Grammar Is a System That Characterizes Talk in Interaction

Abstract

Much of contemporary mainstream formal grammar theory is unable to provide analyses for language as it occurs in actual spoken interaction. Its analyses are developed for a cleaned up version of language which omits the disfluencies, non-sentential utterances, gestures, and many other phenomena that are ubiquitous in spoken language. Using evidence from linguistics, conversation analysis, multimodal communication, psychology, language acquisition, and neuroscience, we show these aspects of language use are rule governed in much the same way as phenomena captured by conventional grammars. Furthermore, we argue that over the past few years some of the tools required to provide a precise characterizations of such phenomena have begun to emerge in theoretical and computational linguistics; hence, there is no reason for treating them as “second class citizens” other than pre-theoretical assumptions about what should fall under the purview of grammar. Finally, we suggest that grammar formalisms covering such phenomena would provide a better foundation not just for linguistic analysis of face-to-face interaction, but also for sister disciplines, such as research on spoken dialogue systems and/or psychological work on language acquisition.

Why We Should Study Multimodal Language

“…Recent work by Schlenker and Chemla ( 2017 ), aims to provide evidence for the grammar-like nature of gestures. Similarly, Ginzburg and Poesio ( 2016 ) offer a formalization of intrinsically interactional aspects of language, including gestures as well as disfluencies and non-sentential utterances, with the goal of demonstrating their grammatical, rule-governed behavior. This resonates with work by gesture researchers who have sought to define multimodal approaches to grammar (e.g., Mittelberg, 2006 ; Fricke, 2012 ), and who have studied aspects of conventionality in gesture, identifying varying degrees of conventionality in form-meaning pairings in gesture, used consistently across speakers within language communities for conveying certain meanings (e.g., Kendon, 1995 , 2004 ; Calbris, 2011 ; Bressem and Müller, 2017 ; Bressem et al, 2017 ; Müller, 2017 ).…”

Laughter as language

“…We do not assume that this is a question that can be answered straightforwardly, not least because of potential disagree-ments about what constitutes the grammar. Over the last few years, several works have appeared detailing the view that grammars should be viewed as systems that classify an utterance as it occurs in conversation see e.g., (Ginzburg 2012;Ginzburg & Poesio 2016;Kempson et al 2016;Cooper 2020). Thus, Ginzburg & Poesio (2016).…”

Ellipsis in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

“…Ginzburg 2012; Cooper 2012), presented in section 7 refines this view. It takes a dialogue-oriented view of grammar in which a grammar provides types that characterize speech events (for detailed discussion, see Ginzburg and Poesio 2016.). Thus, it proposes a linguistic ontology that includes both tokens (speech events, modeled as records) and types that characterize such tokens (signs, modeled as record types).…”

“…More generally,Ginzburg and Poesio (2016) propose constraints that any formalism striving to deal with spoken language needs to satisfy.…”