Manfred Krifka (ZAS Berlin / Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

A simple but attractive model of important aspects of communication holds that it involves subsequent updates of the common ground, the information that the participants of the conversation assume to be shared (Stalnaker 1974, 2002). This model has been enriched by integrating interactive aspects of conversation, like agreeing or disgreeding reactions to assertions, or the discourse contributions of different types of questions followed by responses. One popular framework in which this is done assumes a negotiation table, a kind of automaton that allows for certain rule-governed moves (Farkas & Bruce 2010, cf. also Merin 1994). I point out fundamental problems of this approach and suggest, as an alternative, the Commitment Space model (Krifka 2015), which extends the notion of common ground as including pragmatically acceptable continuations. I will show, with a variety of examples, how conversational interactions can be modelled in this setting (Krifka 2022, 2025).