AH Clarke, Johann Heinrich Ellgring, H. Wagner

• A substantial literature exists on the coordination of speaking and looking behaviour and their significance as indicators for the production and reception of social information. Within this framework, the temporal organisation of such behaviour has been 'shown to reflect both the coordination within the individual and between participants in a situation. In this paper, it is proposed that observed behavioural sequences may be formally described by rules of syntax, thus implying the likelihood of structural organisation as opposed to, forA substantial literature exists on the coordination of speaking and looking behaviour and their significance as indicators for the production and reception of social information. Within this framework, the temporal organisation of such behaviour has been 'shown to reflect both the coordination within the individual and between participants in a situation. In this paper, it is proposed that observed behavioural sequences may be formally described by rules of syntax, thus implying the likelihood of structural organisation as opposed to, for example, linear time dependence between behavioural states. This being the case, differing sets of rules and grammars respectively can be expected for various social situations. Clinical interviews and discu~sions between couples on a topic of marital conflict were analysed, the on-off patterns of speech and gaze being taken as data. The resulting behavioural repertoire was regarded, in the sense of a formal grammar, as the terminal vocabulary. A set of rewriting rules was determined and their associated probabilities inferred. The situational conditions were found to be reflectedin the syntactic features of the grammatical model - the terminal vocabulary, the production rules and the production probabilities.…