Faculty of Philosophy
Aweg 30
9718 CW Groningen
The Netherlands
Erik@Philos.Rug.Nl
According to Walton (1999: 53), a ``profile of dialogue is a connected sequence of moves and countermoves in a conversational exchange of a type that is goal-directed and can be represented in a normative model of dialogue." I should like to add that, generally, a profile is not to be identified with a single occurrence of a sequence, but is supposed to give us some general features of such sequences at some intermediate level of abstraction. Also a profile, generally, does not display just one (abstract) sequence, but a number of them, organized as branches in a tree. In this paper I hope to clarify the notion of ``profile of dialogue" to a certain extent, by giving examples. There will be no attempt to reach a definition of the concept. At the end I shall indicate how profiles can be useful for the study of argumentation.