@conference{Gregoromichelaki.Howes.Purver.Kempson.Eshghi.Cann.Healey.Mills_BICLCE_2017,
author = "Eleni Gregoromichelaki and Christine Howes and Matthew Purver and Ruth Kempson and Arash Eshghi and Ronnie Cann and Patrick G. T. Healey and Gregory J. Mills",
abstract = "In natural conversation, no notion of “complete sentence” is required: (a) non-sentential utterances are adequate to underpin people’s coordination, and (b) all linguistic dependencies are resolvable across more than one turn: 
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(1)	 Angus: But, Domenica, Cyril is an intelligent and entirely well-behaved dog who
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Domenica: happens to smell  [radio play, 44 Scotland Street]
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(2)	A: I’m pretty sure that the:
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B: programmed visits?
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A: programmed visits, yes, I think they’ll have been debt inspections. [BNC]
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Most standard grammar formalisms have problems accounting for such data because their notions of ‘constituency’ and ‘syntactic domain’ are independent of performance considerations. 
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Moreover, no notion of “full proposition” is necessary for successful interaction. Strings, contents, and speech acts can emerge incrementally without any participant having envisaged in advance the result of the interaction: 
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(3)	Eleni: 	Is this yours or
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Yo: 	Yours. 		[natural data]
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(4)	Lawyer: 	And you left your husband because …
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Client: 	we had nothing in common any more
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(5)	Hester Collyer: 		It’s for me.
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Mrs Elton the landlady: 	And Mr. Page?
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Hester Collyer: 		is not my husband. But I would rather you continue to think of me as Mrs. Page.
[The Deep Blue Sea (film)]
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However, morphosyntactic and semantic licensing mechanisms apply as usual in non-sentential utterances. For example, in morphologically-rich languages, speech acts with subsentential/subpropositional elements require appropriate case morphemes and, in all languages, binding restrictions are observed according to current contextual parameters:
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(6)	A: I heard a bang. Did you hurt
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B: myself? No but Mary is in a state
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This shows that grammatical licensing and semantic processing are performed incrementally subsententially online, at each step affording possibilities for further extension by interlocutors’ actions or the situational context. Moreover, a level of abstract syntax, divorced from the conceptual structure, impedes a natural account of such phenomena. For these reasons, we argue that we need a view of natural language as a “skill” employing domain-general mechanisms rather than fixed form-meaning mappings. We provide a sketch of a Dynamic Syntax architecture combined with incrementally-induced conceptual representations within which underspecification and time-relative update of meanings and utterances constitute the sole concept of “syntax”.",
address = "Vigo, Spain",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the BICLCE workshop Approaches to Fragments and Ellipsis in Spoken and Written English",
month = "sep",
pages = "60--61",
title = "{C}ompletability vs (in)completeness",
url = "https://biclce2017.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/biclce2017_boabstracts-ix19.pdf",
year = "2017",
}