Dynamic Syntax (DS) is a grammar formalism and linguistic theory whose overall aim is to explain the real-time processes of language understanding and production, and describe linguistic structures as happening step-by-step over time.
Under the DS approach, syntactic knowledge is understood as the ability to incrementally analyse the structure and content of spoken and written language in context and in real-time.
Thus it differs from other syntactic models which generally abstract away from features of everyday conversation such as interruption, backtracking, and self-correction.
Moreover, it differs from other approaches in that it does not postulate an independent level of syntactic structure over words.
DS emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s through the work of prominent figures such as Ruth Kempson, Ronnie Cann, Wilfried Meyer-Viol and Dov Gabbay.
The first monograph-length work in the framework was released in 2001 under the title Dynamic Syntax: the flow of understanding Archived 2019-05-27 at the Wayback Machine.
It was embedded in wider trends in linguistic thinking of the 20th century, especially in syntax, semantics, pragmatics and phonology.
The Dynamics of Language (2005) by Ronnie Cann, Ruth Kempson and Lutz Marten followed on from the 2001 title and expanded the discussion and empirical coverage of the framework.
Subsequent years saw an expansion of the empirical coverage of the framework to modelling structures in Japanese, Korean, dialects of Modern Greek, Medieval Spanish and a variety of Bantu languages including Swahili, Rangi and siSwati.
More recent work has also explored the way in which the framework can naturally be expanded to model dialogue.
Propositional structure is built up on a strictly incremental manner on a left-to-right basis and is represented through processes of tree growth.
[1]: ix A consequence of this is that it is not just the final tree that is important for representational purposes, but all of the intermediate stages of the parsing/production process.
This contrasts with frameworks such as Lexical Functional Grammar in which multiple structures are posited.
Similarly, no movement operations are considered necessary, unlike in Minimalism or other Generative approaches.
The semantic formulae which classical Dynamic Syntax generates are a combination of Epsilon calculus formulae and Lambda calculus terms (in recent years DS-TTR has been developed alongside DS where Record Types from the formalism Type Theory with Records (TTR)) are used - see Purver et al.
One of the basic assumptions behind DS is that natural language syntax can be seen as the progressive accumulation of transparent semantic representations with the upper goal being the construction of a logical propositional formula (a formula of type t).
[3] Tree growth can take place in three ways: through computational rules, lexical input and pragmatic enrichment.
The language of representation in Dynamic Syntax consists of binary trees.
[3] The First Dynamic Syntax conference was held at SOAS University of London in April 2017.
[4] Prior to this there was a meeting of mainly Dynamic Syntax practitioners at Ghent University in Belgium.