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Speech acts that support other speech acts

Paper · 2025 · Katja Jasinskaja and Frank Zickenheiner

Summary

Discourse theories usually separate coherence relations that link described content from those that link speech acts. Only the content side has a principled, closed inventory, such as Kehler's causal, contiguity and resemblance classes. Jasinskaja and Zickenheiner start building a comparable inventory for the speech-act side. They work top-down, deriving categories from what a speech act is rather than collecting corpus cases. They model relations between speech acts as relations between communicative goals and focus on one family, support relations. In a support relation, one speaker produces two acts: the first falls short of its goal, and the second is aimed at reaching that same goal. The authors split speech-act success into necessary subgoals. They then classify support relations by which subgoal failed and by which means suit the target state (belief, desire, emotion, action, etc.). The scheme covers non-assertive acts, self-repair and disfluency. It also covers cases that standard Evidence definitions miss, such as telling the hearer to go check a claim. The contribution is conceptual and illustrated with natural examples, and it treats even monologue as interaction with a projected audience.

Key points

  • Published in Dialogue & Discourse 16(2), 2025. The work is purely theoretical, with no corpus, annotation study or metrics, and the authors say empirical testing and annotator reliability remain open.
  • Two speech acts by one speaker stand in a support relation precisely when the first does not reach its aim and the second contributes to attaining that very aim. Evidence, which makes an asserted proposition more believable, is the typical case.
  • The classification has two axes: the subgoal at which the initial act fails, and the repair means available for the type of goal state.
  • A key example comes from Ken Follett's Night over Water: "If you don't believe me, ask Peter." Here a directive supports an assertion without itself supplying evidence.
  • The authors argue that the rest of the speech-act relation space is small. It includes adjacency pairs, Franke's retractions, and splitting a larger goal into sub-goals as studied with Questions under Discussion (Roberts, Büring), which covers Parallel, Contrast and Narration. They claim any sequence that fits none of these should count as incoherent.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. An inventory derived from theory, rather than collected bottom-up, makes "no relation found" a meaningful verdict of incoherence instead of a gap in coverage.
  • I2. Treat a speech act's success as a chain of necessary subgoals, and label any follow-up act by which link in the chain it is trying to repair.
  • I3. The right repair strategy depends on the kind of state the speaker wants to bring about in the hearer, such as a belief, a desire, an emotion or an action.
  • I4. Even monologue can be read as dialogue with an imagined audience whose resistance the writer anticipates, which explains why writers add justifications nobody asked for.
  • I5. Self-repairs and disfluencies are modelled as a second attempt at the same communicative goal, not as a new contribution.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): If prag derived its discourse links from goal structure, a failed link could be reported as an explainable incoherence (or irony) signal rather than silently skipped.
  • I2 (frames): Each speech-act frame in prag could carry its goal plus a subgoal checklist, so a follow-up utterance attaches to the specific subgoal it repairs.
  • I3 (back): When generating follow-up text, Mova could choose the support move (evidence, a reason, a pointer to verification) based on the type of target state in the meaning graph.
  • I4 (answer): Readers for fables and tales could answer "why did the character say this?" by reconstructing the resistance being anticipated, such as disbelief.
  • I5 (world): Two support-linked attempts could be merged into one goal before updating the world of the text, so the same claim or event is not counted twice.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of BonnBonn · Germany10 works · 5,751 citations🎓University of CologneCologne · Germany9 works · 407 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPhilosophy · 284 worksLiterature and Literary Theory · 519 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Speech act theory · 229 works

Cite

Cite as Katja Jasinskaja and Frank Zickenheiner. 2025. Speech acts that support other speech acts. Dialogue & Discourse.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5210/dad.2025.201

@inproceedings{jasinskaja2025speech,
  title = {{Speech acts that support other speech acts}},
  author = {Katja Jasinskaja and Frank Zickenheiner},
  booktitle = {Dialogue \& Discourse},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.5210/dad.2025.201},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5210/dad.2025.201}
}

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