Incrementality, Speaker-Hearer Switching and the Disambiguation Challenge

Abstract

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: (Cann et al., 2005; Kempson et al., 2001)). 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.