Clausal Ellipsis, Its Structure and Online Processing

子句省略、其结构及在线处理

• 批准号: 1323245
• 负责人: Masaya Yoshida
• 金额: $ 27.27万
• 依托单位: Northwestern University
• 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: 2013-09-01 至 2017-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1323245&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Clausal; Ellipsis; Its; Structure; Online

The purpose of this project is to investigate the structure of ellipsis from the point of view of theoretical syntax and online sentence processing. Specifically, the project emphasizes the view that a detailed study in the theoretical syntax of ellipsis provides invaluable insight into the mechanism of the structure building process in online sentence processing. The particular type of ellipsis that will be examined in this project is known as 'sluicing' (e.g., "John said Mary was reading in the garden, but he didn't say what").Previous studies of ellipsis have used sluicing as an argument against the position that the grammar supports the unpronounced abstract syntactic structure. (e.g., because sluicing does not always respect syntactic island constraints). Dr. Yoshida will investigate whether ellipsis sites in sluicing are associated with a full-fledged syntactic structure and, if so, what the syntactic properties of those sites are. In addition, the experimental studies of how sluicing constructions are processed on line will investigate: (i) When the parser identifies the ellipsis; (ii) What representation the parser builds in the ellipsis site during online processing; and (iii) What constraint the online structure building process obeys.In addition to advancing our understanding of the syntax of natural language and how humans identify and process the structure of sentences in the course of language comprehension, this project will also provide valuable training opportunities for graduate students in linguistics and psycholinguistics.

本课题旨在从理论句法和在线句子处理的角度研究省略号的结构。具体来说，该项目强调了这样一种观点，即对省略的理论句法进行详细的研究，可以为在线句子处理中结构构建过程的机制提供宝贵的见解。在这个项目中要研究的特殊类型的省略被称为“sluicing”（例如，“John说Mary在花园里读书，但是他没有说什么”）。以往关于省略号的研究，都是用省略作为论据来反驳语法支持不发音的抽象句法结构的观点。（例如，因为闸门并不总是尊重语法岛约束）。吉田博士将调查是否省略位点与一个完整的句法结构有关，如果是的话，这些位点的句法特性是什么。此外，关于如何在线处理水闸结构的实验研究将探讨：(i)解析器识别省略号时；（ii）在在线处理过程中，解析器在省略号站点中构建什么样的表示；（三）在线结构构建过程受什么约束。除了加深我们对自然语言的句法以及人类在语言理解过程中如何识别和处理句子结构的理解外，该项目还将为语言学和心理语言学的研究生提供宝贵的培训机会。