Papers by Eleni Gregoromichelaki
Theoretical Linguistics, 2016
Language use is full of subsentential shifts of context, a phenomenon dramatically illustrated in... more Language use is full of subsentential shifts of context, a phenomenon dramatically illustrated in conversation where non-sentential utterances displaying seamless shifts between speaker/hearer roles appear regularly. The hurdle this poses for standard assumptions is that every local linguistic dependency can be distributed across speakers, with the content of what they are saying and the significance of each conversational move emerging incrementally. Accordingly, we argue that the modelling of a psychologically-realistic grammar necessitates recasting the notion of natural language in terms of our ability for interaction with others and the environment, abandoning the competence-performance dichotomy as standardly envisaged. We sketch
ABSTRACT Various intepretational effects and structural restrictions can be obser ved in the phen... more ABSTRACT Various intepretational effects and structural restrictions can be obser ved in the phenomenon of the duplication of arguments (doubling) by clitics in lan- guages like Modern Greek. The fact that some of these restrictions operate apparently differentially depending on whether the doubled argument occurs in the left or the right periphery have led to the postulation of two supposedly d is- tinct phenomena: CLLD (Clitic Left Dislocation: left periphery, unbounded) vs. Clitic Doubling(ClD: right periphery, clause bound). We examine these left-right asymmetries from the perspective of Dynamic Syntax (DS), a grammar formal- ism which reflects directly the dynamics of incrementally mapping a string of words to a semantic representation. Because in DS no separate level of syn- tactic representation is assumed, many standard structural constraints emer ge as epiphenomenal and rather attributable to the timing of the construction process and its interaction with the context of utterance. For example, the Right Roof Constraint, a phenomenon which appears to require proliferation of otherwise unmotivated functional projections with attendant leftward movement (Kayne 1994), emerges in DS as an immediate consequence of the fact that interpreta- tional processes at early stages may assign underspecified structure/c ontent with delayed construal while interpretational processes at the closing stages may not
Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 2016
Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 2013
Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 2015
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Semantic Representation of Spoken Language - SRSL '09, 2009
Taking so-called split utterances as our point of departure, we argue that a new perspective on t... more Taking so-called split utterances as our point of departure, we argue that a new perspective on the major challenge of disambiguation becomes available, given a framework in which both parsing and generation incrementally involve the same mechanisms for constructing trees reflecting interpretation (Dynamic Syntax: ). With all dependencies, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic, defined in terms of incremental progressive tree growth, the phenomenon of speaker/hearer role-switch emerges as an immediate consequence, with the potential for clarification, acknowledgement, correction, all available incrementally at any sub-sentential point in the interpretation process. Accordingly, at all intermediate points where interpretation of an utterance subpart is not fully determined for the hearer in context, uncertainty can be resolved immediately by suitable clarification/correction/repair/extension as an exchange between interlocutors. The result is a major check on the combinatorial explosion of alternative structures and interpretations at each choice point, and the basis for a model of how interpretation in context can be established without either party having to make assumptions about what information they and their interlocutor share in resolving ambiguities.
