The Comparative Grammar of Intensional Transitive Verbs

在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，理查德·K.拉森将对所谓的“内涵及物动词”（ITV）的行为和解释进行为期三年的研究，ITV是一种解决句法和语义之间关系的结构类型。某些语义现象（例如，意图性）在英语和相关语言中与某些句法结构（例如，从句补语）。ITV挑战了这种相关性。本研究的假设是，这种相关性实际上是成立的，并且ITVs代表了（实际上）预期语法模式的伪装变体。自然语言中的“伪装效应”主要由两个过程引起：语音空成分和小句缩减。如果这一猜想是正确的，那么对那些支配空元素和重组的原则各不相同的语言进行仔细比较，应该会揭示ITV的伪装，或者提供证据证明基本假设是错误的。ITV的数据将从多种语言收集，包括中文、匈牙利语、日语、韩语、斯洛文尼亚语、俄语和北美的一些本土语言。PI将与母语为母语的研究生合作，他们直接控制目标语言，和/或与研究过目标语言的专业语言学家合作。这项研究的结果不仅对语言学理论有影响，而且对语言和思维之间关系的更广泛问题也有影响。一个基本的问题是，语言在表达相同思想或概念的方式上可能会有多大的差异。同样的想法是否必须以同样的形式编码（一旦伪装效果被剥离）？是否真的存在差异？本研究将探讨内涵概念表达中可能存在的变化，从而有助于解决这一更广泛的问题。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Richard K. Larson will conduct three years of research on the behavior and interpretation of so-called "intensional transitive verbs" (ITVs), a construction type that addresses the relation between syntax and semantics. Certain semantic phenomena (e.g., intensionality) are known to correlate in English and related languages with certain syntactic structures (e.g., clausal complements). ITVs challenge this correlation. This research concerns the hypothesis that the correlation does in fact hold and that ITVs represent (in effect) a disguised variant of the expected grammatical pattern. The "disguising effect" is conjectured to arise from two processes found in natural languages: phonetically null elements and clause reduction. If this conjecture is correct, careful comparison of languages in which the principles governing null elements and restructuring are known to vary should reveal the disguise of ITVs, or else provide evidence that the basic hypothesis is incorrect. Data on ITVs will be collected from a wide range of languages, including Chinese, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Slovenian, Russian, and a number of native languages of North America. The PI will work with native-speaker graduate students, who directly control the target languages, and/or with professional linguists who have studied them. The results of this research will bear not only on linguistic theory, but also on broader issues in the relation between language and thought. A basic question is how far languages may vary in the ways that they express the same thoughts or concepts. Are the same ideas necessarily encoded in the same forms (once disguising effects are stripped away)? Or can there be true variation? This study will investigate the question of what variation is possible in the expression of intensional concepts, and so contribute to this wider set of questions.