NEGATIVE FEEDBACK IN INFORMATION DIALOGUES - IDENTIFICATION, CLASSIFICATION AND PROBLEM-SOLVING PROCEDURES

This research-essentially empirical and of a linguistic nature-takes a s its departure point the notion of feedback and the analysis of feedb ack phenomena in French informative dialogues. Our main concern has be en to try to map the theoretical models of dialogue control with the e mpirical reality of, dialogue problems. Supported by the statement of Bunt (1995a) that ''understanding dialogue behaviour is central to a t heory of dialogue'', our research attempts to arrive at a better under standing of dialogue difficulties and reflects on how to construct an acceptable dialogue model adjusted in the best possible way to this co mplex reality. There is also a certain comparative perspective as we h ave been considering different kinds of dialogue data at different sta ges from human-human dialogues to human-machine dialogues. Our contrib ution will focus on three aspects: 1. A proposal for the classificatio n of 238 difficulties found in 117 man-man and 146 man-machine dialogu es. 2. An analysis of the linguistic ''dialogue problem'' devices foun d in the corpus as well as their interpretation. 3. A tentative redefi nition of feedback as a dynamic dialogue control mechanism which tries to recognize, correct and avoid dialogue problems. (C) 1998 Academic Press Limited.