Where Semantics Meets Pragmatics: The Incremental Interpretation of Conversational Dialogues

Due to its intense interactivity and context-dependency, conversation has posed considerable challenges for current context-free grammar frameworks which aim to characterize complete sentences.It is argued in this paper that by placing a high premium on contextuality, conversational utterances, complete or partial, can be characterized straightforwardly.Within the framework of Dynamic Syntax (Kempson et al.2001; Cann et al.2005), both semantic content and linguistic context are characterized dynamically and structurally in tandem, and, conversation is shown to be parsed progressively according to the lexical-input sequence along with a context-based update.The dynamic analysis proposed here not only provides a formal representation for the incremental interpretation of conversational utterances in Mandarin, but captures the parallelism between conversation, ellipsis as well as anaphor, i.e., the context-dependent commonality, in terms of underspecification and update.