Variability in Pragmatic Inferencing

语用推理的可变性

• 批准号: 0744898
• 负责人: David Sobel
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Brown University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-04-15 至 2010-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0744898&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Variability; Pragmatic; Inferencing

In order to successfully communicate, speakers and hearers must use more than their knowledge of a common language. Often, understanding a speaker's intended meaning requires "reading between the lines" thereby enriching the linguistic meaning of what the speaker has said. For example, if a speaker says "I like some of my relatives," the hearer will likely understand her to have implied that she does not like all of them, even though her utterance is, strictly speaking, true if she does in fact like them. Previous work has shown that similarly enriched meanings can be computed extremely rapidly by hearers. This project examines in detail how speakers (or readers) arrive at such enriched meanings. What kinds of expectations about the speaker's choice of linguistic expressions does the hearer rely on? Does the hearer take into account the speaker's communicative goal or communicative abilities? Are there individual differences in the extent to which people can integrate more socially-based expectations about typical communicative behavior with linguistic meanings? And are there aspects of linguistic structure or context that make enriched meanings more accessible to the hearer/reader? This project will address some currently heated debates in theoretical linguistics, philosophy and cognitive psychology about the nature of enriched meanings and their relationship to purely linguistic meanings. It will provide the first study of individual differences in this domain, laying the groundwork for future studies with atypical populations (especially autistic individuals). The results are also likely of interest to computational linguists.

为了成功地进行交流，说话者和听者必须使用的不仅仅是他们所掌握的共同语言知识。 通常，理解说话者的意图需要“读懂字里行间的意思”，从而丰富说话者所说内容的语言意义。 例如，如果说话者说“我喜欢我的一些亲戚”，听者可能会理解她暗示她不喜欢所有的人，尽管严格来说，如果她确实喜欢他们，她的话就是真的。 先前的研究表明，听者可以极其快速地计算出类似的丰富含义。 该项目详细研究了说话者（或读者）如何获得如此丰富的含义。 听话者对说话者选择的语言表达有什么样的期望？ 听话者是否考虑了说话者的交际目标或交际能力？ 人们对典型交际行为的更多基于社会的期望与语言意义的整合程度是否存在个体差异？ 语言结构或语境的某些方面是否可以使听者/读者更容易理解丰富的含义？该项目将解决理论语言学、哲学和认知心理学中目前关于丰富意义的本质及其与纯粹语言意义的关系的一些激烈争论。 它将提供该领域个体差异的首次研究，为未来非典型人群（尤其是自闭症个体）的研究奠定基础。 结果也可能引起计算语言学家的兴趣。