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 the British 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.

露丝·坎普森教授 英国科学院院士、欧洲科学院院士

露丝·坎普森教授现在是伦敦大学国王学院荣誉退休教授、伦敦大学玛丽女王学院和亚非学院访问研究教授。由于学术贡献卓著，她先后获得英国科学院和欧洲科学院院士殊荣。近些年，她最广受关注的成就是率领团队发展出动态句法理论框架。这个理论框架对是对形式主义语法的一次重大变革。该理论框架认为语法包括语言行为动态过程的一个重要方面——信息起初地位的不定和随后的补充，反映了实时对话加工过程的时间线性特征。这个观点不断被语言事实材料有力支持，它不仅能够解释解释自然语言现象，也能够在自然语言加工和会话建模/执行等心理语言学实验中得到验证。