Grammars as Processes for Interactive Language Use: Incrementality and the Emergence of Joint Intentionality
Recent research in the formal modelling of dialogue has led to the conclusion that bifurcations like language use versus language structure, competence versus performance, grammatical versus psycholinguistic/pragmatic modes of explanation are all based on
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Abstract Recent research in the formal modelling of dialogue has led to the conclusion that bifurcations like language use versus language structure, competence versus performance, grammatical versus psycholinguistic/pragmatic modes of explanation are all based on an arbitrary and ultimately mistaken dichotomy, one that obscures the unitary nature of the phenomena because it insists on a view of grammar that ignores essential features of natural language (NL) processing. The subsequent radical shift towards a conception of NL grammars as procedures for enabling interaction in context (Kempson et al. 2009a, b) now raises a host of psychological and philosophical issues: The ability of dialogue participants to take on or hand over utterances mid-sentence raises doubts as to the constitutive status of Gricean intention-recognition as a fundamental mechanism in communication. Instead, the view that emerges, rather than relying on mind-reading and cognitive state metarepresentational capacities, entails a reconsideration of the notion of communication and a non-individualistic view on meaning. Coordination/alignment/intersubjectivity among dialogue participants is now seen as relying on lowlevel mechanisms like the grammar (appropriately conceived).
1 Introduction Following Chomsky (1965), there has been a widespread perception, until recently, that formal accounts of natural language (NL) grammars must be grounded in the description of sentence-strings without any reflection of the E. Gregoromichelaki (&) R. Kempson King’s College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] R. Kempson e-mail: [email protected]
A. Capone et al. (eds.), Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 2, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-01014-4_7, Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013
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dynamics of language performance. Departures from this anti-functionalist methodology were rejected on the basis that language use is often disfluent and disorderly, hence presumed to preclude rigorous systematization, a stance independently propounded by the antiformalist approach of Ordinary Language philosophy (Austin 1975) and followed up by many theoretical approaches to pragmatics. However, structural, formal accounts consistent with performance considerations are now being considered (see e.g. Newmeyer 2010), as witness the huge growth in context-modelling and information update in formal semantics since the development of DRT and related frameworks. However, when required to interface with standard grammar formalisms, these developments in formal semantics/pragmatics are now beginning to show that the standard methodological dichotomies, e.g. language use versus language structure, competence versus performance, grammatical versus psycholinguistic/pragmatic modes of explanation seem problematic. This is because all phenomena of NL context-dependency are explainable only by bifurcating them into grammar-internal versus grammarexternal/discours
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