Common Ground

Common Ground, Corrections, and Coordination*
NICHOLAS ASHER and ANTHONY GILLIES
Department of Philosophy
University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station
C3500 Austin TX 78712
U.S.A.
1. INTRODUCTION
Imagine conceiving of a conversation as a game. Each conversational par-

ticipant is a player and when speaking makes a move in the game. Each
move consists in proffering either an assertion for acceptance by other
players or in putting forward a question to be answered. As the game pro-
gresses, a stock of accepted assertions is built up, which we could call the
common ground, what has been settled in the conversation; a corresponding
stack of questions is also built up, as new questions are introduced into
the conversation. As questions are answered, the questions are removed
from the stack, and the answers get added to the common ground. One
could further extend the game to handle other sorts of speech acts like
requests, and so on.
The view of conversation as a game has a certain elegance and plausi-
bility. Suggested already in the later Wittgenstein’s work and developed in
Lewis (1969), Stalnaker (1974) and Carlson (1983), this view has informed
several studies of dialogue (Roberts, 1995; Ginzburg, 1994; Clark, 1996).
Pragmadialecticans like van Eemeren and Grootendorst (1984, 1992, 2003,
this volume), van Eemeren and Houtlosser (2002, this volume), and Snoeck
Henkemans (this volume) have further extended this conception to handle
argumentative moves in discourse and dialogue. But while attractive, this
model has little to say about how to integrate an at least equally compelling
idea that the content of a discourse must depend on the truth conditional
contents of its constituent sentences and their semantic relations to each
other. The game model of conversation alone isn’t sufficient to do justice
to the complexity of discourse interpretation and how individual speech
acts can affect the content of the discourse as a whole.
To get started, consider, for instance, the following examples:
(1) a. A: Who went to work yesterday?
b. B: C did.
c. A: No she didn’t; I talked to her.
Let’s adopt a simplistic game model of conversation for the moment. B
profers his assertion to A, which A rejects. What now is the status of B’s
Argumentation 17: 481–512, 2003.

 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
482 NICHOLAS ASHER AND ANTHONY GILLIES
assertion in terms of its contribution to the overall content of the discourse?

The game view doesn’t say. At the very least we would like to record the
information that the assertion was B’s attempt at answering A’s question.
Indeed, part of the discourse content and an important fact about the
interpretation of the dialogue is that B offered (1b) as an answer to A’s
question.
A more complex conversation shows that the rhetorical function of a
particular speech act can itself be questioned or rejected.
(2) a. A: Why did John get sent to jail?
b. B: He was caught embezzling funds from the pension plan.
c. C: John was indeed caught embezzling, but that’s not WHY he
went to jail. He went to jail because he was convicted of
tax evasion.
C accepts both the presupposition behind A’s question (that John went to
jail) and the truth of B’s assertion in (2b); but C rejects the claim that (2b)
is an answer to A’s question. The simple game model that we sketched
earlier simply fails to capture this information. Indeed it fails to capture
any aspect of the rhetorical function of conversational moves of dialogue.
In other work, one of us [NA] has argued that such rhetorical functions
must be captured in order to explain many features of discourse interpre-
tation – pronominal and temporal anaphora, VP ellipsis, lexical ambiguity
and presupposition (Asher, 1993; Lascarides and Asher, 1993; Asher Hardt
and Busquets, 1997; Asher and Lascarides, 1995; Asher and Lascarides,
forthcoming). If this previous work is on the right track, then the simple
game theoretic view of conversation has to be replaced, supplemented or
integrated with an account of rhetorical function.
In this essay we’ll try to integrate certain key elements of the game
theoretic view within a framework of discourse interpretation (SDRT) that
takes rhetorical function seriously. These key elements are: the common
ground or stock of accepted assertions and the stack of questions under
discussion. It turns out that the stack of questions under discussion arise
naturally out of an incremental picture of how discourse structure is built
up as the dialogue proceeds. The stock of settled information, on the other
hand, is more difficult to capture, at least in part because, as we already
see in the examples above, subsequent discourse can affect what is and
what is isn’t settled. Key to understanding a theory of common ground or
of settled information is a good grasp of the rhetorical functions of speech
acts that put information into question or correct it. And these rhetorical
relations are peculiar to dialogue. So first we will briefly go into why a
theory of settled information isn’t obviously needed for monologue and
then move to a semantics for dialogue. Then we’ll introduce ways of
encoding disagreements within discourse structure and in the third section,
we’ll look at a particular type of disagreement in dialogue, which are called
Corrections, with the aim of analyzing how information becomes settled
COMMON GROUND, CORRECTIONS, AND COORDINATION 483
in dialogues with Correction We’ll then go on to analyze settledness

