Display Acts in Grounding Negotiations

Display utterances are those utterances, such as verbatim rephrases or cooperative completions, that exhibit the speakers’ construals of their partners’ previous utterances. Drawing on both empirical analyses and theoretical considerations, we study the ways they perform the acts of acknowledgment and repair-request. We show that (1) these grounding acts, when performed by display utterances, are not autonomous acts whose choices are under the control of the speakers, yet (2) they are instantaneous acts whose types are fixed at the time of utterance. Accordingly, the grounding model proposed in this paper reconciles the non-autonomous nature of display utterances (Clark, 1996) with the necessity for on-line classifications of the grounding acts (Traum, 1994).