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Mechanisms for interaction: Syntax as procedures for online interactive meaning building

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2016

Ruth Kempson
Affiliation:
Philosophy Department, King's College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United [email protected]://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/philosophy/people/staff/associates/emeritus/kempson/index.aspx
Stergios Chatzikyriakidis
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg, 41124 Gothenburg, [email protected]://www.stergioschatzikyriakidis.com/contact.html
Ronnie Cann
Affiliation:
Linguistics and English Language, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9AD, Scotland. [email protected]://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~ronnie/

Abstract

We argue that to reflect participant interactivity in conversational dialogue, the Christiansen & Chater (C&C) perspective needs a formal grammar framework capturing word-by-word incrementality, as in Dynamic Syntax, in which syntax is the incremental building of semantic representations reflecting real-time parsing dynamics. We demonstrate that, with such formulation, syntactic, semantic, and morpho-syntactic dependencies are all analysable as grounded in their potential for interaction.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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