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# The Pragmatics of Indirect Commands in Collaborative Discourse

**Authors:** [Matthew Lamm](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/matthew-lamm/), Mihail Eric · **Year:** 2017 · **Venue:** IWCS 2017 (short papers) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/W17-6921](https://aclanthology.org/W17-6921/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

[**1** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2962751874) openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14[Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS) –- Short papers](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/W17-69/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W17-6921/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W17-6921.pdf)
- [arXiv 1705.03454](https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03454)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2962751874)

**Authors (2)**

1. [Matthew Lamm](https://openalex.org/A5005471354) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/48024953) · h 9 · 372 citations · 18 works
2. [Mihail Eric](https://openalex.org/A5109275608) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/144528428) · h 14 · 1228 citations · 24 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex-snapshot (2026-10-14); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

In the Cards corpus (1,266 transcripts of a two-player game: collect six consecutive cards of one suit, hold at most three each) the authors study commands that name neither an action nor an agent: locative statements such as «there is a 5h in the very top left corner», after which the partner goes and picks the card up. For card pickups such locatives are almost half of all commands, more than imperatives. They annotated a simple common ground (hands, locations, agreed suit, needed cards, who can act) before 94 ambiguous locatives in 55 transcripts and predicted whether the addressee acts. Context-free baselines reach F1 23.5 (random) and 58.9 (bigrams). One common-ground feature alone does much better: «explicit goal» (the card fits the agreed suit or a stated need) 76.2, and «full hands» (the speaker cannot pick it up but the addressee can) 82.3. Combining the two did not help.

## Ideas

- I1. Treat a bare statement of where something is as a possible indirect request when (a) the thing is what the addressee or both said they want and (b) the speaker cannot act on it themselves. In tales: «The key is under the stone» said to the hero who wants the key. A rule over Say frames in `prag/src/frames.rs` with the evidence printed; measure `indirect` recall on the silver's `assert` lines with `means` mentioning an action.
- I2. The paper's result argues for a few common-ground features over many lexical ones (2,916 bigram features lost to one binary feature). For `prag`, add one or two discourse features built from frames (a want-frame of the addressee shares an entity with the sentence; the speaker's last frame shows them unable) rather than more words, and compare against adding the previous sentence's words. Measure `indirect` macro-F1 with a negative control (shuffled feature).
- I3. Use the follow-up action as the label, as the paper does: the next frame of the addressee acting on the named object marks the statement as a command in effect. This gives tale data for the dialogue layer without the teacher; check its agreement with the Opus `means` field first.

## For Mova

[31. Speech acts](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/31-speech-acts/) §5 (indirect speech acts) and `38-dialogue-and-discourse-markers.md` §2 (recruitments). Code: `prag/src/frames.rs` (Say frames, want frames), `prag/src/feats.rs` (discourse features), `world/src/talk.rs`. Measures: `indirect` macro-F1 and recall in `prag eval`; agreement of action-follow-up labels with the silver.

Topics: [Discourse analysis](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/discourse-analysis/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [arXiv 1705.03454](https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03454)

```
@inproceedings{lamm2017pragmatics,
  title = {{The Pragmatics of Indirect Commands in Collaborative Discourse}},
  author = {Lamm, Matthew and Eric, Mihail},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS) –- Short papers},
  year = {2017},
  eprint = {1705.03454},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03454}
}
```

- [← previous Whit's the Richt Pairt o Speech: PoS tagging for Scots](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lameris-2021-whit-s-richt-pairt-o/)
- [next → Two ways to agree in DN1&N2 constructions – Romance left-conjunct agreement and Germanic morphologically resolved agreement](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lamoure-2023-two-ways-agree-d-n1/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

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