Languages as Mechanisms for Interaction

Modelling conversational dialogue presents a major hurdle for both conventional grammar formalisms and current pragmatic theories. A diagnostic pattern of dialogue is the hand over from one participant to another. This switch of speaker/hearer roles can involve splitting apart structural or semantic dependencies at any point in an utterance, giving rise to exchanges in which no one person need have had an overall plan of the emergent structure. In this talk I will show how an explanation of these data form a subpart of a Dynamic Syntax account of ellipsis (Cann et al 2005, Purver et al 2006, Gregoromichelaki et al 2011). Dynamic Syntax, uniquely, takes an aspect of online performance – the concept of underspecification and progressive update – and uses that as the core organising principle of grammar. Syntax simply is a set of principles for the incremental building up of representations of content in context. On this view, both content and context continually evolve, with elliptical fragments being developments relative to the shifting context. As I shall show, split utterances emerge as an immediate consequence of this account, an effect of interaction that is induced by the language mechanisms themselves. I shall then probe the consequence of adopting a grammar system in which syntax is not domain-specific, by exploring parallelisms between music and language. In particular I shall argue that the Sentential Subject restriction (Ross 1968) follows from a very general principle constraining the dynamics of tree growth, which applies equally to determine constraints on displays of rhythmic complexity in musical performance (Vazan and Schober 2004, London 2012).

This work is supported by the following project: The Dynamics of Conversational Dialogue (DynDial).

Related texts

• Cann, R. et al 2005 The Dynamics of Language.  Elsevier.
  
• Gregoromichelaki E. et al 2011.  Incrementality and intention-recognition in utterance processing.  Dialogue and Discourse 2.1. 
• Kempson, R et al 2001 Dynamic Syntax: The Dynamics of Language Understanding. Blackwell.
• London, J. 2012.  Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter (2^nd edition ) Oxford University Press.
• Purver, M. et al 2006.  Grammars as parsers: meeting the dialogue challenge.  Research on Language and Computation 4.
• Ross, J. 1967.  Constraints on Variables in Syntax. MIT PhD.
• Vazan and Schober (2004) Detecting and resolving metrical ambiguity in a rock song upon multiple rehearings. 8^th international conference on Music Perception and Cognition.