Review of The Interactive Stance: Meaning in Conversation by Jonathan Ginzburg (Oxford Linguistics 2012)

LUCIANA BENOTTI

STUDIA LOGICA

SPRINGER

Año: 2015 vol. 103 p. 877 - 882

0039-3215

This book does an important job, as it performs a step towards bridging the gap between techniques from diverse areas such as semantics, conversational analysis and computational linguistics, as seen from a formal perspective. The book assumes a strong formal background; grasping the details of the formalizations otherwise is not an easy task. As a result, it is a good entry point to the other areas for semanticists, logicians and formal linguists interested in meaning in conversation; people from other areas should grasp the main arguments but may not be able to follow and verify the details by themselves. One important direction in which the area of meaning in conversation is advancing into is the use of machine learning techniques in order to model the probabilistic aspects of conversation and context. Bridging theories of formal semantics such as the one developed in this book and such techniques is one of the most important challenges that the future brings for meaning in conversation (see [Liang and Potts, 2014] for a step in this direction). This is a big challenge that will need to be addressed soon in order to provide solid ground for current technological advances.