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Questions and entailment

问题和影响

基本信息

批准号：
228934092
负责人：
Professor Dr. Clemens Steiner-Mayr
金额：
--
依托单位：
Seminar für Englische Philologie
依托单位国家：
德国
项目类别：
Research Grants
财政年份：
2013
资助国家：
德国
起止时间：
2012-12-31 至 2016-12-31
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/228934092?language=en
关键词：
Questions entailment

项目摘要

Entailment is a fundamental notion in semantics: e.g., it is a core semantic fact that every English speaker knows that 'John read War and Peace' entails 'John read a book'. Moreover, entailment is also important for the understanding of grammatical phenomena such as negative polarity items and scalar implicatures. In declarative sentences, their distribution is predictable from the entailment properties of the sentence (e.g. Gazdar 1979, Ladusaw 1979). I.e., a strong correlation between the appearance of these phenomena and specific entailment properties is observed. But negative polarity items and scalar implicatures also occur in questions. A well-known problem for the understanding of these phenomena in questions is that entailment is based on semantic relations between declarative sentences. It is therefore unclear whether, for instance, 'Did John read War & Peace?' and 'Did John read a book?' are related by entailment. As a result the exact licensing conditions of negative polarity items and scalar implicatures in questions are ill-understood. But this open issue has cast into doubt the causal link between entailment and the phenomena mentioned in the first place. This project addresses the 30-year-old debate about entailment-sensitive phenomena in questions in a novel way. It seeks a solution to the problem by addressing it on two fronts: first I study in detail the correlation between entailment reversal and exhaustivity in questions, building on work by Guerzoni & Sharvit (2007). Second I develop a new theory of question semantics based on these insights. This new theory has the consequence that (i) questions are related by entailment, and (ii) the strongly exhaustive answer to a question reverses entailment in the same way as negation. In other words, the strongly exhaustive answer to 'Did John read a book?' entails the one to 'Did John read War & Peace?'. The investigation has significant consequences for a number of other important debates. In particular, I expect evidence for the proposal to come from five empirical domains: (i) anti-additivity and rhetorical questions such as 'Did John lift a finger to help you?', (ii) the reversal of scalar implicatures in certain questions and the absence thereof in others, (iii) speaker's intuitions about the strongly exhaustive answer, (iv) focus-distribution in answers, and finally (v) the analysis of embedded questions and their embedding predicates.

蕴涵是语义学中的一个基本概念：例如，每个说英语的人都知道，“约翰读了《战争与和平》”需要“约翰读了一本书”，这是一个核心的语义学事实。此外，蕴涵对于理解诸如负极性项目和标量含义等语法现象也很重要。在陈述句中，它们的分布可以从句子的蕴因属性来预测（如Gazdar 1979， Ladusaw 1979）。也就是说，观察到这些现象的出现与特定蕴涵属性之间存在很强的相关性。但负极性项和标量蕴涵也出现在问题中。在问题中理解这些现象的一个众所周知的问题是，蕴涵是基于陈述句之间的语义关系。因此，我们不清楚，例如，“约翰读过《战争与和平》吗？”和“约翰读书了吗？”都是通过蕴涵联系在一起的。因此，问题中负极性项和标量蕴涵的确切许可条件是不清楚的。但是，这个悬而未决的问题使人们对蕴涵与最初提到的现象之间的因果关系产生了怀疑。这个项目以一种新颖的方式解决了30年来关于问题中蕴涵敏感现象的争论。它通过在两个方面解决问题来寻求解决方案：首先，我在Guerzoni和Sharvit（2007）的工作基础上，详细研究了问题中蕴意反转和穷竭性之间的相关性。其次，我在这些见解的基础上发展了一个新的问题语义理论。这个新理论的结论是：(i)问题是通过蕴涵联系起来的，（ii）对一个问题的强烈详尽的回答以与否定相同的方式推翻蕴涵。换句话说，对于“约翰读过书吗？”，其中包括“约翰读过《战争与和平》吗？”这项调查对其他一些重要的辩论产生了重大影响。特别是，我希望这一提议的证据来自五个经验领域：(I)反加和反问句，如“约翰帮过你吗？”’，（ii）在某些问题中标量含义的反转，而在其他问题中则没有标量含义，（iii）说话者对强烈详尽答案的直觉，（iv）答案中的焦点分布，最后(v)对嵌入问题及其嵌入谓词的分析。