Genres of Conversation

Abstract

The QUD model is largely situated in the dominant pragmatic tradition that takes conversation to be a kind of cooperative information exchange. However, it fails to account for participants’ behavior outside this idealization. We do not just cooperatively exchange information with others—we argue with our opponents; we exchange greetings with coworkers; we are interrogated by a nosy friend or neighbor; we tell jokes to friends and family, etc. In this paper, I aim to refine the QUD model to account for these behavioral differences. I will do so by shedding more light on an often neglected aspect of the QUD model—domain goals—and their interaction with the QUD. I argue that participants’ domain goals account for their behavioral differences. Domain goals are what participants aim to achieve in conversation and the world more generally, and these constrain how participants act in conversation and engage with the QUD. The fact that behavioral differences in conversation are explained by participants’ domain goals also gestures to something significant: our conversational activities should be tied to what I will call the genre of conversation. That is, a proper understanding of conversational activities must tie such activities to a specific genre. We have compelling reasons for thinking so: (i) it allows us to say why some conversational activities are more natural than others, while also supporting our expectations about how other participants will behave; and (ii) it allows us to say why the meaning of certain speech acts, e.g., utterances, vary depending on the genre. While my account of conversational dynamics makes significant progress in accounting for the nuances that the basic QUD model overlooks, there remains a host of questions ripe for serious attention but which I do not have the space to address, of which I mention a few in the Conclusion.