Philosophical and Formal Approaches to Linguistic Analysis, 2012
Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 2013
ABSTRACT Various intepretational effects and structural restrictions can be obser ved in the phen... more ABSTRACT Various intepretational effects and structural restrictions can be obser ved in the phenomenon of the duplication of arguments (doubling) by clitics in lan- guages like Modern Greek. The fact that some of these restrictions operate apparently differentially depending on whether the doubled argument occurs in the left or the right periphery have led to the postulation of two supposedly d is- tinct phenomena: CLLD (Clitic Left Dislocation: left periphery, unbounded) vs. Clitic Doubling(ClD: right periphery, clause bound). We examine these left-right asymmetries from the perspective of Dynamic Syntax (DS), a grammar formal- ism which reflects directly the dynamics of incrementally mapping a string of words to a semantic representation. Because in DS no separate level of syn- tactic representation is assumed, many standard structural constraints emer ge as epiphenomenal and rather attributable to the timing of the construction process and its interaction with the context of utterance. For example, the Right Roof Constraint, a phenomenon which appears to require proliferation of otherwise unmotivated functional projections with attendant leftward movement (Kayne 1994), emerges in DS as an immediate consequence of the fact that interpreta- tional processes at early stages may assign underspecified structure/c ontent with delayed construal while interpretational processes at the closing stages may not
Advances in Interaction Studies, 2013
Lappin/The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory, 2015
In conversation, interlocutors routinely indicate whether something said or done has been process... more In conversation, interlocutors routinely indicate whether something said or done has been processed and integrated. Such feedback includes backchannels such as 'okay' or 'mhm', the production of a next relevant turn, and repair initiation via clarification requests. Importantly, such feedback can be produced not only at sentence/turn boundaries, but also sub-sententially. In this paper, we extend an existing model of incremental semantic processing in dialogue, based around the Dynamic Syntax (DS) grammar framework, to provide a low-level, integrated account of these phenomena, demonstrating that they can be accounted for as part of the semantic processing mechanisms rather than as higher level pragmatic phenomena or as an " unofficial " part of the conversation. Specifically, we show how backchannels, clarification requests and their responses can be parsed and generated incrementally in context, using only the core semantic structure-building mechanisms o...
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2009 Conference on The 10th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue - SIGDIAL '09, 2009
This paper presents a preliminary English corpus study of split utterances (SUs), single utteranc... more This paper presents a preliminary English corpus study of split utterances (SUs), single utterances split between two or more dialogue turns or speakers. It has been suggested that SUs are a key phenomenon of dialogue, which this study confirms: almost 20% of utterances were found to fit this general definition, with nearly 3% being the between-speaker case most often studied. Other claims/assumptions in the literature about SUs' form and distribution are investigated, with preliminary results showing: splits can occur within syntactic constituents, apparently at any point in the string; it is unusual for the separate parts to be complete units in their own right; explicit repair of the antecedent does not occur very often. The theoretical consequences of these results for claims in the literature are pointed out. The practical implications for dialogue systems are mentioned too.
Dialogue & Discourse, 2011
Ever since dialogue modelling first developed relative to broadly Gricean assumptions about utter... more Ever since dialogue modelling first developed relative to broadly Gricean assumptions about utter-ance interpretation (Clark, 1996), it has remained an open question whether the full complexity of higher-order intention computation is made use of in everyday conversation. In this paper we examine the phenomenon of split utterances, from the perspective of Dynamic Syntax, to further probe the necessity of full intention recognition/formation in communication: we do so by exploring the extent to which the interactive coordination of dialogue exchange can be seen as emergent from low-level mechanisms of language processing, without needing representation by interlocutors of each other’s mental states, or fully developed intentions as regards messages to be conveyed. We thus illustrate how many dialogue phenomena can be seen as direct consequences of the grammar architecture, as long as this is presented within an incremental, goal-directed/predictive model.
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Computational Semantics - IWCS-8 '09, 2009
... On making syntax dynamic, dialogue modelling, and the nature of linguistic knowledge EleniGre... more ... On making syntax dynamic, dialogue modelling, and the nature of linguistic knowledge EleniGregoromichelaki with R. Kempson, M. Purver, Y. Sato The Dynamics of Conversational Dialogue (DynDial) ESRC-RES-062-23-0962 www.kcl.ac.uk/research/groups/ds ...
Joint utterances, in which individuals can take over the construction of structure from one anoth... more Joint utterances, in which individuals can take over the construction of structure from one another, are widespread in conversational dialogue, universally available, and manipulated by very young children. Such hand-overs from one speaker to another can distribute all syntactic/semantic dependencies across more than one speaker, and, as a result, are highly problematic for sentence-based grammars. In this paper we show how by the simple move of defining a grammar formalism
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Papers by Eleni Gregoromichelaki