The Development of Dynamic Syntax
A special issue of Languages (ISSN 2226-471X).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 August 2025) | Viewed by 1747
Special Issue Editors
Interests: dialogue; interaction; conversational repair; common-sense reasoning
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-blind 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 1400 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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