Interactional language
What is interactional language?
When we talk to each other,
our utterances are filled with little words (if we even want to call them words)
and intonational tunes.Their main function is to regulate our interaction.
...they manage turn-taking
...and the construction of common ground
They can indicate our epistemic states
These units of i-language follow a logic
They are not randomly inserted.
They are organized by grammar....
The interactional spine hypothesis
- According to the interactional spine hypothesis, sentence structure is embedded in an articulated structure consisting of:
- a speaker-oriented grounding phrase ... dedicated to the expression of the speaker's epistemic state
- an addressee-oriented grounding phrase ... dedicated to the expression of (the speaker's assessment of) the addressee's epistemic state
- a response-phrase ... dedicated to marking the utterance as a request for response (thus an initiation move) or ... dedicated to marking the utterance as a respone (thus a reaction move)
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New empirical domains
Assuming that sentence-grammar is embedded in interactional grammar has even led me to some new empirical domains that I am in the process of exploring.
- The acquisition of interactional language by children is something that has rarely been studied and definitely not from a generative perspective. It seems to be acquired incredibly early in ways that cast doubt on the standard assumption that syntactic sructure matures upwards (assuming that interactional language is located at the top of the tree). This led Johannes Heim and me to propose the inward growing spine hypothesis.
Once we assume that the interlocutors are represented grammatically, we predict that it matters who we talk to. I have started to explore two phenomena that are somewhat at the fringes of interaction.
- People often talk to themselves (a.k.a. self-talk . This phenomenon lies squarely between thinking and being in dialogue with oneself. As such, properties of self-talk serve as an import window into the nature of interactional language. You can find my most recent paper on this topic here.
- Over the past decades, human-machine interaction has become more and more frequent, especially since the advent of ChatGPT. The question that interests me is how we conceive of the machine as an interactant. And interactional language is an ideal tool to explore this question. Do we build common ground?
Hey!
Okay.
Eh?
No way!
Yup!
So?
Well...
Meh!
I know, right?
Interactional grammar
Traditionally, the unit of analysis of grammar is the sentence.
And the unit of analysis of conversational interaction is an adjacency pair
(i.e., a question and its answer).
Sentences are embedded in interaction.
I hypothesize that sentence grammar is embedded in interactional grammar.
It's the same formal apparatus.
And presumably the same cognitive apparatus.
I call it the interactional spine hypothesis.
A new perspective on old problems
The interactional spine hypothesis led me to investigate several issues from a new perspective.
Phenomena that are known to be context-dependent may receive a novel analysis.
These include the following
- Japanese pronouns don't behave like typical pronouns. In Ritter and Wiltschko (2024), we analyse them as interactional pronouns.
- Politeness and formality can be analysed in novel ways allowing for a systematic typology (dedicated honorificity, phi-based pronouns recycled in the interactional structure, purely interactional formality).
- The non-spatial use of demonstratives can be analysed as a result of being recycled and interpreted in the interactional structure.
- The interpretation of biased questions
- The meaning of intonational tunes
