Perlocutions: The Achilles' heel of speech act theory
Journal of PragmaticsPublished 1 November 2000
Daniel Marcu
Citations40
SJR quartileQ1
SJR score1.21
SNIP1.91
Generate an AI Snapshot to get a quick, structured summary of this paper.
Study Snapshot
ObjectiveStudy objective
MethodsResearch methodology
PopulationPopulation studied
Sample sizeSample sizes
OutcomesStudy outcomes here
ResultsStudy results comes here
LimitationsResearch study limitations comes here
A concise AI-generated summary of the paper will appear here once you click Generate AI Snapshot.
Abstract
This paper criticizes previous approaches to perlocutions and previous formalizations of perlocutionary effects of communicative actions by showing that some of their fundamental assumptions are inconsistent with data from communication studies, psychology, and social studies of persuasion. Consequently, it argues for a data-driven approach to pragmatics, one that permits pragmatic theories to be falsified and improved. The paper also offers an introductory account of a formal theory that can explain the difference in persuasiveness between messages that are characterized by the same set of locutionary and illocutionary acts; and the difference in persuasiveness of the same message with respect to different hearers. The formal theory is developed using the language of situation calculus.
Keywords
Computer ScienceArts and HumanitiesPhysics and Astronomy
Handbooks of sociology and social researchHandbook of Social Psychology
7,552 Citations2013John DeLamater, Amanda K. Ward
Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language
6,641 Citations1969John R. Searle
Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change
5,024 Citations2015Franziska Marquart, Brigitte Naderer
Principles of Pragmatics
4,989 Citations2016Geoffrey Leech
The Philosophical QuarterlySpeech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language.
3,911 Citations1970William P. Alston, John R. Searle
The Philosophical ReviewLinguistic Communication and Speech Acts.
2,525 Citations1982Warren Ingber, Kent Bach +1 more
Artificial IntelligenceIntention is choice with commitment
1,865 Citations1990Philip R. Cohen, Hector J. Levesque
The formalism provides analyses for Bratman's three characteristic functional roles played by intentions, and shows how agents can avoid intending all the foreseen side-effects of what they actually intend.
New England Journal of MedicineOn the Elicitation of Preferences for Alternative Therapies
1,659 Citations1982Barbara J. McNeil, Stephen G. Pauker +2 more
It is suggested that an awareness of variations in the way information is presented to patients influence their choices between alternative therapies could help reduce bias and improve the quality of medical decision making.
Studies in linguistics and philosophyReference to Abstract Objects in Discourse
1,124 Citations1993Nicholas Asher
A tour of Abstract Entities, Eventualities and the Nominals that Denote them and applications of the Theory of Discourse Structure to Concept Anaphora and VP Ellipsis and its Philosophical Implications.
The American Journal of PsychologyIntentions in Communication
969 Citations1991Raymond W. Gibbs, Philip R. Cohen +2 more
Psychological BulletinEffects of involvement on persuasion: A meta-analysis.
944 Citations1989Blair T. Johnson, Alice H. Eagly
The MIT Press eBooksIntentions in Communication
892 Citations1990
This book addresses central questions about the nature of intention as it is understood in theories of communication, the crucial role of intention recognition in understanding utterances, the use of principles of rational interaction in interpreting speech acts, the contribution of intonation contours to intention recognition, and the need for more general models of intention.
Journal of Personality and Social PsychologyThe effect of message framing on breast self-examination attitudes, intentions, and behavior.
867 Citations1987Beth E. Meyerowitz, Shelly Chaiken
Only measures of perceived self-efficacy in performing BSE were differentially affected by the framing manipulation, with loss subjects reporting the greatest levels of self-confidence.
Artificial IntelligenceAnalyzing intention in utterances
779 Citations1980James F. Allen, C. Raymond Perrault
It is shown that, given a setting in which purposeful dialogues occur, this model of cooperative behavior can account for responses that provide more information that explicitly requested and for appropriate responses to both short sentence fragments and indirect speech acts.
Belief Revision
724 Citations2003Peter Gärdenfors, Hans Rott
Cognitive ScienceElements of a plan-based theory of speech acts
724 Citations1979Philip R. Cohen, C. Raymond Perrault
Designing Health Messages: Approaches from Communication Theory and Public Health Practice
445 Citations1995Edward Maibach, Roxanne Parrott
Research to Inform Campaign Development and Message Design and Recent Developments in Informing Patients about Their Prescription Drugs Enabling Health Policy and Administrative Practices at a Crossroads are presented.
