[Cancelled] Workshop Monday, February 23rd: Livia Polanyi, The Topic of this Talk is Topic Shifting in Talk
NOTE: THIS WORKSHOP HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO SNOW STORM. WE WILL TRY TO RESCHEDULE.
Our speaker on Monday, February 23rd will be Livia Polanyi, who is an Independent Scholar, formerly of Stanford University, Microsoft Research, Powerset, Fuji-Xerox Research, Rice University, BBN Labs, University of Amsterdam. Livia will give a talk called "The Topic of this Talk is Topic Shifting in Talk: Constraints on the Appropriateness of Next Utterances in Conversation"
Conversation is a form of linguistically encoded interaction in which speakers exchanging utterances with one another without acknowledged goals or tasks jointly construct a Discourse History. In framing an initial or next conversational utterance competent speakers adhere to social and pragmatic conventions to manage how talk flows appropriately from one thing, one topic, to another. After defining key terms and showing how a next utterance for the purpose of topic shifting need not be immediately prior in the flow of talk, I will introduce two distinct topic shifting processes, Step by Step (STEP) described by Sacks, 1973; Hobbs, 1990; Decker, 2022, and Disjunctive Topic Shifting (DTS) treated informally in Sacks,1973 and Jefferson, 1984. Both processes require utterances conform to constraints on Informativity, Coherence, and Relevance.
The Dynamic Feature Model of Topic in which topic is treated as an local phenomenon of individual clauses will then be introduced to explain how one moment we are talking about one thing and a few minutes later we might find ourselves talking about something all together different without anyone really noticing how we got from here to there (H. Sacks, 1973). In STEP, each clause encoding next and prior topic must be Informative to the extent that information novel to the immediate conversational interaction is expressed; while Coherence in STEP emerges from connecting lexical, syntactic and semantic properties of a next utterance to the properties of a previous utterance accessible according to the Right Edge Constraint of discourse syntax. introduced initially in Polanyi and Scha, 1976. Like Coherence, Relevance, is a text internal property in STEP and concerns how informational content in a next utterance relates in some way to some aspect of content in the utterance previous to it.
Unlike STEP, Disjunctive Topic Shift results when a clause without connection to any topic accessible on the Right Edge of the Discourse Parse Tree is uttered by a speaker. This is a fraught move in conversation because speakers are aware of being viewed as a less than competent conversational partner if the topic they introduce fails to adhere to the three constraints. While assessing the Informativity of the DTS utterance is essentially identical to assessing the Informativity of STEP next utterances, explicating how Coherence and Relevance are achieved requires rather different resources. The Be Coherent constraint is met in DS by simply being the next constituent in the interactive activity of Conversing. To explain how a next DTS utterance can meet the Relevant constraint, I will rely on the Egocentric Model of Relevance (EMR). The EMR situates EGO of all speakers at the center of a Relevance Space with the relative placement of each person’s Times, Places, Persons,Events, Activities, Interests etc. at various level of remove. Using the model, the relevance of information encoded in a next utterance to the conversational partners can be calculated. To the extent they are adhered to, respecting these three constraints determine the appropriateness of a next conversational utterance
The workshop will take place on Monday, February 23rd from 5:15 until 7:15pm (Eastern Time) in room 202 of NYU's Philosophy Building (5 Washington Place).
RSVP: If you don't have an NYU ID, and if you haven't RSVPed for a workshop yet during this academic year, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name and email address to Jack Mikuszewski at [email protected]. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show government ID to the security guard.