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The Development of Dynamic Syntax
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The Development of Dynamic Syntax

A special issue of Languages (ISSN 2226-471X).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 August 2025) | Viewed by 5558

Editors

Prof. Dr. Christine Howes

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Philosophy, Linguistics, Theory of Science, The University of Gothenburg, 40530 Gothenburg, Sweden
Interests: dialogue; interaction; conversational repair; common-sense reasoning
Prof. Dr. Stergios Chatzikyriakidis

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Philology, University of Crete, 74100 Rethymno, Greece
Interests: computational semantics; natural language understanding; formal syntax/semantics; computational dialectology

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce a call for a special issue of the journal Languages (ISSN 2226-471X) on “The Development of Dynamic Syntax”. Dynamic Syntax (DS) is an action-based grammar formalism that models the process of natural language understanding as monotonic tree growth, which was first introduced in response to well-studied grammatical puzzles like scrambling, clitic doubling and person-case restrictions, among others (Kempson et al., 2001; Cann et al., 2005, Chatzikyriakidis and Kempson 2011). The incremental and process-driven nature of DS means that it is not only useful as a grammar formalism solving just syntactic puzzles, but also applied to questions around diachronic change, pragmatic problems and interactive issues (Bouzouita 2008, Eshghi et al. 2016, Kempson et al., 2016, amongst others).

The Special Issue is intended to both reflect the broad range of work within the framework of Dynamic Syntax in diverse areas such as the syntax of diverse languages, language change, semantics/pragmatics, and dialogue modelling with a focus on recent directions in Dynamic Syntax research. Ultimately, our aim is to showcase a unified formal framework that can tackle a spectrum of phenomena from narrow syntax/semantics puzzles all the way to dialogue modelling and linguistic interaction.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200 words summarising their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editors christine.howes@gu.se or to Languages Editorial Office (languages@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the special issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

Tentative Completion Schedule 
Abstract Submission Deadline: 8 January 2025
Notification of Abstract Acceptance: 15 January 2025
Full Manuscript Deadline: 20 August 2025

References

Bouzouita, M. (2008). The diachronic development of Spanish clitic placement (Doctoral dissertation, King's College London).

Cann, R., Kempson, R., & Marten, L. (2005). The dynamics of language. Oxford: Elsevier.

Chatzikyriakidis, S., & Kempson, R. (2011). Standard Modern and Pontic Greek person restrictions: A feature-free dynamic account. Journal of Greek Linguistics, 11(2), 127-166.

Kempson, R., Meyer-Viol, W., & Gabbay, D. (2001). Dynamic Syntax: The flow of language understanding. Oxford: Blackwell.

Kempson, R., Cann, R., Gregoromichelaki, E., & Chatzikiriakidis, S. (2016). Language as mechanisms for interaction. Theoretical Linguistics, 42(3–4), 203–275.

Eshghi, Arash, Christine Howes, Eleni Gregoromichelaki, Julian Hough, and Matthew Purver. "Feedback in conversation as incremental semantic update". Association for Computational Linguistics, 2015.

Prof. Dr. Christine Howes
Prof. Dr. Stergios Chatzikyriakidis
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Languages is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • dynamic syntax
  • language change
  • semantics/pragmatics
  • dialogue modelling

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Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

