Collaborative Research: Typology and Theory of Anaphora

尽管对人类社会组织有重要的表面差异，但人类面部或身体的基本结构是相同的，它们的结构反映了一种独特的、基于生物学的蓝图。同样，人类语言表面上在社会组织的重要方面有着巨大的不同，但我们不知道它们的结构是否以及在多大程度上反映了一种独特的蓝图，也不知道——如果有的话——它是语言独有的还是反映了更普遍的认知能力。本项目在参考的中心领域探讨这些普遍性问题，作为解决相关认知原则的语言特殊性问题的第一步。调查指称意味着询问世界上的实体是如何通过语言表达挑选出来的。更准确地说，本项目关注的是指喻的指称意义，指的是像英语“他自己”这样的表达，似乎在所有语言中都存在，其指称功能必须依赖于另一种表达或话语突出实体。该项目旨在开发精确的工具和测试，以深入记录、分析和解释隐喻所显示的经验模式，这对语言学理论、类型学和其他领域都很感兴趣。这项调查最初将在一组类型学上不同的语言中进行。收集到的数据，其组织将根据所使用的分析工具和得出的结论，将丰富开放获取的众包SSWL（世界语言句法结构）数据库，不仅为语言学理论的进一步发展，而且为哲学、心理语言学、神经心理学和计算方法的参考提供坚实的基础。甚至——考虑到隐喻对话语参与者的显性或隐性观点的敏感性——也适用于文学分析和翻译。

Despite significant superficial differences important to human social organization, human faces or bodies are fundamentally structured in the same way, and their structures reflect a unique, biologically based, blueprint. Similarly, human languages are superficially vastly dissimilar in ways important to social organization, but it is not known if and to what extent their structures reflect a unique blueprint, nor is it known - if there is one - whether it is unique to language or reflects cognitively more general capacities. The present project explores these questions of universality in the central domain of reference, as a first step towards settling the question of the linguistic specificity of the relevant cognitive principles involved. Investigating reference means asking how entities in the world are picked out by linguistic expressions. More precisely, this project concentrates on the referential import of anaphors, which are expressions such as English "himself" seemingly present in all languages, and whose referential function must rely on another expression or a discourse prominent entity. The project aims to develop precise tools and tests to document in depth, analyze and explain the empirical patterns displayed by anaphors, which are of interest to linguistic theory, typology and beyond. This investigation will initially be carried out in a set of typologically diverse languages. The gathered data, whose organization will be informed by the analytical tools used and the conclusions reached, will enrich the open access crowd-sourced SSWL (Syntactic Structures of the World's Languages) database, and should provide a sound basis not only for further development of linguistic theories, but also for philosophical, psycholinguistic, neuropsychological and computational approaches of reference, and even - given the sensitivity of anaphors to explicit or implicit points of view of discourse participants - for literary analysis and translation.