Conversational scoreboard

In linguistics and philosophy of language, the conversational scoreboard (or conversational score) is a theoretical representation of the state of a conversation at a given moment. It treats discourse as a kind of game in which each speech act updates a structured collection of contextual parameters – for example the common ground, the questions currently under discussion and the interlocutors' public commitments – thereby constraining which subsequent moves are appropriate or felicitous.

The notion was introduced by David Lewis in his paper "Scorekeeping in a Language Game" (1979), which compares conversation to a game of baseball whose scoreboard records the evolving status of play. Since then, variants of the scoreboard framework have played an important role in dynamic semantics, formal pragmatics and recent work in social and political philosophy of language.

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