and question stacks in the theory and finally come back to certain appli-
cations of the theory of settledness that have been exploited by psycholo-
gists like Clark. Clark’s idea is that participants in a dialogue may have
quite different idiolects which they nevertheless coordinate together in
conversation. This coordination takes place through the acquisition of
certain mutual beliefs. These mutual beliefs constitute the common ground
for Clark. We’ll look at some examples of coordination from the SDRT
perspective.
2. DYNAMIC DISCOURSE SEMANTICS FOR DIALOGUE
Dynamic semantic theories are designed to deal with context sensitive and
anaphoric phenomena beyond the bounds of the single sentence. To this
end, such theories postulate that a sentence’s meaning is a context change
potential (CCP), which is a relation between contexts – the input back-
ground context and an output context in which the input context has been
updated with the information contained in the sentence. The notion of
common ground as Stalnaker understood it – that the common ground is
the stock of information that has been agreed upon in the conversation –
has played little to no role in dynamic semantics. And this is equally true
of theories like SDRT with a rich notion of rhetorical function. The reason
for this is simple: in SDRT as in dynamic semantics, every bit of infor-
mation introduced into the discourse context winds up being part of the
output context – everything is agreed upon and thus part of the common
ground! It is only when language use involves several participants in a con-
versation that there can be genuine disagreement and it is only with genuine
disagreement that here arises a need to establish what is settled or common
ground amongst the participants.
The central innovating feature of SDRT in comparison to other dynamic
semantic theories is the central role rhetorical, or discourse, relations play
in determining discourse content. These relations are all anaphoric in the
sense that while an utterance may play one or more rhetorical roles in a
given discourse context, each one of these roles is relational and requires
an antecedent. That is, if an utterance is playing the role of an explanation
in a particular discourse context, it does so in virtue of being an explana-
tion of some other element already introduced into the discourse. In SDRT,
we actually analyze rhetorical roles as contentful relations between speech
acts; alternatively, one can think of rhetorical roles as types of speech acts.
They are relational types of speech acts. Traditional speech act theory
analyzes speech acts in terms of the use of utterances in isolation. What
such a theory misses are the dynamic interactions between speech acts; that
is, speech act theory fails to notice the anaphoric character of speech acts
that is central to SDRT. More recent speech act analyses such as Allen et
al. (1994) have added to the basic analysis of speech acts some that have
a ‘backward communicative function’ – speech acts such as acceptance and
rejection. Nevertheless, even these analyses fail to notice, for instance, that
many other traditional speech acts, like assertions, also have an anaphoric
character and that a much finer typology of speech acts results once one
takes account of this anaphoricity. The different types of assertive speech
acts differ in that each class has a different rhetorical function, and this
rhetorical function determines how the assertion is related to the back-
ground context. SDRT models this rhetorical function by means of rhetor-
ical relations, which are at least two term relations. One of the terms of
the relation is the new speech act; the other is an available antecedent
speech act that is part of the discourse structure given by the context. As
argued in Lascarides and Asher (1993), many discourse relations also deter-
mine anaphoric connections between the eventualities introduced in the two
discourse segments they relate. A rich discourse semantics like SDRT
shows that anaphoric relations exist between speech acts themselves, and
that assertions may exploit this anaphoric element to perform a variety of
rhetorical functions. A typology of discourse relations thus will yield a
typology of the types of anaphoric speech acts – in effect, by recognizing
the anaphoric behavior involved in rhetorical function, we get a much richer
theory of speech acts than Searle’s.
Let’s turn now to discourse structure in more detail. A discourse struc-
ture intuitively involves contents and relations involving those contents;
thus, one proposition elaborates or explains another (cf. Asher, 1993). But
that’s not quite right; as propositions are abstract objects, the same propo-
sition can be expressed by many different utterances or speech acts and so
could conceivably have many different rhetorical relations. So in fact
discourse structure involves occurrences of propositions and relations on
them. These occurrences we call speech acts. To implement this view, the
language of SDRT extends the language of Discourse Representation
Theory (DRT), one type of dynamic semantics, with speech act discourse
referents, π0, π1, π2, etc. These speech act discourse referents act as labels
of formulas or structures that have propositional content; in DRT these are
known as Discourse Representation Structures (DRSs) and in SDRT as
segmented DRSs or SDRSs. The developments of this paper, however,
won’t make any reference to the special properties of DRSs, and so we’ll
be giving here a much more abstract characterization of SDRSs than
usual. The advantage of this way of presenting things is that SDRS update
becomes much simpler to state than usual (Asher, 1996; Asher and
Lascarides, in press). So first let’s look at the SDRS language in this more
abstract setting. We’re going to assume a base set of ‘microstructure’
formulas or logical forms for clauses and then build in a discourse
‘macrostructure’, following Asher and Fernando (1997). The microstruc-
ture formulas could be, ordinary formulas of predicate logic, dynamic
semantic formulas or DRSs, though to handle the anaphoric phenomena
that SDRT has addressed to date (Asher, 1993; Lascarides and Asher, 1993;
Asher and Lascarides, in press) some sort of dynamic microstructure would
be needed).
• the microstructure: a set Ψ of logical forms for clauses
• labels for logical forms: π, π1, π2, etc.
• a set of relation symbols for discourse relations: R, R1, R2
• If R is an n-ary relation symbol, and π1, . . . , πn , then R(π1, . . . , πn ) ∈
Φ and Ψ ⊆ Φ
• For φ, φ′ ∈ Φ, (φ ∧ φ′), ¬φ ∈ Φ
A discourse structure (viz. an SDRS) is a pair (A, F ), where:
• A is a set of labels
• F: A → Φ
Discourse structure is encoded by relation symbols on speech act dis-
course referents; e.g., Elaboration(π1, π2) signifies that the speech act π2
elaborates what was said in π1. Our notation also captures the recursive-
ness of discourse structure; F may map one speech act discourse referent
onto a formula in which other speech act discourse referents occur.
Nevertheless, the macrostructure that encodes discourse structure is really
quite simple; note, for instance, that all quantificational complexities lie
within the microstructure itself. Thus, one might hope for a logic for com-
puting discourse macro structures that is less complex than that for first
order logic, which is in fact the case in SDRT (see Lascarides and Asher,
1993 and Asher et al., 1996 for more details). SDRT has an elaborate theory
about how to infer such discourse relations from a variety of clues (see
Lascarides and Asher, 1993)
From syntax we pass to the semantics. Let us suppose as given a seman-
tics for the microstructural formulas; to be more precise assume an inten-
sional semantics that assigns to formulas relative to a model a set of pairs
of worlds and partial assignments as their semantic values (as in DRT –
cf. Fernando, 1994). Such a semantics extends in a straightforward fashion
to handle formulas in SDRT (for details see Asher, 1998; Asher and
Lascarides, in press). It can be used to then calculate in a bottom up fashion
the content of an entire discourse structure.
Another important part of SDRT is the background theory that imposes
constraints or meaning postulates on the interpretation of formulas
expressing discourse relations. Such axioms specify the semantic implica-
tions of discourse relations, and they detail the contribution of discourse
relations to the interpretation of constituents, supplementing the composi-
tional semantics. For example, consider the three examples from Lascarides
and Asher (1993).
(3) John entered. Fred greeted him.
(4) John fell. Fred pushed him.
(5) Alexis worked hard in school. She got A’s in every subject.
In the SDRT analysis of each one of the examples above, a different dis-
course relation links the labeled representations or logical forms formed
from the two component sentences. We’ll label the two logical forms in
each case π1 and π2. In (3), the propositions expressed by the first and
second sentences form a narration, and thus the SDRS for (3) will contain
the information that Narration (π1, π2). Now one of the meaning postu-
lates on Narration entails that the main eventuality in π1, the eventuality
of John’s entering, must precede the main eventuality in π2, that of Fred’s
greeting him. In (4), a different discourse relation, Explanation, holds of
π1 and π2. The semantics of Explanation yields temporal consequences as
well; given that Fred’s pushing John is an achievement and not a process
or state, we know that the eventuality of John’s falling must come after
Fred’s pushing him. Finally in (5), we have Elaboration(π1, π2), which
implies the presence of yet another temporal relation, the relation of
temporal inclusion between the main eventualities of π1 and π2.
To state such constraints or meaning postulates on discourse relations,
we will have to extend the language of discourse structure to include a way
of representing discourse structures – in particular the function F that
assigns formulas to speech act discourse referents, as well as the transi-
tions between such functions given by the update relation to be discussed
shortly. For example, to state the temporal constraints on Elaboration just
mentioned, we need to suppose a function term for main eventualities that
could be applied to the value of F at a particular label. In Asher and
Lascarides (in press), we also have stated constraints on how a particular
discourse relation can affect underspecified logical forms; to state that
precisely within the background theory we need then to be able to talk about
SDRS updates. Since such updates are relations, we will need two function
symbols for assigning formulas to speech acts – an ‘input’ one so to speak
and an output one that are related by SDRS update.
Let us assume such an extension of our discourse language in place,
where K and K′ will be our function terms for input and output assignments
of formulas to labels. One of the attractions of this extension is that we
can exploit the contents of the SDRSs associated with labels in determining
the content of conditions involving discourse relations Narration,
Elaboration, Explanation. For instance, these relations are all veridical in
the following sense. Let Kπ the formula associated with π.
• A discourse relation R is veridical iff
(Kπ → R(π1, π2)) → (Kπ → (Kπ1 ∧ Kπ2))
In words, if some part of a discourse structure implies a veridical relation
R, then that part implies also the formulas associated with the terms of R.
So, for example, a condition like Elaboration(π1,π2), as intuition would
suggest, entails that the contents associated with those speech acts obtain.1
A discourse structure that features only veridical relations has an easily
calculable content: we first calculate the relational (dynamic) meaning of
each clause associated with a label, and we then compose these together
following the way they are related by discourse relations (remember that
the meaning of each clause, dynamically speaking, is a relation so com-
position is the natural operation here!); finally, we add after each such com-
position the semantic content of the discourse relation that holds between
the constituents. So, for instance, if we have a discourse structure in which
Narration relates π1 and π2 and Elaboration links π2 and π3, we would inter-
pret the whole structure by first composing the meaning of Kπ1 with that
of Kπ2 then adding the semantic effects of Narration (namely that the main
eventuality in π1 precedes that of π2), and then composing with that result
the content of Kπ3 and then that of Kπ4, finally adding the semantic content
of Elaboration(π3, π4).2 If we consider only discourse structures with
veridical relations, then our semantics for discourse looks very much like
other dynamic semantic theories in that it shares the following two features
of success and monotonicity (‘Update(σ, φ)’ is shorthand for the set of
output SDRSs that result from adding the information that φ to each of a
set of contextually given SDRSs σ):
• Success: Update(σ, φ) |= φ
• Monotonicity: σ |= ψ → Update(σ, φ) |= ψ
But it is precisely these properties that many relations in dialogue make
problematic, as we’ll see.
But before we look at the differences between dialogue and monologue,
let’s notice some similarities. Discourse relations present in monologue are
also present in dialogue (though as some of the discussions by Groenendijk,
Stokhof and Veltman would suggest, there may be additional conditions,
say, for Narration in multilogue).
(6) a. A: Jones got kicked out of school.
b. B: He was caught buying liquor.
c. C: That was really dumb of him.
In (6), B provides an explanation for the event A described, while C offers
a Commentary. These are relations that are often observed in monologue
(Asher, 1993). Other relations like Background, Result are also easily
observed in dialogue.
For Narration, the ‘basic’ or default discourse relation of Lascarides and
Asher, 1993, to occur in dialogue, we require some extra assumptions about
the context. Narration involving two or more speakers must be about an
event or events that both participants witnessed or that they have agreed
to imagine together – as when children collaborate in making up a story.
Once this presupposition is met, however, Narrations seem perfectly fine
in dialogue.3 Suppose that A and B are recounting to C what happened
while they were minding the store:
(7) a. A: A well dressed gentleman came in this morning.
b. B: He asked to see the most expensive suit.
c. C: Did he buy it?
In (7) A’s and B’s speech acts stand in the relation of Narration.
But while dialogue shares some structural similarities with monologue,
in other respects it is very different. Because dialogue involves at least
two agents, there is a potential for disagreement and conflict in a way that
there isn’t for monologue (unless the author has split personalities). There
disagreements are types in fact of discourse relations on our view, but these
relations are different from those found in monologue. These discourse rela-
tions that are either not found in monologue at all or only very seldom (and
so have been ignored). Here are some examples of Corrections in 8, 10,
Counterevidence in 11, and Contradiction in 12:
(8) a. A: John distributed the copies.

