Common Ground or Conceptual Reframing? A Study of the Common Elements in Conflicting Positions in French Interactions - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 135

interpret it differently. Royal's sentence ( do you think you are partly responsible for
the situation in which France finds itself today? ) may be described as questioning
Sarkozy's beliefs: the question tends to oblige Sarkozy to publically accept or deny
(1). According to Searle's framework (Searle 1969 ), one would say that this is not
a real question about [you are partly responsible for p ] because the speaker already
“knows the answer” (there is no suspension—not even a mock suspension—of any
judgment about this being true or false), it is actually a real question concerning the
content [Sarkozy thinks that he is partly responsible ::: ]. So in Stalnaker's terms,
Royal does not presuppose (1), because she presents this content as a personal belief
and is asking Sarkozy precisely whether he believes it too. In other words, Royal
wants to know whether (1) is shared belief (i.e. common ground) or not. 3
Sarkozy's position is instead quite transparent. Conjunction (3) comes from the
sentence Regarding the failures of the republic, the Left and the Right are both
partly responsible . Conjunction (4), the acceptance of the fact that the Right must
account for what happened, plus the statement that the Left must do the same,
can be identified in the word record ( Suis-je responsable d'une partie du bilan du
gouvernement ? Oui ::: /Am I responsible for a portion of the government's record ?
Ye s ::: ) which refers, in this precise context, to an explanation of how things went
the way they did, and which we can consider as a synonym for the expression rendre
des comptes ( to account for )usedbyRoyal.
In conclusion, from the moment that both Royal and Sarkozy accept contents (1)
and (2) as true, that is to say the two pieces of information in Royal's position, these
pieces of information belong to the common ground of the interaction—for the sake
of argument, we will consider Sarkozy as synonymous with the Right , so that (1) is
synonymous with (3) b (reproduced here as (5)) and (2) with (4) b (reproduced here
as (6)):
The Common Ground of the interaction contains:
(5) [The Right is partly responsible for p ]
(6) [The Right must account for p ]
The first point I want to make is that by isolating pieces of information, we
are separating what seems to be deeply connected in meaning. In neither of the
interventions is being responsible for p independent from having to account for
what happened to p . In Royal's view, (1) and (2) are not isolated descriptions of
independent states of affairs, one being that Sarkozy had important responsibilities
during the government still in power at the time, the other, that Sarkozy must explain
why everything had gone wrong in France in the previous few years. These are not
two independent entities put one next to the other; they are connected in a way
3 I am not taking into account that there are non-verbal manifestations (intonation, gestures) of this
kind of attitudes, because I am focusing in the verbal features of the interaction. But this must
obviously be addressed in a complete study of how the “conceptual space” (cf. infra ) is modified
by the speaker's interventions.