A linguistic form's compositional, timeless meaning can be surrounded or even contradicted by various social, aesthetic, or analogistic companion meanings. This paper addresses a series of problems in the structure of spoken language discourse, including turn‐taking and grounding. It views these processes as composed of fine‐grained actions, which resemble speech acts both in resulting from a computational mechanism of planning and in having a rich relationship to the specific linguistic features which serve to indicate their presence. The resulting notion of Conversation Acts is more general than speech act theory, encompassing not only the traditional speech acts but turn‐taking, grounding, and higher‐level argumentation acts as well. Furthermore, the traditional speech acts in this scheme become fully joint actions, whose successful performance requires full listener participation. This paper presents a detailed analysis of spoken language dialogue. It shows the role of each class of conversation acts in discourse structure, and discusses how each class can be processed and recognized. Conversation acts, it will be seen, better account for the success of conversation than speech act theory alone. They also provide a pragmatic view of meaning in which the literal/non‐literal distinction is simply irrelevant.

Existing plan-based theories of speech act interpretation do not account for the conventional aspect of speech acts. We use patterns of linguistic features (e.g. mood, verb form, sentence adverbials, thematic roles) to suggest a range of speech act interpretations for the utterance. These are filtered using plan-based conversational implicatures to eliminate inappropriate ones. Extended plan reasoning is available but not necessary for familiar forms. Taking speech act ambiguity seriously, with these two constraints, explains how "Can you pass the salt?" is a typical indirect request while "Are you able to pass the salt?" is not.