b. B: No, it was Sue who distributed the copies.
(9) a. A: I bought the President a tray for his Delft china set.
b. B: That wasn’t a good idea. The President hates the Delft china
set.4
(10) a. A: John went to jail. He was caught embezzling funds from the
pension plan.
b. B: No that’s not why John went to jail. He went to jail because
he was convicted of tax evasion.
(11) a. A: Smith shot the guard at the bank.
b. B: He has witnesses that say he was out of town at the time of
the robbery.
(12) a. A: John took first place.
b. B: No, he didn’t.
The difficulties that these examples expose is that the types of discourse
relations involved hold between speech acts that have contradictory
contents. It is incoherent to analyze these examples in terms of a spatio-
temporal or other structure on entities like the events involved in the
related constituents, if these entitles are understood to be part of or objects
within one possible world. Further, it is clear that the content of the
dialogues in these examples is not the conjunction of the contents of
what A and B say, for that would net us a contradictory truth conditional
content. Rather there is a complex relation between the contents of what
is said in the two speech acts; the second speech act is an attempt to correct
what the second speaker sees as deficiencies in the content of the first
speech act or as in (9) in the content of a cognitive state that the second
speaker assumes led to the first speech act. We call these sorts of discourse
relations divergent discourse relations; these relations contrast with the
veridical ones characterized earlier. A speech act that gets related to an
antecedent in the discourse context by a divergent discourse relation has
a content that is incompatible with that of its antecedent. Nevertheless,
dialogues involving divergent discourse relations do not have absurd

contents. One immediate conclusion is that divergent discourse relations
aren’t veridical in the sense given above. More generally, the presence of
divergent relations requires us to move from incremental or monotonic
interpretation, in which the content of each speech is added to the content
of the context as in all forms of dynamic semantics, to non-incremental
interpretation.
Divergent discourse relations are not only non-veridical, they may also
force us to revise other parts of the discourse structure. Let’s consider (1)
again:
b. B: C did.
c. A: No she didn’t; I talked to her.
B’s response to A’s question is, at least for B, an answer to the question,
and as such something that B takes to be true. The axioms of Asher and
Lascarides (1998a) take B’s response to be an answer to the question as a
default. Now were A to accept such a response, B’s response would then
be settled as an answer to the question, at least as far as the two partici-
pants are concerned. The truth of B’s response would become something
settled and part of the content of the dialogue. A’s Correction, on the other
hand, puts the status of B’s response into doubt; the Correction makes prob-
lematic the status of B’s response as an answer. Of course B may, subse-
quent to A’s Correction, attempt to defend his response as an answer and
correct A’s Correction. The future moves in the dialogue may resolve this
disagreement to settle the matter, so that B’s response eventually becomes
accepted and part of the content of the discourse. But then it may not.
This unsettledness that divergent discourse relations bring to dialogue is
challenging to treat in an incremental theory of discourse interpretation
such as SDRT.
Taking our cue from classical theories of rhetoric, there seem to be two
stages in the analysis of these discourse relations. The first is to get an
adequate representation of such interchanges and to do so in a relatively
compositional manner. The second is to address he problem of how
Corrections, etc. affect the ‘future moves’ by the discourse participants.
Where discourse interpretation is incremental, there is only one type of dis-
course move available if the discourse is to be continued: the speaker adds
new information to the discourse context. But in dialogue and especially
if a non-incremental discourse relation has been used, the speaker is indeed
seems to have several options. He may accept the effects of the Correction,
Counterevidence or Contradiction and perhaps continue the discourse by
adding new information as in the monolingual case, or he may try to defend
the speech act that was the object of the correction, etc. by correcting or
contradicting the previous speech act – as for instance in this continuation
of (10ab):
(10c) A: No, You’re wrong. He went to jail because he was caught

embezzling funds. I was at the trial.
The second stage concerning discourse expectations can be addressed

relatively quickly. SDRT goes some way towards explaining the expecta-
tions that a particular speech act in dialogue may give rise to. These dis-
course expectations are about maintaining discourse cohesion, and as such
they derive at least in part from the rules speakers use to attach their con-
tribution to the discourse context. In dialogue a participant A must respond
appropriately to the other participant B’s last conversational turn, which
involves finding a discourse relation with which to bind A’s speech act to
B’s. Further the discourse relation so discovered will also typically be con-
sonant with the expectations generated by B’s speech act, because A and
B are using the same rules for attachment – and the same rules that we
are. So A will respond to B’s conversational turn using one of the accepted
discourse relations. In this sense a theory of discourse expectations should
fall naturally out of an analysis of the discourse structure of the dialogue.
The first step of building up incrementally a discourse structure and its
associated interpretation when Corrections or other divergent speech acts
are present is a good deal more involved, and it is here that we can use
the formal framework of SDRT to advantage. To give some feel for the
details of this process, in SDRT we define the context change potential of
a sentence using a notion of SDRS update, UpdateSDRT that is a relation
between an input SDRS and an output SDRS that integrates some new
information into the input SDRS. Typically in interpretation we face the
problem of having several candidate SDRSs that purport to give the logical
structure of the discourse, and so update means that we are in effect moving
from one set of logical forms to another. To calculate the update of an SDRS
with new information, we use a ‘glue logic’ called DICE that tells us what
rhetorical relation links the new information to some attachment point in
the antecedent context. Because these rhetorical relations are not always
signaled incontrovertibly with lexical or grammatical clues, we have to
‘guess’ their presence from partial clues: the glue logic in which we for-
malize these ‘guesses’ must be a nonmonotonic one. The main idea of this
logic is that it expresses defaults by means of weak conditionals that use
the connective >. We’ll denote the nonmonotonic consequence relation that
exploits these defaults by |~ (see Asher and Morreau, 1991; Asher, 1995;
Morreau, 1995 for details). The axioms of the glue logic are defaults or
monotonic axioms about rhetorical relations. While these axioms exploit
a wide variety of information sources, they have a limited access to the
contents of formulas associated with labels, and this allows the glue logic
to be of a much lower order of complexity than the logic of SDRT formulas
or of the background meaning postulate language (see Asher and Fernando,
1997 for details). In SDRT we represent this limited access by an infor-
mation transfer function µ on labels which yields predicates of labels that
contain information about the contents of the formulas associated with those
labels.
When the discourse context is ‘empty’ (i.e. when we are just starting a
discourse), we just add the new information into the context. But in general,
UpdateSDRT is much more complex. In particular, when the discourse context
τ is a non-empty SDRS, UpdateSDRT requires an available attachment point
α in τ to be identified, for attaching the new information β to. There is
some indeterminacy in this choice, because τ may contain more than one
label on the right frontier – e.g., if it contains Elaboration, Explanation or
some other discourse subordinating relation. In fact, Correction is also a
discourse subordinating relation, as we shall see below. This means that
SDRS update is a relation relating an input SDRS to an output SDRS. We
now define UpdateSDRT formally within this more abstract SDRT framework
developed here.5 Let α[β/γ] be the result of replacing γ in α with β. Then
UpdateSDRT is defined as follows, where 〈A, F 〉 is the input discourse struc-
ture, e is some new expression to be integrated and whose logical form is
ψe :
SDRT’s Update Relation:
(〈A, F 〉,e)UpdateSDRT〈A ∪ {πe}, F * ∪{πe , ψe}〉 iff
1. if A = 0, then F * = F
2. if A ≠ 0, ∃π, π1 ∈ A such that:
(a) Available(π1) and,
(b) F (π) → φ(π1),
(c) (µ(A) ∧ ψe ) |~ R(π1, πe ) and,
(d) F * is just like F except that F * (π) → R(π1, πe ) and that F * (π)
contains revisions or specifications of underspecified conditions
that are |~ provable from information about the given context and
the fact that R(π1, πe ).
In words, clause 1 deals with the case when we start a new discourse
and we simply add the new information to an empty discourse context.
Clause 2 deals with the case when we continue with a discourse and add
asserted information. It contains three subclauses, the first two of which
demand that you rhetorically connect the new information to some avail-
able speech act discourse referent in the context via some rhetorical relation
R that results from the DICE axioms. As can be seen from clauses (2c)
and (2d), R(α, β) gets added to the update, specifically to the constituent
that introduced the attachment point α as a speech act discourse referent.
Clause (2d) allows for the possibility that adding information to an SDRS
may cause us to revise parts already given by prior processing of discourse.
We won’t have much to say about how discourse structure can help resolve
underspecified conditions in this paper (cf. Asher and Lascarides, 1998a
or Asher and Lascarides, in press for a discussion of this). In fact resolving
underspecifications doesn’t affect the underlying monotonicity or success
properties of discourse interpretation. But the revision of constituents is
crucial for understanding Correction and other divergent speech acts, and
it is revision that threatens monotonicity and success. Revision is how we
will attack the unsettling aspect of Correction. Recall our discussion above
of (1) and how A’s Correction puts the status of B’s response as an answer
into dispute. In SDRT links between the propositions that make up the
discourse structure and that are expressed by the various utterances in the
discourse are computed as new information is added to an existing dis-
course structure. So now suppose that SDRT has computed R(α, β), that
R is veridical, and that γ is a Correction on β. R’s veridicality entails
that the SDRS labeled by β should be true, but the semantics of Correction
says that it isn’t. So if Correction holds, we have to revise R into a non-
veridical version. We do so by defining an operator on relations Dis so
that DisR is discourse relation. DisR(π1, π2) signifies that some discourse
participant, typically the person who introduced π2, believed at the time
that R(π1, π2) but that ¬R(π1, π2). Of course this revision may itself be
reversed or modified during subsequent moves in the dialogue, as we shall
see.
This approach makes revision an unavoidable feature of update with
divergent discourse relations. It might be possible to avoid revision in
updating an SDRS with Correction just by waiting to assign the relation
between α and β until after the other partner in the dialogue has his con-
versational turn. That is, we would let the relation between α and β in the
abstract example given above remain underspecified until it could be
verified whether new information attached to β was a Correction or not.
But this would not rule out revision in cases where there were multiple
Corrections. Further, it wouldn’t account for the sort of Correction in (10)
or (2), in which it is the discourse relation computed during the attach-
ment of previous information to the discourse context that is disputed. We
repeat these examples below:
(10) a. A John went to jail. He was caught embezzling funds from the
pension plan.
b. B: Yes, John went to jail, but he did so because he was
convicted of tax evasion.
tax evasion.
C accepts both the presupposition behind A’s question (that John went to
jail) and the truth of B’s assertion in (2b); but C rejects the claim that (2b)
is an answer to A’s question. This is a more complex conversation than
others we have looked at so far, because it has three participants. But we
could imagine a sort of examination context in which A corrects B in the
same manner as C. We shall take this as evidence that Corrections and other
divergent discourse relations impose revisions on the discourse context.
A final comment about SDRT-update concerns what it doesn’t tell us.
SDRT-update doesn’t tell us about settledness or common grounds. Indeed,
the crucial question that we have to answer is: what the upshot of a dis-
course, if it contains a sequence of speech acts involving divergent dis-
course relations? Is anything ‘settled’ after a sequence of such speech acts?
As will emerge from our discussion of divergent discourse relations, under-
standing what is ‘settled’ in a discourse with divergent discourse relations
will be crucial to a satisfactory analysis and gives the key to the content
of a discourse in which such divergent relations appear. We could make
settledness an underspecified feature that SDRS update could resolve. As
we will see, however, settledness isn’t determined just by the local dis-
course connection but rather by the global discourse structure. So it dose
not seem plausible to make settledness some underspecified element that
is resolved during local discourse attachment.
In the next section we will look in more detail at what is the contribu-
tion of a sentence to the interpretation of the discourse of which it is part
on the non-incremental conception of discourse semantics. We’ll consider
the case of one particular type of divergent discourse relation, Correction.
3. ANALYSIS OF ONE DIVERGENT DISCOURSE RELATION: CORRECTION
Correction is an example of a discourse relation, the understanding of which

