The Meaning of Verbal Roots Across Languages

不同语言中动词词根的含义

• 批准号: 1451765
• 负责人: John Beavers
• 金额: $ 29.41万
• 依托单位: University of Texas at Austin
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-07-01 至 2020-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1451765&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Meaning; Verbal; Roots; Across; Languages

Language serves not just as a means of communication but also a window into how humans perceive the world. Verbs have been a rich source of information about how humans categorize events, and one tantalizing result of work on verb meaning is that the possible meanings a verb can have are not arbitrary. Rather, there are recurring meaning components of high generality that define classes of verbs according to the broad situation type being described, including cause and effect, bodily action, and possession, and verbs within a class tend to have shared grammatical behaviors. Individual verbs within a class are distinguished by idiosyncratic details that fill in the specifics of the broader situation, e.g. the name of a specific action, usually with few grammatical ramifications. However, how general and idiosyncratic components combine in the meaning of a verb is still not well understood, nor is the space of what idiosyncratic meanings an individual verb within a class can have, including how distinct general and verb-specific meanings even are. Understanding these issues has consequences for our understanding of human languages, and can serve practical purposes, particularly in relation to search engine technology and machine translation.This project addresses these lacunae by examining the idiosyncratic meanings of verbs describing change-of-state (e.g. break, redden) and caused possession (e.g. give, send), which have been claimed to exemplify possible limits on idiosyncratic meanings. The methodology involves (i) in depth studies of these verbs in English and Kinyarwanda (chosen for its rich verbal morphology), the latter through field work, and (ii) a broad survey of change-of-state verbs in a genealogically balanced 100 language sample drawn from existing published reference materials. The goal is to isolate general and idiosyncratic meaning in verbs through inferential and morphological patterns. The results will be integrated into a theory of how verb meanings are composed using modern techniques in compositional semantics. The expectation based on pilot data is that while idiosyncratic meanings are not limited in terms of their literal content, they fall into limited types regarding their relation to the rest of the verb's meaning, making some predictions about possible and impossible verbs.

语言不仅是一种交流手段，也是了解人类如何感知世界的窗口。动词一直是人类如何对事件进行分类的丰富信息来源，研究动词意义的一个诱人的结果是，动词可能具有的意义并不是任意的。相反，有高度概括性的重复意义成分，根据所描述的广泛情景类型来定义动词类别，包括原因和结果、身体动作和占有，并且类别中的动词往往具有共同的语法行为。一个类别中的单个动词通过特殊的细节来区分，这些细节填充了更广泛情况的细节，例如特定动作的名称，通常很少有语法上的分支。然而，一般成分和特殊成分如何结合在动词的意义上仍然没有很好的理解，一个类别中的单个动词可以具有什么特殊意义的空间也不是很清楚，包括一般意义和动词特定意义的区别程度。理解这些问题会影响我们对人类语言的理解，并可以服务于实际目的，特别是在搜索引擎技术和机器翻译方面。这个项目通过研究描述状态变化的动词(例如Break，Redden)和导致占有(例如Give，Send)的特殊含义来解决这些漏洞，这些词被声称是对特殊含义的可能限制。该方法涉及(I)深入研究英语和基尼亚卢旺达语(因其丰富的动词词法而被选中)中的这些动词，后者通过实地考察而被选中，以及(Ii)从现有出版的参考材料中提取100个谱系平衡的语言样本，对状态变化动词进行广泛的调查。其目的是通过推理和形态模式来分离动词中的一般意义和特殊意义。这些结果将被整合到一个关于动词意义是如何使用组成语义学的现代技术构成的理论中。基于Pilot数据的预期是，虽然特殊意义不受字面内容的限制，但它们在与动词其余含义的关系方面属于有限类型，对可能和不可能的动词做出了一些预测。