The Comparative Grammar of Intensional Transitive Verbs

在国家科学基金会的支持下，理查德·K·拉森博士将对所谓的“内涵及物动词”的行为和解释进行为期三年的研究，这是一种处理句法和语义之间关系的结构类型。在英语及相关语言中，某些语义现象(例如，内涵)与某些句法结构(例如，从句补语)相关。ITVS挑战了这种相关性。这项研究涉及的假设是，这种关联实际上是成立的，而且ITV(实际上)代表了预期语法模式的变种。“伪装效应”被认为是自然语言中存在的两个过程：语音零成分和小句简化。如果这一猜想是正确的，仔细比较那些已知支配零成分和重组的原则不同的语言，应该会揭示ITV的伪装，或者提供证据，证明基本假设是不正确的。有关信息技术电视的数据将从多种语言收集，包括汉语、匈牙利语、日语、韩语、斯洛文尼亚语、俄语和一些北美本土语言。PI将与直接控制目标语言的以英语为母语的研究生合作，和/或与研究过这些语言的专业语言学家合作。这项研究的结果不仅涉及语言学理论，还涉及语言与思维关系中更广泛的问题。一个基本的问题是，语言表达相同的思想或概念的方式可能会有多大的差异。相同的想法是否必须以相同的形式进行编码(一旦去除伪装效果)？或者会有真正的变化吗？这项研究将调查在表达内涵概念时可能发生什么变化的问题，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.