Conversational Scorekeeping

ABSTRACT Recent philosophy of language has seen a growing interest in what is often called the dynamics of conversation or conversational scorekeeping , that is, the ways in which speech and context mutually interact in the course of a conversation. This paper provides an introduction to the scorekeeping approach to linguistic interaction and its different developments and applications. Starting from the seminal work of Stalnaker and Lewis in the 1970s, it looks at subsequent proposals for enriching and extending their conceptions of context or conversational score to account for various linguistic phenomena. In addition, it discusses different, and sometimes conflicting, interpretations of the idea of conversational scorekeeping; the prospects for integrating the scorekeeping approach with two other prominent frameworks in pragmatics, namely, Grice's theory of conversational implicatures and speech act theory; and applications of the approach in the area of social and political philosophy of language.