The Interactive Building of Names Ruth Kempson, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Ronnie Cann April 16, 2015 With the increasing probing of the dynamics of context construction in natural language processing, attention has recently turned to conversational dialogue. Exchange of speaker/hearer roles that is common in dialogue poses the challenge that the concept of update sentence by sentence, standardly reflected in sentence-based grammar formalisms (eg DRT) is not well-suited to dialogue modelling. Familiar depen- dencies at a cross-sentential level are anaphora and some forms of ellipsis, both able to be distributed across more than one participant : (1) A: We’ve invited Tom to the party. B: And Sue? A: She isn’t expecting me to. But, in dialogue, linguistic dependencies can be split between participants at a sub-sentential level, one person providing the environment specifying some anticipation of some upcoming dependency, the other person providing the dependent element, with the potential for indefinite extendability of the structure being constructed: (2) A: I suppose I need a a B: mattock. For breaking up clods of earth (3) A: We’re going to B: Bristol, A which is where Jo lives C: with the dogs B: if you promise to control them. The effect is one of rich interactivity in dialogue as participants apparently build up a structure jointly, no one person necessarily having anticipated the result. The challenge these data pose is that dependencies of every sort can be split across a speaker/hearer switch of roles: long-distance dependencies (4), local discontinuities between an auxiliary and a twinned verbal form (4)-(5) , reflexive anaphoric dependencies known to require a locally provided antecedent (6); anticipatory “expletive” pronouns known to require locally subsequent resolution (7), and even quantifica- tional dependencies (8): (4) A: Which dog did you B: nearly lose? Fricka. (5) A: Did we.. B: embarrass Sue? I hope not. (6) A: I’m afraid I nearly burned the kitchen down B: Did you burn A: myself? Fortunately not. 1