Casual Conversation
How Tonesu handles everyday social interaction — greetings, small talk, hedging, register, humor, and the phatic texture of real speech.
Formal sentences are the easy case. Casual conversation is where vocabulary gaps become visible: the words that oil social interaction, express uncertainty without full evidential machinery, soften a request, or mark that something was a joke. The fa-CON corpus batch (affect in conversation) and C001–C008 conversations are the primary data.
What formal Tonesu doesn't cover yet
Phatic speech — greetings, farewells, acknowledgments. Does Tonesu have a "hello"? A "thank you"? These are speech acts with social function but low propositional content. Do they reduce to existing roots, or are they gaps?
Hedging and softening — ~ (approximation) handles epistemic hedging of quantities and claims, but social softening is different: I was sort of thinking maybe we could... is not an approximation claim, it's a face-saving act. What carries that?
Register — written Tonesu is formal by default. What signals informality? The colloquial contracted forms in registry/colloquial.md are a start. Is there a register system, or just a vocabulary gap?
Humor and irony — irony requires the listener to infer the negation of the surface meaning. Tonesu's explicit denial machinery (no —) is the wrong tool. What marks non-literal speech?
Back-channeling — mm, right, I see, go on. Does Tonesu have minimal response tokens? The ya (attention-signal) particle is close, but it's forward-pointing, not a listener acknowledgment.
Starting points from the corpus
| Batch | What it tests |
|---|---|
fa-CON |
Affect registration across conversation (anger, grief, rising concern) |
C001–C008 |
Eight full conversations covering coordination, dispute, social, theological, legal contexts |
CVP-001 |
Vocative and direct address — he na Moses! |
ODL-001 |
Embodied states — hunger, fatigue — the most everyday of needs |
Notes
Nothing here yet. Add exploration sessions, vocabulary lists, and design notes as they develop.