Understanding communicative action requires bridging two worlds: the world of social actors with the purposes, concerns, and 'goals' that motivate their actions, and the world of discourse in which everyday actors' goals are expressed and inferred. This paper overviews two distinct approaches to building that bridge, discourse studies and communicative goal studies, highlighting the strengths and limitations of each approach. In addition, we overview each of the papers in the volume showing how each contributes to and extends one approach while raising challenges to the other.
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