34 pages, 5861 KB  
Article
BabyDS: Visually Grounded Grammar Induction with Online Curriculum Learning
by Arash Ashrafzadeh, Julian Hough and Arash Eshghi
Languages 2026, 11(5), 99; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages11050099 - 12 May 2026
Viewed by 535
Abstract
Recent research in grounded language learning has seen remarkable success due to advances in large vision and language models (VLMs). However, these models (i) are extremely costly to train and update; (ii) struggle with generalisation; and (iii) do not support continual learning. [...] Read more.
Recent research in grounded language learning has seen remarkable success due to advances in large vision and language models (VLMs). However, these models (i) are extremely costly to train and update; (ii) struggle with generalisation; and (iii) do not support continual learning. In this paper, we introduce baby-ds integrating the Dynamic Syntax (DS) framework with automated planning within the multimodal BabyAI platform as a testbed. We provide methods whereby DS lexicons are induced continually from teacher demonstrations within BabyAI. We study (i–iii) by experimenting with the compositional complexity of natural language instructions in the data to compare data efficiency, generalisation, and continual learning properties of baby-ds with a simple neural model. The results show that the baby-ds model: (i) needs much less data than the neural model to reach threshold performance; (ii) generalises much faster to more complex instructions; and (iii) is a more effective continual learner. We argue that it is the attendant linguistic bias within DS and the rich inferential power of TTR that enables (i–iii), highlighting the importance of further research on hybrid grammar–neural approaches. Finally, we discuss several important limitations of baby-ds and sketch a path forward for further DS research. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Development of Dynamic Syntax)
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22 pages, 801 KB  
Article
Incremental Processing of Laughter in Interaction
by Vladislav Maraev, Arash Eshghi, Chiara Mazzocconi and Christine Howes
Languages 2026, 11(2), 25; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages11020025 - 29 Jan 2026
Viewed by 1058
Abstract
In dialogue, laughter is a frequent non-verbal signal that can precede, follow, or overlap its antecedent—the laughable. Furthermore, the time alignment between the laughter and the laughable is dependent on who produces the laughable, whether laughter overlaps or not with speech and the [...] Read more.
In dialogue, laughter is a frequent non-verbal signal that can precede, follow, or overlap its antecedent—the laughable. Furthermore, the time alignment between the laughter and the laughable is dependent on who produces the laughable, whether laughter overlaps or not with speech and the communicative act performed. Laughter can interrupt either one’s own or one’s conversational partners’ utterances and, like other well-studied features of dialogue such as repair and split utterances, this interruption does not necessarily occur at phrase boundaries. Similarly, much like repair and other feedback like backchannels, laughters can be categorised as forward-looking or backward-looking. Given these parallels, we propose an analysis of how laughter can be processed and integrated using a Dynamic Syntax (DS) model, which already has well-motivated accounts of repair, split utterances, and feedback. We present a corpus study of laughter in dialogue, as well as a model using Dynamic Syntax and Theory of Types with Records (DS-TTR). Analogously to pronouns and ellipsis, our approach uses underspecification to account for laughter types that are different in processing terms as anaphoric or cataphoric, and demonstrates how laughter is processed incrementally as an utterance unfolds. Our analysis covers ≈87% of the annotated corpus data. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Development of Dynamic Syntax)
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22 pages, 451 KB  
Article
Dynamic Syntax in a Theory of Types with Records
by Robin Cooper and Staffan Larsson
Languages 2025, 10(12), 300; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages10120300 - 10 Dec 2025
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 677
Abstract
This paper presents a recasting of key aspects of dynamic syntax (DS) in a theory of types with records (TTR), concentrating on the incremental processing of speech events as they unfold and viewed in terms of classifying these events in terms of grammatical [...] Read more.
This paper presents a recasting of key aspects of dynamic syntax (DS) in a theory of types with records (TTR), concentrating on the incremental processing of speech events as they unfold and viewed in terms of classifying these events in terms of grammatical types and making predictions about future types that will be realized as the speech event progresses. TTR, like DS, attempts to provide formal analyses of language in terms of a theory of action which is related to cognitive processes. It therefore seems appropriate to explore one in terms of the other in hopes of revealing how the two theories may interact with and contribute to each other. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Development of Dynamic Syntax)
28 pages, 376 KB  
Article
Morphological Dependencies in English
by Ronnie Cann
Languages 2025, 10(12), 289; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages10120289 - 27 Nov 2025
Viewed by 882
Abstract
This paper presents accounts of preposition selection and agreement in English within Dynamic Syntax. To achieve this, I introduce two new, non-semantic, labels into the tree language: Ph that takes as values phonological forms which are modelled as ordered sets of phonemes [...] Read more.
This paper presents accounts of preposition selection and agreement in English within Dynamic Syntax. To achieve this, I introduce two new, non-semantic, labels into the tree language: Ph that takes as values phonological forms which are modelled as ordered sets of phonemes and Md which takes as values sets of Ph values, the phonological forms of certain words and forms with which a particular word can collocate. While these labels are not grounded in semantic concepts like type and formula, they are nevertheless grounded in phonological concepts and thus ultimately in phonetic phenomena. These labels are introduced through the parsing of words and are used to constrain the forms of other words they can felicitously appear with, such as nouns and certain determiners or verbs with selected prepositions or prepositional phrases, in a straightforward manner. It is shown how the remnant agreement and selection patterns in modern (standard) English can be captured without any recourse to traditional categories such as gender, person and number. Certain disagreement phenomena are discussed as are the broader implications of the approach. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Development of Dynamic Syntax)
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19 pages, 562 KB  
Article
Constructive Dynamic Syntax
by Stergios Chatzikyriakidis
Languages 2025, 10(11), 269; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages10110269 - 23 Oct 2025
Viewed by 811
Abstract
This paper explores the integration of constructive type theory in the tradition of Martin Löf into Dynamic Syntax. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Development of Dynamic Syntax)
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