The Development of Syntactic Alternations

句法交替的发展

• 批准号: 1025602
• 负责人: Joan Bresnan
• 金额: $ 27.5万
• 依托单位: Stanford 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: 2010-09-15 至 2015-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1025602&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Development; Syntactic; Alternations

Mastering spoken and written discourse is vitally important in human cognitive development, and it is increasingly recognized that this mastery depends on the implicit knowledge of "linguistic probabilities"--the likelihoods of types of expressions occurring in ordinary language use. For example, psychologists have shown that while reading or hearing a sentence, people instantaneously anticipate the more likely of two types of continuations, even when they are semantically equivalent. For another example, researchers of the historical and social dimensions of language have demonstrated that speakers of different regional varieties of the same language (such as British and American English) are characterized by different models of their speech probabilities, and that these probabilities have been changing over historical time. Finally, developmental studies have revealed children's sensitivity to the statistical regularities of their linguistic environment and their mastery of the variable higher-level linguistic structures that occur in spontaneous discourse. Combing these psychological, historical/social, and developmental perspectives, the present project will investigate how the implicit knowledge of linguistic probabilities develops in the individual and in historically diverging groups of speakers. The project will make use of a common theoretical framework for studying linguistic probabilities as well as a common set of semantically equivalent types of linguistic expressions which differ in their linguistic probabilities. The latter, called "syntactic alternations", are alternative ways of paraphrasing the same message (such as "give her a book/give a book to her" or "the woman's shadow/the shadow of the woman"). The project will enlist an international team of experts to conduct on-site field research of the same syntactic alternations in three suites of studies: (i) parallel observational studies and experiments across groups of speakers of closely related dialects of English to investigate the varying probabilities of syntactic alternations in speaking or writing and their effect on understanding, (ii) studies of how probabilistic models of higher-level linguistic structures from the spontaneous spoken language of children and their caretakers develop over the time-course of primary language learning, and (iii) studies of how the predictors of probabilistic changes in the same high-level linguistic structures develop in historical time.The project has unusual intellectual scope, because it applies multiple methods of expert collaborators that are seldom brought together within an integrated theoretical approach. New datasets built for this project will be made publicly available to all researchers. This work also has potential applications in reading, second language education and language impairment. Working as a multidisciplinary team on this central set of fundamental linked problems in the comprehension, production, and development of spoken and written discourse will more rapidly advance the growing convergence of probabilistic approaches to language in all of the language sciences, including computer science, communication engineering, psychology, and linguistics.

掌握口语和书面语篇在人类认知发展中至关重要，越来越多的人认识到，这种掌握依赖于对“语言概率”的隐含知识--在日常语言使用中出现的表达类型的可能性。例如，心理学家已经证明，当人们阅读或听到一句话时，即使在语义相同的情况下，人们也会瞬间预料到两种延续形式中可能性更大的那一种。例如，研究语言的历史和社会维度的研究者证明，同一语言的不同地区变体(如英国英语和美国英语)的说话人具有不同的言语概率模式，并且这些概率一直在随着历史的推移而变化。最后，发展研究揭示了儿童对其语言环境的统计规律的敏感性，以及他们对自发话语中发生的可变的高级语言结构的掌握。结合这些心理学、历史/社会和发展角度，本项目将调查语言概率的内隐知识是如何在个人和历史上不同的说话者群体中发展的。该项目将利用一个共同的理论框架来研究语言概率，以及一组在语义上等价的不同语言概率的语言表达。后者被称为“句法交替”，是解释相同信息的另一种方式(如“给她一本书/给她一本书”或“女人的影子/女人的影子”)。该项目将招募一个国际专家团队，在三套研究中对相同的句法变化进行现场实地研究：(I)平行的观察性研究和实验，跨越密切相关的英语方言的说话者群体，以调查口语或写作中句法变化的不同概率及其对理解的影响；(Ii)研究儿童及其照顾者自发口语中的高级语言结构的概率模型如何在小学语言学习的时间过程中发展；以及(Iii)研究同一高级语言结构中的概率变化的预测因素如何在历史时间中发展。该项目具有不同寻常的智力范围，因为它使用了专家合作者的多种方法，而这些方法很少在一个综合的理论方法中结合在一起。为该项目建立的新数据集将向所有研究人员公开。这项工作在阅读、第二语言教育和语言障碍方面也有潜在的应用。作为一个多学科团队，在理解、产生和发展口语和书面语篇中的这组基本联系的中心问题上进行合作，将更快地推动语言的概率方法在所有语言科学中日益趋同，包括计算机科学、通信工程、心理学和语言学。