is crucially dependent on how the new information interacts with the
discourse context. Correction exploits intonational structure, in particular
the focus background partition of the new information,6 and induces a
revision of the part of the discourse context on which it is ‘anaphorically’
dependent or in SDRT terms discourse attached. Consider for instance (13)
from from Van Leusen (1994). The intonationally prominent or focused
part of the new information in the second sentence is marked off in brackets
subscripted with an F.
(13) a. A: They gave Peter the new computer.
b. B: No, they gave [John]F the new computer.
13.a–b presents a very simple sort of correction. We will call A’s turn
the target of the correction by B. Now to some informal observations. No
seems to be functioning here as a discourse particle, and it is a clue that
some divergent discourse relation relates B’s response to A’s turn. It also
gives us a key element of the semantics of Correction: B’s response should
contradict or be inconsistent with what A said. What is in focus is intended
to replace some part of the constituent that is the target, and what is not
in focus appears to be very similar in content to some part of the other
constituent.
Van Leusen gives convincing examples to show that the information that
is not in focus is not necessarily syntactically or morphologically identical
to material in the other constituent to which one is attaching with the
discourse relation Correction.
(14) a. A: They gave Peter the new computer.
b. B: No [Andrew]F got it.
So it seems that the relation depends on the structure of the content of
the two propositions being related.7 The proposal made in Asher (1995) is
that the appropriate level at which to define Correction is the level of
semantic representations of SDRT known as SDRSs.
So far we have seen examples of Corrections, where what is being cor-
rected is some feature of the asserted content associated with the
Correction’s first term. However, that isn’t always the case; (9) shows that
an implicature – viz., that A bought the tray because he thought it would
please the President – is corrected. Corrections can also correct presuppo-
sitions of a previous speech act as well (cf. van der Sandt, 1991):8
(15) a. A: I heard John’s girlfriend is coming to town.
b. B: John doesn’t have a girlfriend.
As argued in Asher and Lascarides (1998b), presuppositions attach to
the discourse context in a way similar to assertions. In (15) the assertion’s
content depends on the presupposition, because the assertion involves a
variable who’s binder occurs in the presupposition. In correcting a pre-
supposition as in (15), B’s contribution is linked to the presupposition of
(15a), but in so doing it will also render A’s assertion problematic, since
the Correction puts into doubt the very existence of the binder of a variable
in that assertion. Implicatures like those inferred in (9) don’t attach to dis-
course structure but they are dependent on it. We have argued elsewhere
that an important feature of dialogue interpretation is the interpreter’s model
of the speaker’s cognitive state – e.g., a model of what he believes, wants
and intends at the minimum. This model enables the interpreter to plan
appropriate responses and even deduce discourse structure (Asher, 1998b).
Implicatures like those from (9 are added to the hearer’s model of the first
speaker’s cognitive state. In such cases, the Correction will still attach
to the assertion but its correcting force will be directed to one of these
implicatures.
The partial semantics of the Correction relation below summarizes but
also amplifies on that given in Asher (1995). We use meaning postulates
in the background theory to specify it. The semantics of Correction exploits
the SDRS update relation that tells us how to modify the content of the
discourse. We will exploit the focus background partition (where focus
is marked by intonational prominence) of the Correcting constituent
(see Txurruka, 1997) and assume that there is a function that takes
these elements and maps them onto semantic representations of subclausal
elements in the Corrected constituent. These subclausal representations
could be lambda terms representing partial DRSs (dynamic quantifiers) or

predicative DRSs (dynamic properties) as in Asher (1993).
Coherence constraints on a discourse relation R impose constraints on
the resolution of underspecified conditions and on the general form and
content of the constituents to be R related. In particular Correction imposes
a constraint on the content of the second term of the relation; the second
term must deny the content of the first term or one of its presuppositions
or implicatures. This is our first update axiom for revising the content of
constituents linked by Correction. The next two axioms determine the effect
of Corrections on the rhetorical structure of the context. The second revises
veridical discourse relations in the context. We’ll use the ordinary notation
of substitution of one SDRS condition with another to indicate the effects
of this axiom. In words it says: if you attach with a correction to a con-
stituent that itself is attached to the discourse context with a veridical
relation R, replace R with its ‘disputed cousin’ dis-R.9 Again, DisR(A:α,
B:β) iff some discourse participant, typically B, believes R(A:α, B:β)
but ¬R(α, β). The third axiom shows the effects of Correction when
attached to speech act supporting another divergent discourse relation. It
says that a Correction to a Correction will put into dispute the unsettling
effects of the first Correction. Furthermore, by the semantics of the Dis
operator, if given the new input we can infer that the speaker who was
first corrected still believes that the convergent discourse relation he used
obtains, then we will conclude that second Correction reinstates that
original relation that was put into doubt by the first Correction. That is, Dis
Dis R(A:a, B:b) iff ∃xbelieves(xDisR(a, b) ∧ ¬DisR(a, b), which implies
¬(∃xbelieves(x, R(a, b)) ∧ ¬R(a, b)), which of course implies R(a, b) if
someone believes that R(a, b).
• Semantics of Correction:
• Correction (A: α, B: β) iff
1. Kβ is inconsistent with Kα, a presupposition of Kα or an implicature
of Kα, hereafter called Source (Kα).
2. there is a bijection ζ from the focus background structure of Kβ onto
the logical forms of the subclausal constituents of Source (Kα) such
that for some X, ζ(Focus(β)) = X, and
Source(Kα) ~||~ Apply[X, Background(Kβ)]
• Correction Update Axiom 1 (material to be added to β during update):
(K′π → (Kπ ∧ Correction (α, β))) → (K′β ↔ (Kβ Source Kα [y/x] ∧
¬Source(Kα)))
• Correction Update Axiom 2 (revising veridical discourse relations):
((K′π → (Kπ ∧ Correction (α, β))) ∧ (Kπ → R(γ, α)) ∧ Veridical(R)) →
(K′π → Kπ[DisR(γ, α)/R(γ, α)])
• Correction Update Axiom 3 (responses to divergent relations):
((K′π → (Kπ ∧ Correction (α, β))) ∧
(Kπ → (R(γ1, α) ∧ DisR′(γ2, γ1)))) →
(K′π → Kπ[DisR(γ1, α)/R(γ1, α)] [Dis DisR′(γ2, γ1)/DisR′(γ2, γ1)])
The idea is that the partition of the new information induces us to con-
struct a partial isomorphism between the focus/background structure of
the source and a structure in the target such that the element in target that
the background maps onto is equivalent in semantic content and the value
of the focused material under this mapping is the part to be corrected. The
Correction constraint tells the interpreter that the speaker wishes to reject
a particular portion of what has been said. Rather than simple rejecting
the whole of what has come before, which means then that it is not clear
what the revision is, the speaker accepts everything except that which is
mapped onto the focal information. So for example, if we accept B’s
response in 13, we are not just accepting what he says, but we are also
negating what A said in 13.a; here the assertion is the source. So Correction
(α, β) should entail ¬Kα ∧ Kβ, as it does given update axiom 1. But in
effect it does more than that; it replaces A’s utterance, in effect, with a
revision of it that is determined by the focus/background partition. In 13.b
the background part should map onto something equivalent in 13.a, while
the part in focus, John 13.b maps onto something in 13.b that it ends up
replacing.
In the more complex discourse examples like (1), we can see the second
discourse update axiom at work. In Asher and Lascarides (1998), we
proposed an analysis of the discourse relation, indirect question answer
pairs or IQAP, which obtains between a question and some assertion that
leads the hearer to infer a direct answer to his question. This relation
subsumes the question direct answer relation and is more useful, since most
responses in dialogue cannot be labelled as direct answers but are rather
indirect answers, thus instantiating IQAP. The response is taken to be
true if IQAP holds. This implies the following meaning postulate for
IQAP:
• (K′π → (Kπ ∧ IQAP(π1, π2))) → (K′π → Kπ2)
How does IQAP interact with Correction in, for example, (1)? Using the
axioms of Asher and Lascarides (1998a), we infer IQAP(A:1a, B:1b). But
then we have Correction (B:1b, A:1c), via for instance the axioms in Asher
(1995). There is, as things stand, an incompatibility between IQAP and
Correction, but the second update axiom for Correction forces us to revise
the background discourse context, replacing IQAP(A:1a, B:1b) with Dis
IQAP(A:1a, B:1b). So at the end of (1), matters are unsettled and in dispute.
We’ll see how to resolve matters in the next section.
In view of the fact that Corrections may only reject part of the con-
stituent to which they attach, it appears possible that a Correction of a
purported answer to a question may still be compatible with IQAP. If the
background part of the Correction is sufficient to serve as an answer to
the original question, then the IQAP relation will be preserved but only
the background part of its original second term will serve as an answer, as
in the following example:

