TY  - JOUR
A1  - Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar
A1  - Ogden, Richard
T1  - “Chunking” spoken language
BT  - Introducing weak cesuras
JF  - Open linguistics
N2  - In this introductory paper to the special issue on “Weak cesuras in talk-in-interaction”, we aim to guide the reader into current work on the “chunking” of naturally occurring talk. It is conducted in the methodological frameworks of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics – two approaches that consider the interactional aspect of humans talking with each other to be a crucial starting point for its analysis. In doing so, we will (1) lay out the background of this special issue (what is problematic about “chunking” talk-in-interaction, the characteristics of the methodological approach chosen by the contributors, the cesura model), (2) highlight what can be gained from such a revised understanding of “chunking” in talk-in-interaction by referring to previous work with this model as well as the findings of the contributions to this special issue, and (3) indicate further directions such work could take starting from papers in this special issue. We hope to induce a fruitful exchange on the phenomena discussed, across methodological divides.
KW  - Conversation Analysis
KW  - Interactional Linguistics
KW  - prosody
KW  - phonetics
KW  - intonation units
KW  - talk-in-interaction
KW  - syntax
KW  - kinetics
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2020-0173
SN  - 2300-9969
VL  - 7
IS  - 1
SP  - 531
EP  - 548
PB  - De Gruyter
CY  - Berlin
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar
A1  - Küttner, Uwe-Alexander
A1  - Raymond, Chase Wesley
T1  - Pivots revisited
BT  - cesuring in action
JF  - Open linguistics
N2  - The term "pivot" usually refers to two overlapping syntactic units such that the completion of the first unit simultaneously launches the second. In addition, pivots are generally said to be characterized by the smooth prosodic integration of their syntactic parts. This prosodic integration is typically achieved by prosodic-phonetic matching of the pivot components. As research on such turns in a range of languages has illustrated, speakers routinely deploy pivots so as to be able to continue past a point of possible turn completion, in the service of implementing some additional or revised action. This article seeks to build on, and complement, earlier research by exploring two issues in more detail as follows: (1) what exactly do pivotal turn extensions accomplish on the action dimension, and (2) what role does prosodic-phonetic packaging play in this? We will show that pivot constructions not only exhibit various degrees of prosodic-phonetic (non-)integration, i.e., differently strong cesuras, but that they can be ordered on a continuum, and that this cline maps onto the relationship of the actions accomplished by the components of the pivot construction. While tighter prosodic-phonetic integration, i.e., weak(er) cesuring, co-occurs with post-pivot actions whose relationship to that of the pre-pivot tends to be rather retrospective in character, looser prosodic-phonetic integration, i.e., strong(er) cesuring, is associated with a more prospective orientation of the post-pivot's action. These observations also raise more general questions with regard to the analysis of action.
KW  - Conversation Analysis
KW  - Interactional Linguistics
KW  - syntax
KW  - talk-in-interaction
KW  - prosody
KW  - phonetics
KW  - cesuras
KW  - intonation units
KW  - social action
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2020-0152
SN  - 2300-9969
VL  - 7
IS  - 1
SP  - 613
EP  - 637
PB  - de Gruyter
CY  - Warsaw
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Yadav, Himanshu
A1  - Husain, Samar
A1  - Futrell, Richard
T1  - Do dependency lengths explain constraints on crossing dependencies?
JF  - Linguistics vanguard : multimodal online journal
N2  - In syntactic dependency trees, when arcs are drawn from syntactic heads to dependents, they rarely cross. Constraints on these crossing dependencies are critical for determining the syntactic properties of human language, because they define the position of natural language in formal language hierarchies. We study whether the apparent constraints on crossing syntactic dependencies in natural language might be explained by constraints on dependency lengths (the linear distance between heads and dependents). We compare real dependency trees from treebanks of 52 languages against baselines of random trees which are matched with the real trees in terms of their dependency lengths. We find that these baseline trees have many more crossing dependencies than real trees, indicating that a constraint on dependency lengths alone cannot explain the empirical rarity of crossing dependencies. However, we find evidence that a combined constraint on dependency length and the rate of crossing dependencies might be able to explain two of the most-studied formal restrictions on dependency trees: gap degree and well-nestedness.
KW  - crossing dependencies
KW  - dependency length
KW  - dependency treebanks
KW  - efficiency
KW  - language processing
KW  - syntax
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2019-0070
SN  - 2199-174X
VL  - 7
PB  - De Gruyter Mouton
CY  - Berlin ; New York, NY
ER  -