Linguistic structure in ellipsis and pronoun interpretation

省略和代词解释中的语言结构

• 批准号: 1150337
• 负责人: Jeffrey Runner
• 金额: $ 27.54万
• 依托单位: University of Rochester
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-06-01 至 2017-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1150337&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Linguistic; structure; ellipsis; pronoun; interpretation

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Jeffrey T. Runner will conduct three years of linguistic research examining how participants interpret sentences containing a range of different elided phrases. Many of the proposed experiments will use a lightweight head-mounted eye tracker to monitor eye movements as participants identify an object or a person in a scene while listening to descriptions of the depicted activities (e.g., "The security guard opened the lock and the night watchman did, too."). Which object or person participants look at, and when they look at them, provides evidence about which referents they are considering as they interpret the elided expressions. The goals of this research are to (a) investigate the interpretation of these expressions with on-line and off-line tasks; (b) evaluate the extent to which grammatical factors define the potential set of referents for elided phrases and pronouns; and (c) examine the interaction of these grammatical factors with pragmatic and discourse factors. The results of this research will be important for understanding how people assign reference, which is a central goal of current research in theoretical and applied linguistics. Very little research has been devoted to using a range of different expressions to explicitly address these questions. A better understanding of reference resolution can also benefit research in other domains. Reference resolution is one of the most central and challenging problems in developing efficient language understanding systems, including systems that are being developed for health-related bio-medical applications. Moreover, information about the timing of eye movements and speech, especially in relation to reference resolution, will also inform scientists who are developing computer-based language understanding systems that use eye movements to help resolve ambiguous words and referring expressions. Furthermore, difficulties in reference resolution are associated with, and often used to diagnose, certain language difficulties that arise due to brain damage, and thus a better understanding of the grammatical and discourse factors guiding reference resolution can prove a useful baseline for clinical research.

在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，杰弗里·T. Runner将进行为期三年的语言学研究，研究参与者如何解释包含一系列不同省略短语的句子。许多提议的实验将使用轻型头戴式眼动仪来监测眼睛运动，因为参与者在听所描绘的活动的描述时识别场景中的物体或人（例如，“保安打开了锁，守夜人也打开了。").参与者看的是什么物体或人，以及他们什么时候看的，提供了他们在解释省略的表达时考虑的是什么指示物的证据。本研究的目的是（a）通过在线和离线任务调查这些表达的解释;（B）评估语法因素在多大程度上定义了隐去短语和代词的潜在指称集合;（c）检查这些语法因素与语用和语篇因素的相互作用。本研究的结果对于理解人们如何分配指称具有重要意义，这是当前理论和应用语言学研究的中心目标。很少有研究致力于使用一系列不同的表达来明确地解决这些问题。更好地理解参考分辨率也可以有益于其他领域的研究。参考分辨率是开发有效的语言理解系统中最核心和最具挑战性的问题之一，包括正在开发的用于与健康相关的生物医学应用的系统。此外，关于眼球运动和言语的时间信息，特别是与参考分辨率有关的信息，也将为开发基于计算机的语言理解系统的科学家提供信息，这些系统使用眼球运动来帮助解决模糊的单词和指涉表达。此外，在参考分辨率的困难与，并经常用于诊断，由于脑损伤而出现的某些语言困难，因此，更好地了解语法和话语因素指导参考分辨率可以证明是一个有用的基线临床研究。