Formal Semantic and Pragmatic Approaches to Binding Theory

绑定理论的形式语义和语用方法

• 批准号: 0902671
• 负责人: Philippe Schlenker
• 金额: $ 6.08万
• 依托单位: New York University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-09-01 至 2012-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0902671&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Formal; Semantic; Pragmatic; Approaches; Binding

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.

虽然代词、专有名词和限定描述是一些最基本的语言表达，但直到最近30年，才正式详细描述了支配它们行为的规则。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“他的母亲喜欢导演”中没有这样的约束。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约束，但它们的存在从来没有得到令人满意的解释。本项目旨在开发一种新的帐户，其中这些限制是副产品的非常程序的意义计算。基本的观察是，一个一般的经济原则禁止明确的描述包含更多的材料，而不是挑选出他们想要的指涉对象所必需的-这解释了为什么说“约翰的金发父亲”是奇怪的，因为“金发”在语义上是闲置的（因为一个人通常只有一个父亲）。在简单的情况下，这种经济原则将描述与其语言外的语境联系起来。然而，有人建议，意义是通过字面上扩展的语言外的上下文与代词，专有名词和描述，发现在一个句子中的外延计算。当相同的经济原则应用于这个扩展背景时，可以解释约束的经典例子（尤其是条件C），以及一些迄今为止尚未描述的新数据。因此，该项目将增加现有理论的深度，并对相关事实提供更精细的描述，将通过比较英语和罗曼语和斯拉夫语的数据进行研究。