One of the success stories of formal semantics is explicating responsive moves like answers to questions. There is, however, a significant lacune concerning the characterization of initiating utterances, which are strongly tied to the conversational activity [language game (Wittgenstein), speech genre (Bakhtin)], or—our terminology—conversational type, one is engaged in. To date there has been no systematic proposal trying to account for the range of possible language games/speech genres/conversational types and their global structure. In particular, concerning the range of subject matter that can and needs to be discussed and by whom—ultimately a semantic analogue of Laplace’s demon. We suggest that the subject matter problem for conversational types is a central task for any semantic theory for conversation. This paper develops a theory of conversational types, which embedded in the theory of conversational interaction KoS, enables this problem to be tackled for a wide range of conversational types drawn from the British National Corpus classification of conversational domains. The theory we develop treats conversational types as first class, not metatheoretical entities, in contrast to explications of corresponding notions in game theoretic approaches. We demonstrate that this allows us to explicate the possibilities interlocutors have to refer to and seek clarification about the types of conversations they are engaged in.

形式语义的成功故事之一是解释响应性动作，例如问题的答案。然而，关于起始话语的表征存在一个重大缺陷，它与人们所从事的会话活动[语言游戏（维特根斯坦）、演讲流派（巴赫金）]或我们的术语——会话类型密切相关。迄今为止，还没有系统性的建议试图解释可能的语言游戏/语音流派/会话类型的范围及其全局结构。特别是，关于可以和需要讨论的主题范围以及由谁讨论——最终是拉普拉斯恶魔的语义类似物。我们认为会话类型的主题问题是任何会话语义理论的中心任务。本文发展了一种会话类型理论，该理论嵌入会话交互 KoS 理论中，使得该问题能够针对来自英国国家语料库会话领域分类的广泛会话类型得到解决。与博弈论方法中相应概念的解释相反，我们开发的理论将会话类型视为第一类，而不是元理论实体。我们证明，这使我们能够解释对话者必须参考并寻求澄清他们所参与的对话类型的可能性。