Grammar Is a System That Characterizes Talk in Interaction

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Mainstream formal grammar theories primarily analyze idealized language, excluding phenomena common in spoken interaction.
• Features like disfluencies, non-sentential utterances, and gestures are often omitted from formal grammatical analyses.
• These elements are ubiquitous in actual spoken language and interaction.

Purpose of the Study:

• To demonstrate that phenomena in spoken interaction, such as disfluencies and gestures, are rule-governed.
• To argue for the integration of these spoken language features into formal grammar.
• To highlight the potential benefits for linguistic analysis and related disciplines.

Main Methods:

• Synthesizing evidence from linguistics, conversation analysis, and multimodal communication.
• Incorporating findings from psychology, language acquisition, and neuroscience.
• Examining emerging tools in theoretical and computational linguistics for characterizing spoken language phenomena.

Main Results:

• Spoken language features, including disfluencies and gestures, exhibit rule-governed behavior comparable to traditional linguistic phenomena.
• Recent advancements in theoretical and computational linguistics offer tools for precise characterization of these features.
• Excluding these phenomena from grammar is based on pre-theoretical assumptions rather than empirical necessity.

Conclusions:

• Grammar formalisms should encompass phenomena from actual spoken interaction, not just idealized language.
• Including spoken interaction features enhances linguistic analysis of face-to-face communication.
• This integrated approach benefits sister disciplines like spoken dialogue systems and language acquisition research.