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: 0952571
• 负责人: Craige Roberts
• 金额: $ 17.62万
• 依托单位: Ohio State 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 2015-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0952571&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.

术语“投射”描述的是某些意义元素意外地从另一个表达式（如否定或条件）的范围中逃脱的情况。例如，“John didn't see his sister”通常被理解为否认约翰见过他妹妹的事件，而不是否认约翰有一个妹妹——尽管从句法上讲，“他的妹妹”是在否定的范围内。大量的表达式产生投影，包括预设触发、常规含义触发、近似值和一些与格里希含义相关的推论。本项目将对投射意义的全部范围进行第一次系统的实证和理论分析，以确定投射发生的原因，以及投射意义的子类如何不同。为此目的，它将开发诊断测试的模板，可用于研究跨语言的投射意义的特性，与理论上幼稚的顾问。研究人员将对英语和巴拉圭瓜拉尼语的投影意义进行详细调查，并通过出版物和讲习班向研究其他语言的实地工作人员传播这些技术。现代语义学以Fregean compostionality为中心，即把各个部分的意思结合起来，给出更大的表达的意思。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一般的组合规则。到目前为止，对于投射意义为何与普通内容表现不同，还没有统一的解释。这个项目试图解释投射，基于工作假设，即当且仅当意义的各个方面没有问题时，它们就会投射。议题性的概念是一个实用主义的概念，基于话语中讨论的问题。因此，该项目将把一个相对较少研究的语用概念置于语言学意义研究的核心。该项目的创新具有广泛意义的第一个领域是其跨语言重点：人类语言理论不能仅基于一种语言，该项目将跨语言应用其经验技术。除了语义学之外，所研究的问题是语言哲学的基础，因为这本书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写作而产生的推断。一个不考虑投影的问答系统将无法识别用户已经知道的内容，也无法识别需要回答的问题。