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: 0952862
• 负责人: David Beaver
• 金额: $ 10.46万
• 依托单位: University of Texas at Austin
• 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 2013-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0952862&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”描述了某些含义元素意外地脱离了另一个表达式的范围的情况，例如否定或条件。例如，“约翰没有看到他的妹妹”通常被理解为否认约翰看见他的妹妹的事件，而不是否认约翰有一个妹妹——尽管从句法上来说，表达“他的妹妹”属于否定的范围。大量的表达式产生预测，包括预设触发器、传统含义触发器、近似表达式以及与格莱斯含义相关的一些推论。该项目将对所有投射意义进行首次系统的实证和理论分析，以确定投射意义发生的原因以及投射意义的子类有何不同。为此，它将开发诊断测试模板，可用于与理论上幼稚的顾问一起跨语言研究投射意义的属性。研究人员将对英语和巴拉圭瓜拉尼语的投射意义进行详细调查，并通过出版物和研讨会向研究其他语言的田野工作人员传播这些技术。现代语言语义学以弗雷格组合性为中心，即组合各部分的含义以给出更大表达式的含义的方式。尽管组合语义学取得了巨大进步，但投射意义并不遵守普通的组合规则。到目前为止，对于为什么投射意义的表现与普通内容不同还没有统一的解释。该项目旨在解释投射，基于这样的工作假设：意义的各个方面当且仅当它们不存在争议时才会投射。争议性的概念是一种务实的概念，基于话语中正在讨论的问题。因此，该项目将把一个相对较少研究的实用概念置于语言意义研究的核心。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。除了语言语义学之外，所研究的问题也是语言哲学的基础，因为这部作品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（特别是计算语义学子领域）具有实际意义。文本处理系统，例如自动回答用户问题的计算机系统必须考虑独立于标准构成而产生的推论。不考虑预计内容的问答系统将无法识别用户已经知道的内容，并且无法识别需要回答什么问题。