Understanding common ground as a cognitive object

Abstract

At first glance, the idea of common ground seems a simple notion. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Common ground is actually very nuanced and complicated, with a dynamic connection to knowledge, context and situation. Common ground has been characterised to date as joint action, dynamic, and containing shared knowledge of various kinds. In this paper we propose a view of common ground as a type of cognitive object. We argue that common ground, the informational contents of common ground, and the operations that act on it in its construction and maintenance (grounding, verification, repair, accommodation, etc.), can be considered as contributing to the emergent common ground, while distributed across the minds of the discourse interlocutors. We argue for a view of common ground as distributed, complex, and adaptive across discourse agents. In motivating this view, we show how knowledge, context and situation intersect to help delineate the scope boundaries of the common ground informational content, and act as cognitive framing devices. We propose a formalisation of this model of common ground that can i) resolve diverse kinds of linguistic ambiguity found in discourse, and ii) be utilised in the characterisation of, for example, speech acts such as the assertive and declarative, along with indirect requests. The formalisation exemplifies elements of the interfaces between knowledge, context, situation, and both core and emergent common ground. The important questions we consider are therefore: 1. What is the relationship between context, situation and common ground? 2. What is the relationship between core and emergent common ground? 3. How does relevant knowledge and content get selected for inclusion into core and emergent common ground? 4. Considered as a cognitive object, what operations are used to manage the informational content of common ground?