题目： The Dynamics of Conversation
主讲人： Ruth Kempson教授（King’s College London）
主持人： 李文山博士（清华大学人文社会科学学院中文系）
工作语言：英语
讲座时间：2011年10月14日，下午4点
讲座地点：清华大学人文学院新斋304
内容摘要：
In conversation, we interactively build up structures together, with free switching of speaker/hearer roles both within and across sentence boundaries. Current grammars provide a poor basis from which to explain this phenomenon, or to explain the way in which all language understanding is relative to context. In this talk I address this challenge. I introduce a grammar formalism (Dynamic Syntax) in which incremental information-growth following the dynamics of processing forms the core structural notion. I will report recent work showing how from this perspective, we gain richly structured and evolving concepts of context and content, and immediate explanation of the patterns of ellipsis displayed in conversational dialogue (for which there is direct computational implementation). In closing I explore the significance of these results for language modelling.
主讲人简介
Professor Ruth Kempson , Fellow of the British Academy
She is now an Emeritus Professor of King’s College London and Visiting Research Professor of Queen Mary University of London, and of School of Oriental and African Studies. In recognition of her work, she has become a fellow of theBritish Academy and member of the Academia Europaea.She is best known in recent years for her leadership of the research program developing the Dynamic Syntax framework which revolutionises grammar formalisms by incorporating into the grammar one aspect of the dynamics of language performance, namely the concept of initial underspecification of information and update reflecting the time-line of on-line processing in conversational dialogue. This perspective is receiving very considerable empirical confirmation, not merely through the explication it provides of natural-language data but also through empirical psycholinguistic work on language processing and the modelling/implementation of conversational dialogue.