b. B: C did. D did too
c. A: No, C didn’t; I talked to her.
The content of A’s Correction is that D went to work but C didn’t,

which still serves as an answer. An analysis of such an example from our
current perspective would be as follows. Correction(16b, 16c) changes
IQAP(16a, 16b) into Dis-IQAP(16a, 16b) by the axioms for Correction.
The update of (16c) includes that D went to work. So assuming that the
question is still an available attachment point, which it seems to be,10 we
would also then be able to infer, given the content of (16c), IQAP(16a,
16c).
Let’s look again at Corrections of presuppositions and implicatures like
(9) or (15). First, let’s look again at (9):
(9) a. A: I bought the President a tray for his Delft china set.
b. B: That wasn’t a good idea. The president [hates]F the Delft
china set.
As argued in Asher (1995), the that in B’s response refers to the action of
getting the china set; the sentence as a whole expresses a negative evalu-
ation of the action. Thus, the first constituent in B’s turn is a commentary
on what A said. In the second constituent B explains why he thinks the
idea was bad. Explanations, however, take place against a background of
what the speaker takes the other participants’ cognitive states to be; we
explain a particular phenomenon, roughly as Bromberger pointed out in the
1960s, in cases when the participant we think needs to have his cognitive
state corrected in order to see how this phenomenon follows from or should
be expected given what he believes. So an explanation can be thought of
as involving a type of correction – a correction of the agent’s cognitive
state. It is explanations that connect corrections of cognitive states to dis-
course structure. The element in focus supplies the crucial information for
the explanation of B’s first utterance, for it leads us to the implicature that
B thinks that A believes that the President likes the Delft china set and to
B’s reconstruction of A’s cognitive state in which this belief serves as a
rationale for his action (see Asher, 1995 for further discussion).
The example involving Correction of presuppositions is somewhat dif-
ferent.
(15) a. A: I heard John’s girlfriend is coming to town.

b. B: John doesn’t have a girlfriend.
In this example, we need to assume some sort of dynamic semantic logical

forms like DRSs. The presupposition, that John has a girlfriend x, is
attached via Background to the assertion that the speaker heard that x is
coming to town. This forms a particular type of topic structure called a

‘focus background pair’ structure to which we now attach the Correction.
The Correction corrects the presupposition but because the presupposition
and assertion are closely linked via the FBP and the shared variable x, the
Correction also renders A’s assertion problematic (see Asher and Lascarides
in press for details).
Another interesting subclass of Corrections has been noticed by Walker
(1995). These are corrections where the Correction simply leaves out the
information that is to be corrected. She also notes that there is a particular
prosodic contour to such Corrections, which she calls a ‘fall-rise.’ In the
example below, imagine B’s response with a falling pitch frequency to the
word New and then a rapid rise in pitch frequency on the first syllable of
Orleans.
(17) a. A: We bought these pajamas in New Orleans for me.

b. B: We bought these pajamas in New Orleans.
The implicature in 17.b is that the pajamas weren’t for A.

Such examples don’t fit easily with the Correction Constraint enunci-
ated earlier, although it seems quite plausible to suppose that the partic-
ular intonation contour given to B’s utterance in 17 is the ‘hat’ contour of
17.b, which many have interpreted as part of the topic under discussion.11
Arguably at least this example is not a counterexample to the Correction
Constraint; all of 17.b doesn’t have a focus accent that would mark what
is corrected; what is ‘corrected’ is simply left out. This is a sort of limiting
case of the Correction Constraint.
Walker suggests that examples like 17 indicate that Corrections obey a
law of ‘focus exclusion’; according to her the Correction must not include
material that was in focus in the speech act it corrects. But this doesn’t
seem to capture the cases of Correction that involve so called ‘secondary
readings’ of focus like the one found in (18):
(18) a. A: Eva only gave Xerox copies to the [Graduate Students]F .

b. B: No, [Peter]F only gave Xerox copies to the graduate
students.
Clearly, (18.b) contains the focused material of (18.a). But on the SDRT
approach to Corrections (see Asher, 1995), this example works out. The
presence of the particle no and the intonational structure leads us to
conclude that Correction holds between the two constituents; so the
Correction constraint must be satisfied or else the discourse is incoherent.
But the discourse is coherent. So background(18.b), when applied to
ζ(Peter), must give us something logically equivalent to (18.a). Whatever
ζ(Peter) is, it must be of the same type as Peter, i.e. an NP denotation
or, in DR-theoretic terms, a partial DRS (Asher, 1993). Now the only way
to get something equivalent to 18.a is to map Peter onto Peter in the
first clause and to assume that the background of 18.b is using the logical
form:
λx∃y(grad-students(y) ∧ ∀z(give-copies-to(x,z) → z = y))
4. SETTLEDNESS WITH DIVERGENT DISCOURSE RELATIONS: AGREEMENT
With this sketch of an analysis of Correction in place, let us now return to

the question of what the import of a Correction is on the discourse as a
whole. What can we conclude after a Correction has taken place or what
is the upshot of a Correction? We’ve seen that Corrections unsettle material
in the discourse context, changing veridical discourse relations into non-
veridical discourse ones. Nevertheless, our picture of discourse interpreta-
tion is still somewhat unsatisfactory; thus far non-incremental discourse
intepretation involves a series of anaphoric links given by the discourse
relations between propositions, but the content of these propositions does
not directly affect the truth conditional content of the discourse itself, since
the discourse relations are not factive in the way they are for monotonic
and incremental interpretation. For instance, in each of the Corrections that
we have examined, the content of the Correcting proposition does not get
added to the content of the discourse; rather the relation of Correction
between the two propositions gets added to the content of the discourse.
Thus, the discourse’s truth conditions are not dependent of the truth of the
Correcting proposition. This is utterly unlike the way incremental inter-
pretation proceeds.
To leave the matter thus would make non-incremental interpretation too
different from its incremental cousin. One has the feeling that even in a
dialogue with Corrections, the contents of the propositions involved in the
links ends up being somehow a part of the discourse content, as do for
instance the answers to a question. But it seems that whether this is so or
not depends on future moves in the dialogue. And also it matters from
whose perspective we take the discourse content. Participants may often
take their conversational contribution to be definitive and true, when it turns
out that the other participants do not accept it. Nevertheless it seems as
though in dialogue certain matters can become ‘settled’, whereas others
do not.
Settledness is a default indication of what the speakers believe; a speaker
may agree to settle an issue in a conversation without really believing what
has been agreed upon. What is settled is not really a matter of what the
participants believe, but part of the information present in the conversation.
To use another idiom, what the participants have come to see as an equi-
librium point in the discussion. The participants of course may still disagree
in a dialogue, but then that will be what is settled – that they have, for
instance, two opposing viewpoints). Thus, the notion of settledness includes
what Clark and others have seen as mutually believed coordinating

conventions.
How do certain matters become settled? One default evident already in
the two element discourses that make up most of our examples of
Correction is that settledness is achieved by default, if the conversation
stops at that point. So if we stop at the Correction and the ‘corrected’ agent
does not attempt to rebut the Correction or somehow indicate disagreement
(perhaps by a sudden change to topic), then by default we can take the
last turn in the Correction as definitive and settled. In his 1967 lectures on
conversation, Sacks (1992) observes that certain speech acts like questions,
when performed, entail the right of the speaker to have another turn. In a
similar vein, one could propose that Corrections or other divergent speech
acts entail a right of response in conversation. This right of response under-
lies our default; if the ‘corrected’ agent doesn’t respond to the Correction,
then by default we assume that the Correction wins. This is only a default,
however, because the right to respond might have been violated in some
way by the other participants in the conversation; it may not even be present
in cases where one speaker has a certain social status vis a vis the other.
Further, it’s a default because we are not sure until certain ending moves
are made (see Sacks, 1992 for a discussion), when a discourse is over. Note
that this doesn’t mean that the participants all agree, once the conversa-
tion is over; settledness is not about mutual belief, but rather about what’s
settled content from the perspective of the conversation itself.
Another way matters may become settled is when the participants offer
explicit indications of agreement. Take any case of Correction we have
looked at so far – for instance, (8), repeated below, together with a response
by A that indicates agreement with B.
c. A: Oh, OK.
There are presumably many ways of indicating or suggesting agree-
ment or that the topic is settled. Many of these ways require a defeasible
inference to agreement as well. For instance, the use of OK above together
with oh in (19) indicates agreement, but in another context OK alone may
simply signal that the speaker has understood what the other participant
has said, as many have noted. Similarly ambiguous are those cases where
a disagreement is followed by an abrupt change of topic. This might signal
agreement but it may also signal that the speaker no longer wishes to pursue
the previous topic, which may remain as unsettled as before.
Another way of signaling agreement is through the use of discourse
attachment. When a speaker attaches new information with a non divergent
discourse relation to an attachment point in the SDRS that dominates the
one in which the information was disputed, we can take that as a sign of
agreement.
(20) a. B: We need the copies of the paper distributed before noon.

