Herbert Herb Clark (born 1940) is a psycholinguist currently serving as Professor of Psychology at Stanford University.
Together with Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs (1986), he also developed the collaborative model, a theory for explaining how people in conversation coordinate with one another to determine definite references.
Since those who are ignorant of irony would be more likely to cling to the general tendency of seeing the world in terms of success and excellence, these are the people that ironists pretend to be.
Taking on the pretense of an oblivious weatherman and saying, “What lovely weather it is!” when it is storming and dark outside is making mention of a phrase previously said by weathermen and expressing contempt toward it.
It is a useful convention due to how it provides the stranger with a broad range of graceful excuses not to give the desired answer.
The last way of framing to overcome obstacles is for situations where the person being addressed seems unwilling to provide the information.
If A realizes the presentation wasn't definitive enough, he may edit his speech to be more specific (e.g. the dog with the pink collar, near the tree, by the parking lot over there).
[5] Clark began his work in common ground with studying the references in conversation between experts and novices.
Clark test summarized the process into 3 stages: assessing (directly or in passing finding out the expertise level of the discourse partner), supplying (experts who are addressing novices can expand their contribution to explain the reference), and acquiring expertise (novices speaking to experts acquire knowledge and fill in the gaps during conversation).
[6] In a different study, Clark showed how coordinating beliefs in conversation shapes the effectiveness of references.
[7] Most recently Clark studied how speakers monitor their addresses for understanding when giving directions, making references, or developing common ground.
Those who couldn't see the workspace made more errors, due to lack of affirmation by the instructor and the inability to check how successfully they were following directions.
This finding demonstrated how a conversation is a collaborative process, and that speakers and listeners work together to achieve a common goal.
The ability to interact to maintain common ground throughout discourse or any communicational process allows for both parties to feel like they're keeping up.
[8] Similarly to the Lego study, Clark examined the differences in understanding and compliance between addressees and overhearers.
[9] Clark worked with Jean E. Fox Tree to study the pronunciation of ‘the’ and ‘thee’ and their use in signaling problems while speaking.
What they found was that the shorter pronunciation of ‘the’, phonetically thuh, was used far less frequently to show a problem in speech production.
Only 7% of thuhs were followed by a suspension of speech due to articulation errors, word retrieval, or choice of message consideration.
What they argued was that um and uh are conventional English words and speakers plan for them, formulate them, and produce them just like any other vocabulary.
[11] Conversations as joint projects were where Clark explored vertical and horizontal transitions prompted by dialogue.
Once B recognizes the reference and the car is no longer the joint action of the speakers, they have made a vertical transition in dialogue.
Clark proposed that m-hm, uh-huh, yeah, yes, and yep are all horizontal markers that do not interrupt the flow of the joint activity.
Speakers understand and use these markers seamlessly and precisely in conversation to coordinate joint actions and maintain common ground for future direct reference.