The Comparative Grammar of Intensional Transitive Verbs

在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，理查德·拉尔森博士将进行为期三年的研究，研究所谓的“内涵及物动词”（ITVs）的行为和解释，这是一种解决句法和语义之间关系的结构类型。在英语和相关语言中，某些语义现象（如语气）与某些句法结构（如小句补语）有关。电视挑战了这种相关性。这项研究关注的假设是，这种相关性实际上是成立的，电视节目（实际上）是预期语法模式的一种变相的变体。据推测，“伪装效应”源于自然语言中的两个过程：语音空元素和子句缩减。如果这个猜想是正确的，那么仔细比较那些已知控制零元素和重组的原则各不相同的语言，就应该揭示电视的伪装，或者提供证据表明基本假设是不正确的。关于电视的数据将从广泛的语言收集，包括中文、匈牙利语、日语、朝鲜语、斯洛文尼亚语、俄语和北美的一些本土语言。PI将与直接掌握目标语言的以母语为母语的研究生和/或研究过这些语言的专业语言学家合作。这项研究的结果将不仅涉及语言学理论，而且涉及语言与思维关系等更广泛的问题。一个基本的问题是，语言在表达相同的思想或概念的方式上可能会有多大的差异。相同的想法是否必须以相同的形式编码（一旦去除伪装效果）？或者真的有变异吗？本研究将探讨内涵概念表达中可能出现的变化，从而为这一更广泛的问题做出贡献。

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.