ABSTRACT
The idealisation of language-as-system was introduced by de Saussure with his distinction between langue, which he took to be a body of generalisations shared by a community of people that speak it, and parole, language performance, which he thought too variable to be amenable to formal study. The major alternative of Montague Grammar was developed with the goal of formally modelling meaning in a language as an articulation of the language-world correspondence via the notion of truth conditions for its sentences. The first thing which strikes one from even a cursory glance at conversational dialogues is how prevalent the use of elliptical fragments is in conversation. Though the dynamics of ongoing dialogue has received little attention from the core linguistics community, those working at the interface between linguistics and sociology in the conversational analysis paradigm have long been sceptical of the dichotomy between competence and performance, and the attendant commitment to an over-deterministic methodology.
