A Contextual Look on Rejection

Any theory of dialogue must account for the construction and maintenance of 'common ground', the set of propositions mutually taken for granted by the interlocutors. A basic issue is to tell apart accepted propositions from rejected ones. I will discuss recent work (joint with Raquel Fernandez) on the problem of rejection detection. Our work focusses on contextual aspects, i.e., situations where acceptance and rejection can only be separated by looking at a wider segment of the dialogue. The talk will include short primers on the semantic/pragmatic foundations of this area of research.