PubMedThe effects of computer-tailored smoking cessation messages in family practice settings.
418 Citations1994Victor J. Strecher, Matthew W. Kreuter +4 more
Positive effects of computer-tailored smoking messages among moderate to light smokers are indicated and smoking cessation outcomes may be enhanced by combining tailored messages with nicotine replacement therapies to treat physical dependency.
Cognitive ScienceElements of a Plan‐Based Theory of Speech Acts*
398 Citations1979Philip R. Cohen, C. Raymond Perrault
This paper explores the truism that people think about what they say and proposes hat, to satisfy their own goals, people often plan their speech acts to affect their listeners' beliefs, goals, and emotional states.
Cambridge University Press eBooksPlanning English Sentences
359 Citations1985Douglas E. Appelt
This book is an investigation into the problems of generating natural language utterances to satisfy specific goals in the speaker's mind and is thus an ambitious and significant contribution to research on language generation in artificial intelligence.
Journal of PragmaticsGenerating natural language under pragmatic constraints
340 Citations1987Eduard Hovy
Computational LinguisticsA plan-based analysis of indirect speech acts
289 Citations1980C. Raymond Perrault, James F. Allen
An account of indirect forms of speech acts to request and inform based on the hypothesis that language users can recognize actions being performed by others, infer goals being sought, and cooperate in their achievement is proposed.
Persuasion : new directions in theory and research
215 Citations1980Michael E. Roloff, Gerald R. Miller
Communicative Actions for Artificial Agents.
204 Citations1995Philip R. Cohen, Hector J. Levesque
The paper illustrates the kind of semantics it is believed to be necessary to characterize agent communication languages, identifies an important adequacy condition (compositionality) and shows how to compose a question from a request and an inform.
Statistical ScienceQuantifying Probabilistic Expressions
181 Citations1990Frederick Mosteller, Cleo Youtz
Artificial intelligence and mathematical theory of computation: papers in honor of John McCarthy
167 Citations1991Vladimir Lifschitz
A short sketch of the life and career of John McCarthy, D. Israel functional instantiation in first order logic, and a simple solution to the frame problem in the situation calculus.
Elsevier eBooksPersistence, Intention, and Commitment
161 Citations1987Philip R. Cohen, Hector J. Levesque
Kluwer international series in engineering and computer scienceNatural Language Generation in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics
155 Citations1991Cécile Paris, William Swartout +1 more
This book presents an overview of the state of the art in natural language generation, describing both new results and directions for new research.
Communication MonographsUse of inoculation to promote resistance to smoking initiation among adolescents
144 Citations1992Michael Pfau, Steve Van Bockern +1 more
The pattern of results revealed that inoculation promotes resistance to smoking onset, but only among adolescents of low self‐esteem, precisely those most at risk to smoking initiation in the first place.
International Joint Conference on Artificial IntelligenceArgumentation: planning other agents' plans
141 Citations1989Katia Sycara
This work presents a model of persuasive argumentation that has been implemented as part of the PERSUADER, a multi-agent computer program that operates in the domain of labor negotiations.
Speech acts and rationality
106 Citations1985Philip R. Cohen, Hector J. Levesque
The basis of a theory of communication from a formal theory of rational interaction is derived, and it is shown to distinguish insincere or nonserious imperatives from true requests.
Sentence planning as description using tree adjoining grammar
104 Citations1997Matthew Stone, Christine Doran
This approach captures naturally and elegantly the interaction between pragmatic and syntactic constraints on descriptions in a sentence, and the inferential interactions between multiple descriptions inA sentence.
An artificial discourse language for collaborative negotiation
102 Citations1994Candace L. Sidner
Negotiation in communication can be simulated by a series of exchanges in which agents propose, reject, counterpropose or seek supporting information for beliefs they wish to be held mutually.
Using argumentation to control lexical choice: a functional unification implementation
96 Citations1993Michael Elhadad
New surface generation techniques that improve on both aspects of surface generation are presented, which allow a purely conceptual input to be expressed by a greater variety of linguistic forms and with more sensitivity to pragmatic factors than was previously possible.
Cambridge University Press eBooksAutonomous belief revision and communication
86 Citations1992Julia Galliers
Phrasing a text in terms the user can understand
85 Citations1989John Bateman, Cécile Paris
This research proposes a new mechanism which allows the text planning process to specifically tailor syntactic phrasing to the hearer type in the context of an expert system explanation facility that needs to produce explanations of the expert system's behavior for a variety of different users.
