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SUMMARY:Ellipsis\, Dialogue Modelling\, and the Grammar-Pragmatics Interfa
 ce - Ruth Kempson (King's College London)
DTSTART:20061204T114500Z
DTEND:20061204T130000Z
UID:TALK5871@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Napoleon Katsos
DESCRIPTION:ABSTRACT: In this talk I take up the challenge of providing a 
 grammar formalism which can provide a basis from which the patterns of dia
 logue can be naturally reflected (Pickering and Garrod 2004). There are tw
 o major problems posed by dialogue patterns. First there is the so-called 
 split utterance phenomenon\, in which speakers and hearers can switch role
 s across any syntactic dependency whatever. This ability is wholly systema
 tic and displayed even by very young children with emergent syntactic skil
 ls. This\nphenomenon is highly problematic for all formalisms which presum
 e on a use-neutral formalism which production and parsing separately make 
 use of. Secondly\, there are widespread parallelism effects\, displayed bo
 th in ellipsis construal and more generally in priming effects\; and these
  have generally taken to be a primitive constraint on dialogue processing.
  In this talk I will give a sketch of a grammar formalism which has the in
 trinsic dynamics of a parsing device\, Dynamic Syntax (Kempson et al 2001\
 , Cann et al 2005)\, and show that this framework directly meets the Picke
 ring and Garrod challenge\, as follows.\n\nFirst\, the grammar is defined 
 in terms of mechanisms for the process of parsing\, and these\, along with
  the partial structures which such processes give rise to\, form part of t
 he context relative to which interpretation is progressively built up. It 
 is re-use of such procedures which forms the heart of parallelism effects\
 , both in ellipsis and in lexical\, syntactic and semantic priming. A happ
 y consequence of this account of ellipsis is an integrated basis for expla
 ining ellipsis effects\, despite the diversity of available interpretation
 s. Secondly\, the phenomenon of split utterances is directly predicted: th
 e production system\, in having to use the associated grammar formalism\, 
 has to have the same incremental dynamics as the parsing device. The very 
 tight coordination of parsing and production is ensured: and\, as I shall 
 show\, the phenomenon of split utterances follows immediately.\n\nA conseq
 uence of this system is that there is no concept of\nsentence-meaning\, si
 nce the mechanisms for growth of interpretation interact with context-depe
 ndent choices as part of the process of constructing interpretations. In c
 losing\, I shall argue that\, with this shift in perspective\, the context
 ualism debate (as posed by Cappelen and Lepore 2005) is transformed. Far f
 rom being irrelevant as Cappelen and Lepore presumed\, ellipsis phenomena 
 demonstrate the force of the contextualist claim that natural language int
 erpretation is essentially and systematically context-dependent.\n\nCappel
 en\, H. and Lepore\, E. 2005 'Insensitive Semantics'. Blackwell. \n\nCann\
 , R\, Kempson\, R\, and Marten\, L. 2005. 'The Dynamics of Language.' Else
 vier.\n\nKempson\, R.\, Meyer-Viol\, W. and Gabbay\, D. 2001. 'Dynamic Syn
 tax: The Flow of Language Understanding'. Blackwell. \n\nPickering\, M. an
 d Garrod\, S. 2004. Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue. Behaviora
 l and Brain Sciences\,\n27\, 169-225.\n
LOCATION:GR-06/07\, English Faculty Building
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