“The hand is no banana!” On communicating natural kind terms to a robot

摘要

Dialogic exchange is at the heart of anthropological, social and cultural evolution. Most of basic human interaction is mediated by dialogue. So it seems a natural step to transfer similar competences also to robots. Current prototypes reveal that this aim presupposes the implementation of a lot of skills and capabilities, which might pass unnoticed at first sight. In order to identify a roadmap towards further improvement, human-robot communication (HRC) has to be analyzed more deeply using methods from dialogue theory, conversational analysis and pragmatics. In our paper, we show this paradigmatically in the context of a particular multi-modal tutorial setting. In addition, we provide answers to the question how HRC contributes to a new theory of communication and vice versa.