b. A: John made the copies.
c. B: No, it was Sue who made the copies.
d. A: Who will distribute the copies?
A’s question in (20d) attaches to B’s statement about their needing to

attain a common goal, which we interpret as a very partial plan (for more
details see Asher (1999) and Asher and Lascarides (in press).) A’s question
is a Question-elaboration or Q-Elab of (20a); an answer to the question
will specify a part of the plan needed by B – something about which we’ll
say a bit more below. Such a high attachment can be interpreted as A’s
accepting B’s Correction in (20c) and hence taking the matter of who made
the copies as settled.
In either the case of agreement or high attachment, all dialogue partic-
ipants must agree to settle an issue. Otherwise, a person who is not in agree-
ment but has not had the opportunity to speak his turn may go back and
initiate a repair of the discourse structure.
How shall we formulate the matter of settledness? Settledness from
the model-theoretic perspective is just truth. The veridical relations like
Explanation, Elaboration, Narration and so on – we should now include
Agreement within this set12 – all take the contents associated with their
terms as part of the settled content of the discourse; that’s what the veridi-
cality axiom says. On the other hand, with divergent discourse relations are
more complicated. Our definition below says that by default when ever a
disputed discourse relation holds (one of the form Dis-R), then at least by
default the first term of the relation is settled. This makes Correction a
sort of minimal revision on the discourse content. Settledness is
a default scheme for computing what’s settled. Both of these tell us
something about the discourse structure, and as such are rules of DICE.
Settledness tells us that once one does not correct or contradict a
constituent after perhaps a sequence of such Corrections and the truth of
constituent superordinate to the sequence of Corrections is not in dispute,
then the last Correction is also part of what is settled. This takes care of
the cases of settledness where new information does not attach to the last
Correction but rather attaches up high with a convergent discourse relation,
agreement or question. Settled is a DICE or glue logic predicate on labels
(recall DICE only deals with predicates of labels and doesn’t talk about the
formulas associated with labels). It holds of a label π iff the π associated
formula is true, provided the formula can have a truth value (hence ques-
tions and requests here are taken as settled trivially). The scheme is a
recursive means for calculating settledness. The simplest default case of
settledness also falls out of Settledness. The settledness that results
when a dispute simply stops is the instance of Settledness in which
the settledness of all superordinate nodes is trivially satisfied since there
are no superordinate nodes.
• Settledness: π is settled if:

(∀α(Subordinate(α, π) → Settled(α)) and either:
– π is the first term of a disputed relation (i.e., DisR(π1, π2))) or
– π is a term of a veridical relation
– or π is the second term of a divergent relation that is not itself a first
term of any divergent relation
It is (relatively) obvious how the simple cases of Correction like (16)
or (8) get adjudicated with this definition. Let’s look at some more complex
cases like (2) which we repeat again.
tax evasion.
As we already mentioned, DICE implies IQAP(2a,2b). (2c) is more
complex and involves a complex Correction, in which the IQAP relation
itself is corrected and a correct answer is given. In order to get the right
scope for the Correction, we will attach (2c) to the constituent whose
associated formula is IQAP (π2a , π2b). The Correction then replaces
IQAP(π1, π2) with Dis IQAP(π1, π2) and gives a new answer to the question.
By our axioms for settledness, since nothing more is said, the content of
the discourse incorporates the content of the Correcting proposition.
Next let’s look at sequences of Corrections. Consider the following
example of climber conversation.
(21) a. B: Hey, what happened?
b. A: I got the climb.
c. B: No you didn’t. I saw you fall off.
d. A: NO. First time I fell off. Next time I redpointed it.
The definition of settledness handles this example too. We have a sequence
of corrections, with a question on top. The question is settled by the
definition of settledness, and since the discourse ends without any further
attachment to the last Correction, Settledness predicts that the last
Correction wins. Crucial to a correct analysis of this example is the scope
of the last Correction. It seems that A’s last turn corrects the last Correction;
and though it doesn’t have scope over the entire preceding SDRS, it has
the effect of vitiating the last Correction. Correction (21b, 21c) forces Dis
IQAP(21a, 21b), but Correction(21c, 21d) forces Dis Dis IQAP(21a, 21b)
as well as Dis Correction (21c, 21d). These modifications follow from the
Update axiom for Corrections that gives the effect of a Correction on
another divergent discourse relation, and so the predicted result accords
with intuition. Now if we assume that A’s belief that he got the climb
persists through the last Correction, which would make sense, then we can
infer from Dis Dis IQAP(21a, 21b) implies IQAP(21a, 21b).
To check our intuitions about what is settled, we can examine the

behavior of presuppositions. Presuppositions may be bound only to that
information that has been settled. For instance consider,
b. B: No, it was Sue who distributed the copies. # Why did he do
that?
The presupposition of B’s why question is that John did distribute the
copies. The question sounds odd in this context precisely because this infor-
mation isn’t settled and – more to the point – isn’t accepted by B. So B
can’t make sense of the presuppositions of his own question.13
We can account for presupposition failure in (220 with these axioms of
settledness. Adapting standard linguistic treatments of presupposition to
our more structured notion of context, we require presuppositions to be
satisfied by the settled contents associated with some possible attachment
site. In this case the label for the constituent given by second sentence of
B’s response in (22) must be attached to the label for the constituent given
by the first sentence or to the label for what A said. But in neither case
does the context satisfy the presuppositions of the second sentence. Given
our interpretation of divergent discourse relations, the contents associated
with speech act discourse referents that are terms to divergent discourse
relations in a context C are no more verified than are the contents of com-
plement of attitude predicates like doubt or believe. In (22), the presup-
position of the why question, that John did distribute the copies, is not
satisfied in the context. Nor are the conditions in (22.a) accessible to it.
So we predict presupposition failure. Of course, when 22.a is not related
to B’s response by means of a divergent discourse relation as in 24 where
the question simply asks for an amplification,
b. B: Why did he do that?
we can take A’s response as settled and the presupposition can be
satisfied.
We now see how convergent discourse relations contribute the content
of their relata to the discourse and we have a framework that unifies the
treatment of convergent and divergent discourse relations at least as far as
assertions are concerned. Let’s now see how questions can affect what is
settled and lead to some new insights about settledness in discourse.
5. SETTLEDNESS WITH QUESTION ANSWERING
So far we have looked at how assertions in dialogue may be disputed and

then how those disputes may get settled. But questions have also been
understood as contributing to a part of the common ground or a settled
part of the content of the conversation. That structure has been understood
differently from common grounds involving assertions; it is usually
described as a ‘stack’ or slate of questions that the participants are com-
mitted to or interested in answering. Authors like Ginzburg and Roberts
have given formal characterizations of this structure. From the SDRT per-
spective, however, these structures miss some important observations. First,
questions don’t just interact with questions in a particular way; they also
interact with requests and even assertions in a similar way. Secondly
suppose we try to model the slate of questions in terms of their direct
answers, which form a partition of the set of possible worlds. The slate of
questions then becomes a sequence of partitions of the set of possible
worlds. Consider now the following example
(25) a. A: How do I solve this problem?
b. B: Have you learned about derivatives yet?
The simple approach to the slate of questions that we have outlined ignores
how the questions interact with each other. For the modeltheoretic repre-
sentation of the slate from (25) is no different from the representation of
the slate for (26).
(26) a. A: How do I solve this problem?
b. B: Is your mother’s hair grey?
But the discourse in (26) is decidedly odd. Most likely, A would respond
with puzzlement to B’s question. On the other hand, (25) is perfectly
natural.
The difference between (25) and (26) is that the second question in (25)
bears an obvious relation to the first; an answer to the second question
seems relevant to formulating an appropriate answer to A’s original
question, whereas in (26) it doesn’t. Questions in dialogue have often been
taken as coordinating devices. Questions are asked and answers are
acknowledged or refined through further questioning until participants have
arrived at a mutual agreement about the cognitive task at hand in the
dialogue. There are various sorts of coordination that have been discussed.
One sort is plan coordination where participants mutually agree upon a
common plan for mutual goal satisfaction. We will argue that it is such plan
coordination that explains the relation between the questions in (25) and
it is the lack thereof that explains the oddity of (26).
In Asher (1999) one of us analyzed the discourse relation inferred by
default when an agent responds to a question with another question, a
relation that we call Question-Elaboration or Q-elab. The Q-elab questions
specifies a connection between the answer to the elaborating question and
a speech act related goal or SARG of the speech act to which the question
is attached. The idea is that a direct answer to the Q-elab question should
pair down the set of plans under consideration for achieving the relevant
SARG. A Q-elab implies an attempt to build a possible plan for realizing
a SARG by exploiting the information in the answer to the question.

