Analogies in Spontaneous Discourse

Analo~es in Spontaneous Discourse I Rachel Relc bman Harvard University and Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. Abstract This paper presents an analysis of analogies based on observations of oatural conversations. People's spontaneous use of analogies provides Inslg~t into their implicit evaluation procedures for analogies. The treatment here, therefore, reveals aspects of analogical processing that is somewhat more difficult to see in an experimental context. The work involves explicit treatment of the discourse context in which analogy occurs. A major focus here is the formalization of the effects of analogy on discourse development. There is much rule-llke behavior in this process, both in underlying thematic development of the discourse and in the surface lir~ulstlc forms used in this development. Both these forms of regular behavior are discussed in terms of a hierarchical structurin6 of a discourse into distinct, but related and linked, context spaces. 1 Introduction People's use of analogies in conversation reveals a rich set of processing strategies. Consider the following example. A: B: C: I. I think if you're going to marry someone in the 2. Hindu tradition, you have to - Well, you - They 3. say you give money to the family, to the glrl, 4. but in essence, you actually buy her. 5. It's the same in the Western tradition. You 6. know, you see these greasy fat millionaires going 7. around with film stars, right? They've 8. essentially bought them by their status (?money). 9. HO, but, there, the woman is selllng herself. 10. In these societies, the woman isn't selling 11. herself, her parents are selling her. There are several interesting things happening in this exchange. For example, notice that the analogy is argued and discussed by the conversants, and that in the arEumentatlon C uses the close discourse deictlo "these" tO refer to the in~tlatlng subject of the a~alogy, and that she uses the far discourse delctlo "there" to refer to the linearly closer analogous utterances. In addition, notice that C bases her rejection ca a non- correspondence of relations effectlng the relation claimed constant between the two domains (women hei~ sold). She does not simply pick any arbitrary non- correspondence between the two domains. In the body of this paper, I address and develop these types of phenomena accompanying analogies in naturally ongoing discourse. The body of the paper is divided into four sections. First a theoretic framework for discourse is presented. This is followed by some theoretic work on analo~es, an integration of this work with the general theory of discourse proposed here, and an illuntratlon of how the II would llke to thank Dedre Gentner for many useful comments end discussions. integration of the different approaches explicates the issues under discussion. In the last section of the paper, I concentrate on some surface llngulstlo phenomena accompanying a oonversant's use of analogy in spontaneous discourse. 2 The Context Space Theory of Discourse A close analysis of spontaneous dialogues reveals that discourse processing is focused and enabled by a conversant's ability to …

Content truncated to 500 words