Doctoral Dissertation Research: Experimental Investigations of Multiple Wh-Questions

博士论文研究：多个Wh问题的实验研究

• 批准号: 1251717
• 负责人: Martin Hackl
• 金额: $ 0.5万
• 依托单位: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-04-01 至 2015-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1251717&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Experimental; Investigations

Under the direction of Dr. Martin Hackl, Ms. Hadas Kotek will conduct psycholinguistic experiments on the real-time processing of multiple wh-questions in English (e.g., "John asked which students could not read which sign last night"). Multiple wh-questions are a central construction in the debate regarding the existence of Covert Movement (CM) operations. The debate revolves around the question of whether CM operations are responsible for the interpretation of semantic operators at the syntactic level of Logical Form (LF), or whether alternative mechanisms must be adopted. The CM hypothesis holds that, in contexts like the example above, both "which students" and "which sign" are treated as semantic operators that take scope over [x could not read y last night] by covertly moving out of that structure despite the fact that "which sign" remains a constituent of that larger unit in the (overt) phonological form of the sentence. The results of this research project will contribute to this debate by experimentally testing the existence of CM operations in multiple wh-questions. The project seeks to provide a detailed and theoretically informed description and analysis of the Logical Form of wh-questions. Crucial new evidence will be collected that will distinguish between two main approaches. Although these approaches differ substantially in their treatment of the syntax and semantics of interrogatives, traditional means of investigation have not been successful in choosing between these approaches. One reason for this lack of success is that off-line judgments collected from native speaker informants regarding the acceptability, felicity, and semantic content of multiple questions do not provide direct evidence about CM, and have not pinpointed the grammatical causes of CM for wh-expressions. The project proposes an experimental investigation of multiple wh-questions which goes beyond off-line judgments. In particular, it proposes to conduct three real-time sentence processing experiments to test differing predictions made by these two approaches. The grammatical configurations that these experiments will investigate focus on so-called intervention effects, which have been central to current debates about the syntax and semantics of multiple wh-questions. This project will provide novel experimental evidence for the existence and nature of intervention effects, which have not been previously tested empirically. This award will also support the scientific training of a promising scholar.

在Martin Hackl博士的指导下，Hadas Kotek女士将对英语中的多个wh-问题进行实时处理的心理语言学实验(例如，“John问哪些学生昨晚看不懂哪个手势”)。多个wh疑问句是关于隐蔽运动(CM)行动是否存在的争论的中心结构。争论围绕的问题是：在逻辑形式(LF)的句法层面上，语义操作符的解释是由CM操作负责，还是必须采用替代机制。CM假设认为，在类似上述例子的语境中，“哪些学生”和“哪些符号”都被视为语义操作符，它们通过偷偷地移出那个结构来控制[x昨晚不能读y]，尽管事实是“哪个符号”仍然是句子(公开的)语音形式中较大单位的组成部分。这一研究项目的结果将通过实验测试多个wh-问题中CM操作的存在，从而有助于这场辩论。该项目力求对wh-疑问句的逻辑形式提供详细的、在理论上知情的描述和分析。将收集关键的新证据，区分两种主要方法。虽然这些方法在处理疑问句的句法和语义方面有很大的不同，但传统的研究方法并没有成功地在这些方法之间做出选择。缺乏成功的一个原因是，从母语人士信息者那里收集到的关于多个疑问句的可接受性、适宜性和语义内容的离线判断并没有提供关于CM的直接证据，也没有准确地指出wh-表达的CM的语法原因。该项目提出了一项超越离线判断的多个wh-问题的实验研究。特别是，它建议进行三个实时句子处理实验，以测试这两种方法做出的不同预测。这些实验将调查的语法结构集中在所谓的干预效应上，这是目前关于多个wh-疑问句的句法和语义的争论的核心。该项目将为干预效应的存在和性质提供新的实验证据，这些效应以前没有经过经验检验。该奖项还将支持对一位有前途的学者进行科学培训。