Further, the answer to the question should be informative; it should really
help flesh out a plan. When a question is attached to another question with
Q-elab, the SARG that is to be fleshed out is the goal of the first questioner
to have an answer to his question, according to the axioms in Asher and
Lascarides (1998a). Intuitively, this is what happens in (25); the goal behind
the first question is to find a solution to the problem, and the Q-elabo-
rating question’s answer will help flesh out a plan to find a solution.
However, this relation between answers to questions and SARGs does not
hold in (26).
Q-elab and the Q-elab constraint work in a similar fashion when ques-
tions are appended to requests. Consider, for instance, following dialogue.
(27) a. A: Let’s meet in two weeks.
b. B: OK, are you free then on the seventeenth?
c. A: No, I don’t have any time then.
(27)ab are an instance of Q-elaboration. The constraint on Q-elab is met
because the answer in (27)c helps to specify a plan to reach A’s SARG
‘by elimination.’ This can be easily seen model theoretically: the set of
pairs of states (initial and end states of the plan) that are the semantic value
of a plan that exploits the answer is a distinct subset of the set of state pairs
that are the value of the general plan of meeting in two weeks. On the other
hand, if we replace (27)b with something like,
(27) c B: Is your spouse’s hair grey?
then, just as with (26) we will fail to have a Q-elab because the response
to B’s question doesn’t (unless very special circumstances are assumed)
doesn’t allow us to build a plan that specifies the general plan of meeting
in two weeks.
To state this constraint formally (following Asher, 2000), one can model
plans as sequences of actions. But we won’t do this here (see Asher and
Lascarides, in press, for more details as well). In words the constraint on
Q-elab says that if Q-elab holds of α and β and φ is the SARG underlying
α, then an answer to the question in β should specify, given what A and
B mutually believe and what the discourse context affords, a plan to bring
about φ that is more detailed than φ itself.
To see how the Q-elab constraint works, consider again (27).
c. A: No, I don’t have any time then.
(27a–b) are an instance of Q-elaboration. The constraint on Q-elab is met
because the answer in (27c) helps to specify a plan to reach A’s SARG
‘by elimination.’ This can be easily seen model theoretically: the set of
pairs of states (initial and end states of the plan) that are the semantic value
of a plan that exploits the answer is a distinct subset of the set of state pairs
that are the value of the general plan of meeting in two weeks. Presumably
B can now derive a plan from A’s answer. Further, the plan to meet some
other time than the 17th could not be derived from what A and B believed
given the discourse context τ. So both parts of the consequent of the con-
straint are satisfied. Since the right hand side of the Q-elab constraint is
satisfied in this case, it is consistent to assume Q-elab in this situation since
the constraint is satisfied and so we infer Q-elab by default.
On the other hand, if we replace (27b) with something like,
(27) c B: Is your spouse’s hair grey?
then we will fail to have a Q-elab because the response to B’s question
(unless very special circumstances are assumed) doesn’t allow us to build
a plan that specifies the general plan of meeting in two weeks. The Q-
Elab axiom should fire in this case, but there is an incoherence between
(27b) and the question (27c). B has accepted the goal but then asks a
question whose answer does not apparently specify a plan for achieving
that goal. So if A is trying to attach B’s question to his proposal, he can’t
compute on the basis of what he believes that B is elaborating a plan to
achieve the SARG of his own utterance. So the Q-elab constraint can’t hold.
As the Q-elab constraint fails to hold and this blocks the Q-elab axiom from
firing. A will find B’s question incoherent, unless some other relation can
be computed. But there aren’t any such relations unless B is simply
changing topic and so is making a break in the discourse. By using inco-
herent examples in this way, we can also restrict the number of axioms
within the theory.
This is not to say that (27c), like (26), couldn’t be a Q-elab. B might
have some special beliefs that allow him to compute a plan for achieving
A’s SARG. But in order for A to be able to compute the discourse relation
Q elab (or we), we would have to know what that information is.
The interest in the Q-elab constraint is in how it interacts with settled-
ness. Intuitively, the idea is that if the answer to a Q-elab is accepted –
viz. by a higher attachment (cf. our last settledness axiom), then the set of
plans specified by the answer to the question become a mutually agreed
upon precisification of the plan to achieve the superordinate SARG, which
has by default become a mutual goal because speakers tend, as a default,
to cooperate with each other.14 Consider the following extension to (27):
c. A: Yes, I am. How about in the morning?
A’s Q-elab in (28c) further specifies the plan to achieve his original SARG
that was already somewhat specified in (28b). The analysis of this obser-
vation is as follows. B’s OK in (28b) establishes that B takes A’s SARG
on board. (Even if he hadn’t said OK, it would have been implied by the
Q-elab.) The interesting turn occurs with (28c), which again is a Q-elab
(on (28b)). A’s response in (28c) has an anaphoric or underspecified
element; he doesn’t say the morning of which day he means explicitly.
But by the Q-elab constraint, A’s reply must specify a more detailed plan
of B’s SARG, which we could take to be the plan of meeting on the 17th,
implied by his Q-elab in (28b). Thus, we predict A’s question to be about
the morning of the seventeenth, which is what is intuitively meant by infer-
ring Q-elab, which we do in virtue of attaching A’s question to B’s question.
To make the desired prediction claimed in Asher (1999), we need an
axiom implying by default that if B makes a Q-elab then he is committing
himself to taking on board as a SARG a plan that satisfied the Q-elab con-
straint. Define: Plan (α, β, γ, X) iff X is a plan that is defined by the Q-
elab constraint on Q-elab(α, β) with IQAP(β, γ). Then here’s the relevant
axiom:
• (Q-elab(A:α, B:β) ∧ IQAP(β, γ) ∧ Plan(β, γ, X)) > SARGB(β, X)
Let’s look at (28) again in view of this axiom. (28c.1) (the first sentence
of the third turn) establishes a set of plans that B is committed to meeting
on the 17th. With (28c.2) and the second Q-elab, A commits himself, given
our new axiom, to a refinement of that SARG by making another Q-elab.
A more extended dialogue than (28 gives us an even better feel for the
dynamics of settledness in question answering.
(29) a. Mr Helwig. I would like to get together with you some time
later this month to talk to you for about two hours.
b. Okay Mr Hutsell. The thirteenth and the fourteenth look good
on my calendar. As does the twenty third. Do either of those
three days suit you?
c. The twenty third in the morning would be fine.
d. I don’t like morning meetings. How about the twenty seventh
or twenty eighth?
e. The twenty eighth would be fine. How does two sound?
f. Two sounds just fine. I will see you then.
In (29b) Mr. Helwig adopts Hutsell’s SARG of meeting for two hours
later in the month. He then proposes a Q-elab with two sentences – an alter-
native questions in effect.15 It is now settled that they both plan to meet.
Then Hutsell comes back with an answer to the alternative question, and
makes the meeting time more precise: morning of the 23rd. In effect
there are two constituents in (29c) from a rhetorical point of view: (29c1),
in which an answer to Q-elab in (29b) is given, and (29c2), in which an
Elaboration linked to (29c1) is proposed.16 According to our axiom for
settledness and Q-elabs, Mr. Helwig defeasibly adopts the plan of meeting
on the 23rd given that we have IQAP(29b, 29c1) and that Q-elab(29a, 29b).
Now since Elaboration is a convergent discourse relation and (29c2) elab-
orates the plan given by (29c1), we have Mr. Hutsell presumably also
adopting this plan in a cooperative manner.
(29d) also has two constituents, here marked by punctuation. With

(29d.1) Helwig rejects the plan-elaboration in (29c2) with an implicit denial
or Correction. Now Helwig could have asked whether Hutsell had any time
in the afternoon. But his next question asks about a different date. Helwig
goes back up to attach his contribution to (29a). According to our axioms,
the SARG of (29b) is by default the plan to meet on the 23rd. But (29d.2)
being about a different date, cannot be a Q-elab of that SARG, nor of the
more general SARG of meeting on one of the three days mentioned in
(29b). But since we can conclude that (29d.2) can specify to plan to meet
in the next two weeks, we can infer Q-elab((29a, (29d.2). In fact that’s the
only attachment for (29d.2) on which we can compute a discourse relation;
and given SDRT’s constraints on discourse coherence, it’s the only possible
attachment for the discourse to be coherent. With this attachment our set-
tledness axioms predict that the Correction in (29d.1) is now settled and
the plan-elaboration of (29c2) in doubt. Further, the attachment of (29d.2)
to (29a) makes the plan of meeting on the 23rd no longer operative.
Consider now the attachment of (29e). Given SDRT’s constraints on attach-
ment, (29e) cannot attach to the unavailable (29b–d); it must attach to either
(29a) or (29d.2), and only the latter allows us to resolve the hidden
anaphoric parameter referring to days in two of (29e). So this analysis
predicts that two must be the afternoon of the 28th, not the 23rd (which is
a prediction that cannot be made in standard dynamic semantics). The dis-
course structure made the old plan of meeting on the 23rd moot and has
put a new plan of meeting on the 28th into focus.17
We have seen how to treat a complex relation between questions in
SDRT and we have seen how to analyze the sort of plan coordination that
typically underlies such sequences of questions. Q-elabs are a way of at
least provisionally settling superordinate SARGs and developing mutually
agreed upon plans. Like Correction and other divergent discourse relations,
Q-elab gives rise to a complicated dynamics of what settled. We have
looked at questions of a relatively simple sort in which agents are trying
to coordinate, to settle on, plans to meet. Nevertheless, the same mecha-
nisms involving Q-elab, IQAP and Correction can be used to coordinate
plans to solve more complex problems; the type of goals involved are inci-
dental to the general, plan coordination procedure outlined above. It is even
perfectly possible within this framework to analyze coordination concerning
the reference of definite descriptions (the agents interact to come to know
what the referent of an expression is – see Asher, 1998b) or concerning
plans to adopt certain linguistic conventions like those discussed in Garrod
and Doherty (1994). Of course neither does this framework preclude less
explicit and possibly more efficient coordination strategies like output input
coordination. The general conclusion is that coordination phenomena of
this kind do not constitute an alternative way of thinking about dialogue
but fall squarely within the SDRT framework. More research, however, will
be needed to see whether other coordination phenomena are as tractable.
It may be that cognitive coordination at other levels may be matter of

