This paper deals with the syntax of afterthoughts in Greek under a parsing-oriented perspective. The main claim is that afterthoughts can receive a straightforward explanation once we make the assumption that afterthoughts can be seen as answers to implicit questions. A formal syntactic account based on this assumption is put forth, and its ability to deal with gender mismatches exhibited in Greek afterthoughts is shown. Afterthoughts are further discussed in a more general perspective, arguing that once we turn into a dynamic model where context re-use and update are taken to be core components of syntax, a number of issues regarding afterthoughts like connectivity effects, locality constraints, freedom of positioning and reconstruction effects can receive a straightforward explanation.

We argue that to reflect participant interactivity in conversational dialogue, the Christiansen & Chater (C&C) perspective needs a formal grammar framework capturing word-by-word incrementality, as in Dynamic Syntax, in which syntax is the incremental building of semantic representations reflecting real-time parsing dynamics. We demonstrate that, with such formulation, syntactic, semantic, and morpho-syntactic dependencies are all analysable as grounded in their potential for interaction.