A Cross-linguistic Study of Self-repair

摘要：自我修复的跨语言研究合作者：Barbara A. Fox，科罗拉多大学博尔德分校和Fay Wouk，奥克兰大学在国家科学基金会的支持下，科罗拉多大学博尔德分校的Barbara Fox博士将与新西兰奥克兰大学的Fay Wouk博士进行合作研究。本研究项目探讨了14种语言中自我修复的会话现象。自我修复是说话者停止他们正在说的句子，然后以某种方式修改它的过程。说话者可能会重复刚刚产生的单词或短语，插入一个单词或短语，以一种新的方式重新开始句子，或以其他方式修改结构，例如，And she- this girl's fixed on A da- A blind date。在这个句子中，说话者停止了说话，然后用名词短语“this girl”代替了代词“she”，然后继续说话。随后，说话者似乎以“约会”这个短语开始，然后在这个短语中插入“失明”这个词。“因此，自我修复是一种非常强大的机制，可以在句子生成时改变句子的语法。虽然自我修复乍一看似乎是不流畅和不符合语法的最终结果，但实际上它似乎是高度有组织的。我们甚至可以说，存在一种自我修复的语法。此外，这种“语法”似乎因语言而异。例如，在我们对日语和韩语的自我修复的研究中，我们发现重复整个短语——就像上面的例子一样——是非常罕见的，而在美式英语的自我修复中却并不罕见。对于不同语言中自我修复的不同“语法”，人们提出了各种各样的解释。该项目的研究团队将分析来自各种语言的数据，其中大多数是不相关的，来自世界不同地区，展示了广泛的结构，希望了解自我修复作为一种人类语言现象的范围，并测试过去关于其跨语言变化的解释。

ABSTRACTNSF Proposal 0406512A Cross-linguistic Study of Self-repairCo-PIs: Barbara A. Fox, University of Colorado, Boulder and Fay Wouk, University of AucklandWith National Science Foundation support, Dr. Barbara Fox of the University of Colorado, Boulder, will conduct collaborative research with Dr. Fay Wouk of the University of Auckland, New Zealand. This research project explores the conversational phenomenon of self-repair in 14 languages. Self-repair is the process by which a speaker stops the sentence they are producing and then modifies it in some way. A speaker may repeat a word or phrase just produced, insert a word or phrase, begin the sentence again in a new way, or modify the structure in other ways, for example, And she- this girl's fixed up on a da- a blind date. In this sentence, the speaker stops the utterance and then replaces the pronoun 'she' with the noun phrase 'this girl'and then continues with the utterance. Later in the utterance the speaker appears to begin the phrase 'a date'and then redoes the phrase to insert the word 'blind.'Self-repair is thus a very powerful mechanism for altering the syntax of a sentence as it is being produced. Although self-repair may at first seem like the ultimate in disfluency and ungrammaticality, in fact it appears to be highly organized. We could even say that there is a grammar to self-repair. Moreover, this "grammar" appears to vary from language to language. For example, in our exploration of self-repair in Japanese and Korean, we found that the repetition of whole phrases-as in the above example-is extremely rare, while it is not uncommon in American English self-repair. A variety of explanations have been offered for the different "grammars" of self-repair in different languages. The research team in this project will analyze data from a wide range of languages, most of them unrelated and from different areas of the world, displaying a wide range of structures, in the hopes of understanding the scope of self-repair as a human-language phenomenon and testing past explanations regarding its cross-linguistic variation.