Grammars as mechanisms for fine-grained situated conceptualisation
Eleni Gregoromichelaki
Philosophy Department King’s College London and
Cognitive Science Department, Osnabrück University
elenigregor@gmail.com
The phenomenon of underspecification is ubiquitous in natural language (NL). It is standardly accepted
that lexical items can be associated with multiple conceptual structures, one subset of such phenomena
traditionally known as polysemy. However, NL underspecification is not limited to words: identical
surface structures, i.e., sequences of lexical items, can also be processed differentially to yield divergent
situated interpretations, due to (multimodal) inputs from the physical and social context. In this talk, I
present a grammar model, Dynamic Syntax (DS, Kempson et al. 2001; Gregoromichelaki, 2013), which
takes this observation seriously; accordingly, DS explicates both types of underspecification, lexical and
syntactic, in identical terms: within the DS architecture, both syntactic rules and lexical meanings are
analysed in procedural terms, as mechanisms that incrementally induce or linearise ad hoc conceptual
structures with constant, subsentential integration of elements from the non-linguistic context.
I illustrate the reach of such an account by examining an extreme case of meaning flexibility: quotation
phenomena. In such cases, a word or word-string seems to display not only interpretational but also
syntactic category and pragmatic import flexibilities:
(1) ‘Unmanipulable’ is a word of English.
(2) He said, ‘‘A geometric method is presented to determine the unmanipulable singular
configurations of a general class of mechanisms’ is a sentence of English.’
(3) He said that he was “unmanipulatitable” (as Donald would say).
Recent grammars that take a dialogical view regarding the formal and semantic properties of NLs
(Ginzburg 2012; Gregoromichelaki et al. 2011; Eshghi et al. 2015) indicate that quotation mechanisms
need to be integrated within the purview of standard grammatical frameworks since such mechanisms
are crucially involved in the explication of conversational interaction. However, many grammars
(Ginzburg and Cooper 2014; Potts 2007; Maier, 2015) lack essential integration of the
psycholinguistically-grounded observation that NL use relies crucially on incremental/predictive
processing with context integration at each word-by-word processing stage. For this reason, data
showing the grammatical continuum underpinning various quotational constructions, from word to
suprasentential discourse structures, as well as interactions between quotation mechanisms and
conversational phenomena (split-utterances, Gregoromichelaki et al. 2011), are not amenable to such
approaches.
Based on this inadequacy of even such state-of-the-art, comprehensive models, Gregoromichelaki
(2016) argues that a satisfactory account of the flexibility of meaning/syntax afforded by quotative
devices cannot be given within standard NL theories involving the division of labour between
semantics/pragmatics, and syntax. Instead, it adopts a dynamic, incremental perspective that takes
joint action as the basis for the definition of the grammar, as advocated within DS, updated with the
integration of the multidimensional conceptual structures formalised in Type Theory with Records (DSTTR, Purver et al. 2010, Eshghi et al. 2015). From this perspective, the meanings derived from linguistic
“affordances” during the processing of quotation structures arise as the result of independently
postulated grammatical reification mechanisms, in this instance, targetting the performance of the
grammar itself. As a result, by focussing on mechanisms (actions, procedures), rather than fixed
structure-denotation mappings, this account allows the elimination of Recanati’s (2010) distinction
between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ quotation, integrates the gradient variability of quotation phenomena, and
models seamlessly the incorporation of non-linguistic actions in licensed syntactic structures.