ensuring that one’s discourse representations or cognitive models are
suitably similar.
6. CONCLUSION
We have analyzed coordination tasks involving assertions and planning,

and have shown that the process of building a common ground with settled
information can be quite complex. To motivate why settled information is
important, we introduced the notion of divergent discourse relations and
analyzed in detail the relation of Correction. We then introduced the notion
of settledness that tells us what is the contribution to the content of the
dialogue of the contents of the terms of divergent relations. We then showed
how settledness plays an important role in dialogue, specifically in question
answering dialogues. Finally, we offered a sketch of how the theory of
discourse interpretation and settledness can be used to analyze cognitive
coordination phenomena. From the point of view of pragmadialectics, we
hope all of this underscores how complicated multi-agent discourse gets,
even when we focus our attention to a straightforward case of disagree-
ment like correction.
NOTES
* The history of this paper is complicated, and requires at least some mentioning. It was
first presented by Asher at a conference on dialogue in Bielefeld in 1997. But the proceed-
ings for that conference never appeared. Many of the ideas presented here found their way
into Asher and Lascarides (in press), where they have a more declarative formulation. But
we think that the proceedural way of looking at Corrections is still also worthwhile, and
that is how matters are presented here. They seem especially appropriate to the procedural
approach to argumentation by the pragmadialecticians, to which this paper now serves as a
rather extended comment. Gillies’s original comments at the workshop – posing choice-points
for developing multi-agent nonmontonic logics to deal with the sort of reasoning about dis-
course and world events which seemed to be the core intuition at stake at the workshop in
Texas – have not made it into paper form as yet. Some of the basic ideas (or rather some of
the basic programmatic points they were meant to pose to the pragmadialecticians), plus or
minus a bit, are already present, albeit in a quite disguised fashion, in our discussion of cor-
rection here. As will be clear form the text, the framework within which we explore these
issues is due to Asher. In addition to all of the members of the workshop, we would like to
thank Joan Busquets, Tim Fernando, Simon Garrod, Hans Kamp, Alex Lascarides and Hannes
Rieser, as well as other members of the Bielefeld conference for helpful comments on earlier
versions of this paper.
1
The meaning of relations like Explanation involve the contents of their relata in a complex
way that can be made explicit within the intensional version of SDRT. This would require
prepositional terms as well in the microstructure language. See Asher, 1993 for some details.
2
For more details see Asher, 1998a, or Asher and Lascarides in press.
3
Perhaps the reason for this presupposition is that we need to be able to ensure that the
several people are indeed telling the ‘same’ story.
4
This is an example from Vallduvi.
5
In the full definition (Asher and Lascarides, 1998b), there are three cases: one when the
discourse context is empty, one when asserted information is attached to a non-empty dis-
course context, and one when presupposed information (with underspecified rhetorical con-
ditions) is attached to a non-empty discourse context. We ignore the last case here. Further,
in that definition the meaning postulates concerning the discourse relations are made part of
the glue language and this complicates the definition of the Update, such that we add, for
instance, conditions expressing the temporal effects of the discourse relations to the updated
SDRS. We don’t have to add things specified by those axioms to SDRSs here, as we have
made the meaning postulates on discourse relations just constraints on interpretation, as
they should be.
6
For details on how intonation leads to a partition of the information given by a sentence
into background and focus, see for instance Txurruka, 1997; Steedman, 1995 or Vallduv,
1993. But the distinction has been around a lot longer – it has been part of the ‘Prague’
view of linguistics since the thirties.
7
Van Leusen observes that there is some sort of parallelism involved these corrective utter-
ances and she thinks that the parallelism involves sameness of thematic roles; the focused
element should replace something of the same thematic role in the target, according to van
Leusen. There are some difficulties with her claim, however, which one of us discussed in
Asher, 1995.
8
Indeed, much of this work on Correction can be seen as trying to work out some of the
ideas in van der Sandt’s paper.
9
One remark about revision. The model of revision that underlies the semantics of
Correction is very efficient (replacing one expression for another within a matrix without
any consistency tests). It is also not necessarily consistency preserving; an author might
propose a replacement that leads in fact to an inconsistency with what has been accepted in
the conversation so far. This linguistically driven notion of revision gives a very different
picture of revision from other approaches to revision, such as those proposed by Alchourron,
Gardenfors and Makinson (AGM), which are known to be intractable for expressive lan-
guages. The difference between revision based on Corrections and AGM revision is signif-
icant and it has a justification in processing. There is no way agents could perform AGM
revision in on-line dialogue processing and be reliable.
10
This would entail in SDRT that both IQAP and Correction are subordinating relations
and thus that the question would remain an available attachment point on the right frontier
of the discourse structure.
11
See Steedman, 1995.
12
That the formula associated with the second term should be true as well as the first is
perhaps in this case a bit redundant since that second speech actually just involves some
sort of anaphoric reference to the content of the first.
13
A third party C could in principle ignore the dispute between A and B in 19 and coher-
ently ask B’s why question of A

c. C: Why did he do that?
c′. C: John will regret doing that
But the dialogue with either (23c) or (23c′) still sounds odd to my ears, because C is simply
ignoring B’s contribution. This isn’t one coherent dialogue but rather two dialogues, one
between A and C and one between A and B.
14
This insight of cooperativity is of course due to Grice; Asher (1999) and Asher and
Lascarides (1998a) work out some of the formal details of this insight.
15
It is a nontrivial manner to derive this indirect speech act from the compositional seman-
tics. We won’t try to do it here.
16
To find the discourse constituents in this case, we exploit the question in the context.
17
Now as our axioms stand, they don’t predict that the SARG of (29b) is kept, but neither
do they predict that it is thrown away. We could add an axiom that says whenever one attaches
to a superordinate constituent of a Q-elab with a distinct Q-elab, then the new SARG replaces
that of the previous one. At present, we are unsure whether this is the right way to proceed.
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Common Ground, Corrections, and Coordination*

NICHOLAS ASHER and ANTHONY GILLIES

Imagine conceiving of a conversation as a game. Each conversational par-

Argumentation 17: 481–512, 2003.

assertion in terms of its contribution to the overall content of the discourse?

in dialogues with Correction We’ll then go on to analyze settledness

2. DYNAMIC DISCOURSE SEMANTICS FOR DIALOGUE

(8) a. A: John distributed the copies.

dialogues involving divergent discourse relations do not have absurd

(10c) A: No, You’re wrong. He went to jail because he was caught

The second stage concerning discourse expectations can be addressed

3. ANALYSIS OF ONE DIVERGENT DISCOURSE RELATION: CORRECTION

Correction is an example of a discourse relation, the understanding of which

could be lambda terms representing partial DRSs (dynamic quantifiers) or

(16) a. A: Who went to work yesterday?

The content of A’s Correction is that D went to work but C didn’t,

(15) a. A: I heard John’s girlfriend is coming to town.

In this example, we need to assume some sort of dynamic semantic logical

coming to town. This forms a particular type of topic structure called a

(17) a. A: We bought these pajamas in New Orleans for me.

The implicature in 17.b is that the pajamas weren’t for A.

(18) a. A: Eva only gave Xerox copies to the [Graduate Students]F .

λx∃y(grad-students(y) ∧ ∀z(give-copies-to(x,z) → z = y))

4. SETTLEDNESS WITH DIVERGENT DISCOURSE RELATIONS: AGREEMENT

With this sketch of an analysis of Correction in place, let us now return to

what Clark and others have seen as mutually believed coordinating

(20) a. B: We need the copies of the paper distributed before noon.

A’s question in (20d) attaches to B’s statement about their needing to

• Settledness: π is settled if:

To check our intuitions about what is settled, we can examine the

5. SETTLEDNESS WITH QUESTION ANSWERING

So far we have looked at how assertions in dialogue may be disputed and

a SARG by exploiting the information in the answer to the question.

(29d) also has two constituents, here marked by punctuation. With

It may be that cognitive coordination at other levels may be matter of

We have analyzed coordination tasks involving assertions and planning,

(23) a. A: John distributed the copies.

Allen, James, L. K. Schubert, G. M. Ferguson, P. A. Heeman, C. H. Hwang, T. Kato, M. N.

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