Jonathan Ginzburg

This book presents one of the first attempts at developing a precise, grammatically rooted, theory of conversation motivated by data from real conversations. The theory has descriptive reach from the micro-conversational - e.g. self-repair at the word level - to macro-level phenomena such as multi-party conversation and the characterization of distinct conversational genres. It draws on extensive corpus studies of the British National Corpus, on evidence from language acquisition, and on computer simulations of language evolution. The theory provides accounts of the opening, middle game, and closing stages of conversation. it also offers a new perspective on traditional semantic concerns such as quanitifcation and anaphora. The Interactive Stance challenges orthodox views of grammar by aruging that, unless we wish to excluse from analysis a large body of frequently occurrring words and constructions, the right way to construe grammar is as a system that characterizes types of talk in interaction.

This book presents one of the first attempts at developing a precise, grammatically rooted, theory of conversation motivated by data from real conversations. The theory has descriptive reach from the micro-conversational---e.g. self-repair at the word level - to macro-level phenomena such as multi-party conversation and the characterization of distinct conversational genres. It draws on extensive corpus studies of the British National Corpus, on evidence from language acquisition, and on computer simulations of language evolution. The theory provides accounts of the opening, middle game, and closing stages of conversation. It also offers a new perspective on traditional semantic concerns such as quantification and anaphora. The Interactive Stance challenges orthodox views of grammar by arguing that, unless we wish to exclude from analysis a large body of frequently occurring words and constructions, the right way to construe grammar is as a system that characterizes types of talk in interaction.

This work concerns itself with characterising the different types of contents that arise from uses of interrogative sentences, describing what meanings get associated with particular interrogative sentences and explaining how these get put together compositionally on the basis of the meaning of their constituents, with particular attention to the meaning of interrogative phrases. A view of questions is offered wherein these constitute the subclass of singular propositional entities, unresolved states-of-affairs (SOA's), that contain one or more intrinsic informational voids, characterised technically as argument roles of the propositional entity with whom no entity is associated. This view provides for an inherently richer notion of answerhood that is at the same time based on entities that are more plausibly available to cognitive agents engaged in querying.

Interrogative constructions are the linguistic forms by which questions are expressed. Even though they have played a central role in the development of modern syntactic theory, there exist few syntactic and semantic treatments that provide a comprehensive account of a wide range of interrogative constructions and uses in a single language. This text aims to close the gap in research on this subject. It develops the frameworks of head driven phrase structure grammar and situation semantics, to provide an account that integrates syntactic, semantic and contextual dimensions of interrogatives. The book provides insights about a variety of contentious theoretical issues, including matters of semantic ontology, the quantificational status of wh-phrases, the semantic effect of wh-fronting, the status of constructions in grammatical theory, the integration of illocutionary information in the grammar and the nature of ellipsis resolution in dialogue.

Interrogative constructions are the linguistic forms by which questions are expressed. Even though they have played a central role in the development of modern syntactic theory, there exist few syntactic and semantic treatments that provide a comprehensive account of a wide range of interrogative constructions and uses in a single language. This text aims to close the gap in research on this subject. It develops the frameworks of head driven phrase structure grammar and situation semantics, to provide an account that integrates syntactic, semantic and contextual dimensions of interrogatives. The book provides insights about a variety of contentious theoretical issues, including matters of semantic ontology, the quantificational status of wh-phrases, the semantic effect of wh-fronting, the status of constructions in grammatical theory, the integration of illocutionary information in the grammar and the nature of ellipsis resolution in dialogue.