Formal Semantic and Pragmatic Approaches to Binding Theory

虽然代词、专有名词和明确描述是一些最基本的语言表达，但直到最近三十年，支配它们行为的规则才被正式详细地描述出来。例如，在“他喜欢导演的母亲”中，代词“他”和描述“导演”不能指同一个人（条件C）；但在“他妈妈喜欢导演”中却没有这样的约束。虽然在最近的语言学中已经发展出复杂的规则来描述这些限制，但它们的存在从来没有得到令人满意的解释。本项目试图发展一种新的解释，在这种解释中，这些约束是计算意义的过程的副产品。基本的观察结果是，一般的经济原则禁止明确的描述包含比挑选其预期所指对象所需的更多的材料——这解释了为什么说“约翰的金发父亲”很奇怪，因为“金发”在语义上是无用的（因为一个人通常只有一个父亲）。在简单的情况下，这一经济原则将描述与其语言外语境联系起来。然而，有人认为，意义是通过在句子中发现的代词、专有名词和描述的外延字面上扩展语言外语境来计算的。当同样的经济学原理应用于这个扩展的背景时，约束的经典例子（特别是条件C）可以被解释，以及一些迄今为止尚未被描述的新数据。因此，该项目将增加现有理论的深度，并对相关事实提供更细致的描述，这将通过比较英语、罗曼语和斯拉夫语的数据来研究。

Although pronouns, proper names and definite descriptions are some of the most basic of linguistic expressions, it is only in the last thirty years that the rules that govern their behavior have been described in formal detail. For example, in "He likes the director's mother" the pronoun "he" and the description "the director" cannot refer to the same individual (Condition C); but no such constraint holds in "His mother likes the director". While sophisticated rules have been developed in recent linguistics to describe these constraints, their very existence has never been satisfactorily explained. The present project seeks to develop a novel account in which these constraints are the by-product of the very procedure by which meaning is computed. The basic observation is that a general principle of economy prohibits definite descriptions from containing more material than is necessary to single out their intended referent - which explains why it is odd to speak of "John's blond father", since "blond" is semantically idle (since one generally has but one father). In simple cases, this economy principle relates a description to its extra-linguistic context. It is suggested, however, that meaning is computed by literally extending the extra-linguistic context with the denotation of the pronouns, proper names and descriptions that are found within a sentence. When the same economy principle is applied to this extended context, the classical examples of the constraints (especially Condition C) can be explained, as well as some new data that had not hitherto been described. The project will thus add to the depth of existing theories and offer a more fine-grained description of the relevant facts, which will be studied by comparing data from English and from Romance and Slavic languages.