Contemporary linguistic theories distinguish the principal element of a phrase - the 'head' - from the subordinate elements it dominates. This pervasive grammatical concept has been used to describe and account for linguistic phenomena ranging from agreement and government to word order universals, but opinions differ widely on its precise definition. A key question is whether the head is not already identified by some other, more basic notion or interacting set of notions in linguistics. Heads in Grammatical Theory is the first book devoted to the subject. Providing a clear view of current research on heads, some of the foremost linguists in the field tackle the problems set by the assumptions of particular grammatical theories and offer insights which have relevance across theories. Questions considered include whether there is a theory-neutral definition of head, whether heads have cognitive reality, how to identify the head of a phrase, and whether there are any universal correlations between headedness and deletability.

Computers are increasingly able to mimic abilities we often think of as exclusively human - memory, decision-making and now, speech. A new generation of speech recognition systems can make at least some attempt at understanding what is said to them and can respond accordingly. These systems are coming into daily use for home banking, for airline flights enquiries and for placing orders over the telephone and are fast becoming more powerful and more pervasive. Using data taken from a major, European Union funded project on speech understanding, the SunDial project, this book shows how this data may be analyzed to yield important conclusions about the organization of both human-human and human-computer information dialogues. It describes the Wizard-of-Oz method of collecting speech dialogues from people who believe they are interacting with a speech understanding system before that system has been fully designed or built and it shows how the resulting dialogues may be analyzed to guide further design. This book provides detailed and comparative studies of human and human-computer speech dialogues, including analyses of opening and closing sequences and turn-taking.

Using data taken from a major European Union funded project on speech understanding, the SunDial project, this book considers current perspectives on human computer interaction and argues for the value of an approach taken from sociology which is based on conversation analysis.

Contemporary linguistic theories distinguish the principal element of a phrase - the 'head' - from the subordinate elements it dominates. This pervasive grammatical concept has been used to describe and account for linguistic phenomena ranging from agreement and government to word order universals, but opinions differ widely on its precise definition. A key question is whether the head is not already identified by some other, more basic notion or interacting set of notions in linguistics. Heads in Grammatical Theory is the first book devoted to the subject. Providing a clear view of current research on heads, some of the foremost linguists in the field tackle the problems set by the assumptions of particular grammatical theories and offer insights which have relevance across theories. Questions considered include whether there is a theory-neutral definition of head, whether heads have cognitive reality, how to identify the head of a phrase, and whether there are any universal correlations between headedness and deletability.