Assertion and Common Ground

Linguistic communication generally takes place against a background of assumptions held in common by those participating in the conversation. Call this the common ground. These assumptions represent the state of the world as it is taken to be by those participants. Depending on the interlocutors and the topic of discussion, these common assumptions might range from facts concerning who is participating in the conversation to shared beliefs about quantum physics. Assertion can be viewed as a means of adding to that stock of shared assumptions: when one asserts that P, one puts P forward for inclusion in the common ground, and P will acquire common-ground status unless it is rejected by the other participants in the conversation. On this view of assertion, what one is entitled to assert is constrained by the common ground: one should normally only assert a proposition that is compatible with, but not entailed by, the common ground. To do otherwise would either be contradictory (in the case that the proposition asserted were incompatible with the common ground, i.e. with propositions accepted as true by the speaker), or uninformative. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.