause for hope that RST could be adjusted to fit
into a descriptive framework (about interaction) that accommodated such things.

Bill







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