Journal of PragmaticsThe speech act status of incitement: Perlocutionary acts revisited
71 Citations1998Dennis Kurzon
A process model for recognizing communicative acts and modeling negotiation subdialogues
70 Citations1999Sandra Carberry, Lynn Lambert
This paper presents a plan-based model for understanding cooperative negotiation subdialogues and addresses an important aspect of cooperative interaction and thus is a step toward an intelligent and robust natural language consultation system.
American Behavioral ScientistThe Field of Health Communication Today
65 Citations1994Everett M. Rogers
The health communication field differs from other communication specialty fields in that its dependent variables of study usually are of unquestioned good, it involves collaboration with such other academic units as schools of public health and schools of medicine, and it has borrowed ideas from university business schools and private companies.
Collaborative response generation in planning dialogues
57 Citations1998Jennifer Chu‐Carroll, Sandra Carberry
A plan-based model for response generation during collaborative planning, based on a recursive Propose-Evaluate-Modify framework for modeling collaboration, is presented, which focuses on identifying strategies for content selection when the system initiates information-sharing to gather further information in order to make an informed decision about whether to accept a proposal.
Kluwer international series in engineering and computer scienceGeneration and Explanation: Building an Explanation Facility for the Explainable Expert Systems Framework
54 Citations1991Cécile Paris
It is argued that explanation for expert systems can benefit from the more sophisticated generation techniques being developed in computational linguistics and that explanationFor expert systems actually provides a rich domain in which to study natural language generation.
Expectations in incremental discourse processing
54 Citations1997Dan Cristea, Bonnie Webber
It is shown how an approach that makes use of substitution as well as adjoining on a suitably defined right frontier, can be used to both process expectations and constrain discouse processing in general.
From local to global coherence: a bottom-up approach to text planning
54 Citations1997Daniel Marcu
A new, data-driven approach to text planning is presented, which can be used not only to map full knowledge pools into natural language texts, but also to generate texts that satisfy multiple, high-level communicative goals.
Speech CommunicationPreliminaries to a collaborative model of dialogue
35 Citations1994Philip R. Cohen, Hector J. Levesque
This work sketches here how a formal theory of joint action explains confirmations that arise in task-oriented telephone dialogues, and argues that extensions of this analysis to dialogue more generally will be difficult and force us to give up the authors' simplistic analyses of propositional content and literal meaning.
Content ordering in the generation of persuasive discourse
35 Citations1997Chris Reed, Derek Long
A framework is summarized which supports the planning of natural language argument structure and it is demonstrated that such an approach can also contribute to the generation of surface textual features including formatting, punctuation and clue words.
Elsevier eBooksControl and Prevention of Smoking in Adolescents: A Psychosocial Perspective
32 Citations1982Richard I. Evans, Bettye E. Raines
This chapter discusses control and prevention of smoking in adolescents from a psychological perspective and suggests that peer pressure may be one of the major influences to take up smoking.
Speech MonographsThe relation between sentence order and comprehension
32 Citations1963Donald K. Darnell
National Conference on Artificial IntelligenceCommunicative acts for generating natural language arguments
29 Citations1993Mark T. Maybury
The communicative structure and function of several different kinds of arguments can be formalized as plan-based models of communication in the context of a prototype which cooperatively interacts with a user to allocate scarce resources.
Quarterly Journal of SpeechDoing by saying: Toward a theory of perlocution
28 Citations1979Robert N. Gaines
Quarterly Journal of SpeechA rhetorical view of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts
23 Citations1973Paul Newell Campbell
American Behavioral ScientistNew Technologies in Health Communication
21 Citations1994Michael Allen Chamberlain
The convergence of computers, television, and telecommunications in one information superhighway is being heralded as the cure-all for much of America's economic and even social ills, but whether or not this is true, the health communication professional will have to know how to harness the new media technologies.
The role of cognitive modeling in achieving communicative intentions
16 Citations1994Marilyn Walker, Owen Rambow
This work argues that a mere representation of the Hearer's knowledge is inadequate, and shows that modeling cognitive state can lead to more effective discourses (measured with respect to a simple task).
Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Natural Language Generation
9 Citations1994David D. McDonald, Marie Meteer
The Seventh International Workshop on Natural Language Generation was organized by a committee that was assembled at the end of the previous International Generation Workshop, held at Castel Ivano in Trento, Italy in April of 1992.
A computational model of social perlocutions
6 Citations1998David Pautler, Alex Quilici
A model of such "social perlocutions" that integrates previous work in natural language generation, social psychology, and communication studies is presented and implemented in a system that generates socially appropriate e-mail in response to user-specified communicative goals.