Collaborative Research: Semantics and Pragmatics of Projective Meaning across Languages

合作研究：跨语言投射意义的语义和语用学

• 批准号: 0952497
• 负责人: Mandy Simons
• 金额: $ 11.81万
• 依托单位: Carnegie-Mellon University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-06-15 至 2013-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0952497&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Semantics; Pragmatics; Projective

The term "projection" describes cases where some element of meaning unexpectedly escapes from the scope of another expression, such as a negation or conditional. For example, "John didn't see his sister" is typically understood as denying that there was an event of John seeing his sister, but not as denying that John has a sister -- even though syntactically the expression "his sister" is under the scope of the negation. An enormous range of expressions yield projection, including presupposition triggers, conventional implicature triggers, approximatives, and some inferences associated with Gricean implicatures. This project will carry out the first systematic empirical and theoretical analysis of the full range of projective meanings, to establish why projection occurs, and how subclasses of projective meaning differ. To this end, it will develop templates for diagnostic tests that can be used to study properties of projective meanings cross-linguistically, with theoretically naive consultants. The researchers will conduct detailed investigations of projective meanings in English and Paraguayan Guarani, and disseminate the techniques to fieldworkers studying other languages, through publications and workshops. Modern linguistic semantics centers around Fregean compositionality, the way in which the meanings of parts are combined to give the meanings of larger expressions. While there has been great progress in compositional semantics, projective meaning does not obey ordinary compositional rules. Until now, there has been no uniform account of why projective meanings behave differently from ordinary content. This project seeks to explain projection, based on the working hypothesis that aspects of meaning project if and only if they are not at-issue. The notion of at-issueness is a pragmatic one, based on what questions are under discussion in a discourse. Thus the project will place a relatively little-studied pragmatic notion at the heart of work on linguistic meaning. A first area where the innovations in the project are of broad significance is in its cross-linguistic focus: a theory of human language cannot be based on one language alone, and the project will apply its empirical techniques cross-linguistically. Beyond linguistic semantics, the issues studied are fundamental to Philosophy of Language, since the work subtly redraws the boundary between Semantics and Pragmatics. Further the project is of practical significance in the field of Natural Language Processing (specifically, the subfield of Computational Semantics). Text processing systems, e.g. computer systems for automatically answering a user's questions, must take account of inferences which arise independently of standard composition. A question answering system which does not take account of what is projected will not be able to identify what the user already knows, and will not be able to identify what question needs to be answered.

“投射”一词描述的是某些意义要素意外地脱离另一个表达的范围的情况，例如否定或条件。例如，“John didn 't see his sister”通常被理解为否认有John看到他的妹妹的事件，但不否认John有一个妹妹-即使在句法上表达“his sister”在否定的范围内。大量的表达方式都会产生投射，包括预设触发语、常规含义触发语、近似语以及一些与格赖斯含义相关的推论。这个项目将进行第一次系统的经验和理论分析的全部范围的投射意义，以建立为什么会发生投射，以及如何投射意义的子类不同。为此，它将开发诊断测试的模板，可用于研究跨语言投射意义的属性，理论上天真的顾问。研究人员将对英语和瓜拉尼语瓜拉尼中的投射意义进行详细调查，并通过出版物和讲习班向研究其他语言的实地工作者传播这些技术。现代语言学语义学以弗雷格的组合性为中心，即各部分的意义被组合起来以给出更大表达的意义的方式。虽然组合语义学已经取得了很大的进展，但投射意义并不遵循通常的组合规则。到目前为止，还没有统一的解释，为什么投射意义的行为不同于普通的内容。这个项目旨在解释投影，基于工作假设，即意义的各个方面投影当且仅当它们不是问题所在。在问题性的概念是一个语用学的概念，基于什么问题正在讨论的话语。因此，该项目将把一个相对较少研究的语用学概念置于语言意义工作的核心。该项目的创新具有广泛意义的第一个领域是其跨语言焦点：人类语言理论不能仅基于一种语言，该项目将跨语言地应用其经验技术。除了语言语义学之外，所研究的问题是语言哲学的基础，因为这项工作巧妙地重新划定了语义学和语用学之间的界限。此外，该项目在自然语言处理领域（特别是计算语义学的子领域）具有实际意义。文本处理系统，例如用于自动回答用户问题的计算机系统，必须考虑独立于标准组成而产生的推断。一个不考虑被投射的内容的问答系统将不能识别用户已经知道的内容，并且将不能识别需要回答的问题。