A Framework for Studying Human Multimodal Communication - Coverbal Synchrony in Human-Machine Interaction - page 27

or sharing through speech, where the main function is social contact
and emotional togetherness.
7. Communicative Orientation
Every contribution to a dialog has several communicative orientation
functions. The four most important types are (Allwood, 2000):
(i) One or more responsive functions (all contributions except the
first)
(ii) One or more expressive functions, mostly involving the expression
of emotional or epistemic attitudes
(iii) One or more evocative functions
(iv) One or more referential functions.
The four communicative orientations can be seen in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1. The communicative orientations of a contribution.
Besides these four types of functions, contributions have an
“information structure” (see Section 6, above) helping to focus attention
on new or noteworthy parts of a contribution and to defocus other
aspects, which can be taken for granted to a greater extent.
7.1 Dynamics of dialog
Building on the orientation functions introduced above, we can
better understand what drives dialog forward by considering the
interplay between the evocative and the reactive/responsive functions
of contributions. The double term “reactive/responsive” is used to
include both reactions that are automatic and unaware and responses
that are more deliberate. The evocative and reactive/responsive
functions work like two cogwheels, linking into each other. The
evocative functions of Speaker A trigger the reactive/responsive
functions of Speaker B who then makes another contribution in which
the first part usually is mainly responsive and the second part mainly
evocative. Combined with the expectations connected with particular