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.
Highlights
What should grammars characterize? Historically, grammars were developed with written language in mind, and providing analyses for examples from written text was the standard task for grammarians
While in English sentence (4) below (LilloMartin and Klima, 1991) the relation the pronouns he and him bear to their antecedents is not overtly marked and needs to be inferred from extra-linguistic clues, in American Sign Language (ASL) the corresponding sentence is disambiguated by the loci of the pronouns: the locations in space to which the index finger points
What bears emphasizing is that such dependencies can stretch across many turns, in multi-party dialogue, thereby reinforcing the need for this information to be in long-medium term representation of context: Ginzburg and Fernández (2005) found that in the British National Corpus (BNC) over 44% of short answers have more than distance 1, and over 24% have distance 4 or more, as in the constructed example in (9): (9) a
Summary
What should grammars characterize? Historically, grammars were developed with written language in mind, and providing analyses for examples from written text was the standard task for grammarians. Grammar Characterizes Talk in Interaction omits the disfluencies , interjections, overlapping turns, nonsentential utterances, and ad hoc coinages which are ubiquitous in spoken language, as exemplified in (1)–(3):. Fri: Oh noon no: (interjection), (disfluency) I’m not- I jus: : uh-wanted: you to know that you can go up anyway.= (overlapping turns) 10. It is generally accepted that at least some form of reference to the Interaction Situation, so-called deictic reference, are governed by grammar
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