Talk:Common ground (linguistics)

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Philosophy: Logic / Language / Analytic

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Reconciling with related articles

@Botterweg14: first off, I really appreciate you starting this article. It's bugged me for a while that we didn't have an article on the topic.

There are a couple existing articles that sort of flirt around with the concept of CG in more or less confusing ways, and which probably need to be reconciled with this article. The main one is Grounding in communication. From the very first sentence....

Grounding in communication (or common ground) is a concept proposed by Herbert H. Clark and Susan E. Brennan.

...I see a couple of issues:

It seems to suggest that it and this article are about the same topic.
It makes the claim that Clark and Brennan invented the concept of common ground circa 1991. But the concept was being written about (under the name "common ground") long before that (e.g. here is an example from 1975 - pdf warning). The article Herbert H. Clark sort of repeats this claim (Clark is known for his theory of "common ground").

I'm not a subject matter expert on this, but as best as I can tell from a tiny bit of research, it seems like Clark and Brennan invented an influential theory of grounding, i.e. a theory around the process by which the CG is updated in the course of a conversation? So to the extent that Grounding in communication should exist as a separate article (rather than being integrated into this article), it should focus on that process, rather than the common ground itself. But it seems like some material related to CG generally has crept into the article (e.g. in the criticisms section), and should probably be integrated here.

There are a number of links that currently target Grounding in communication but which should be switched to targeting this article (e.g. at Givenness#Common_Ground). There are also some that should be switched from Common ground (communication technique) (which is a bizarrely vague article which should probably be deleted, IMO).

Anyways, just wanted to make a note of this in case anyone has any thoughts or wants to take on some of this work. (I might take a stab at it myself someday.) Colin M (talk) 19:02, 9 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I agree, thanks for pointing this out. The issue of grounding is closely related but not exactly the same. I might take care of it at some point, but probably not soon. Botterweg14 (talk) 23:28, 9 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]