TEUN A. VAN DIJK DIALOGUE AND COGNITION 1. PROBLEMS AND AIMS

1.1. Dialogues are verbal interaction sequences performed among language users. In order to be able to adequately accomplish their respective actions which constitute a dialogue, these language users must 'go through ' a number of highly complex cognitive processes. It is the aim of this paper to briefly discuss some of the properties of the processes and representations involved in the cognitive management of dialogues. The theoretical background of our discussion is the current work being done in the theory of discourse, and in particular the experimental research in cognitive psychology on processes of discourse production and comprehen-sion. At the moment this kind of research is also done, from a theoretical point of view, in the domain of artificial intelligence. In the present paper we will have to see which additional properties must be postulated in a processing model for discourse in order to be able to account for specific aspects of dialogue. Our discussion will remain informal. 1.2. A cognitive analysis of dialogue indirectly involves many aspects of dialogues, e.g. structural properties on the one hand, and social and cultural conditions on the other hand (which also all need to be represented cognitively), which however cannot be discussed in the framework of one small paper. In order to stress that a complete cognitive model requires processes, operations, strategies, etc. which are linked to these structural and social properties of dialogues, we will nevertheless briefly list some of them: 1. phonetic and phonological relations between sentences, tums or mover of the verbal interaction sequence (intonation, stress, pitch, etc.); paraverbal activities; 2. morphological and lexical properties of sequencing (specific words as `openers', 'closers', 'pass ' indicators, pragmatic particles and other dialogue connectives) 3. syntactic properties and relations (incomplete sentences, com-pletion of sentences by next speakers, phrasal boundaries of tums, repetitions, syntactic expressions of coherence phenomena, e.g. PRO-forms, etc.