Doctoral Dissertation Research: Reinterpreting Condition B: An Investigation of Pronominal Reference in Romanian

博士论文研究：重新解释条件B：罗马尼亚语代词指代的调查

• 批准号: 1823686
• 负责人: Brian Dillon
• 金额: $ 1.59万
• 依托单位: University of Massachusetts Amherst
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-09-01 至 2020-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1823686&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Reinterpreting; Condition

Natural language allows humans to refer to objects in the world, but often the way that language does this is by using seemingly under-informative linguistic devices: pronouns like 'he' or 'she.' Unlike proper names like 'Harry Potter,' pronouns do not have fixed reference, and so they can only be understood relative to a given context. For this reason, they offer a direct window into how the human mind tracks information about people and things in a context. Existing research into how listeners understand pronouns has already yielded substantial insight into how they track information about different entities in a discourse. Research suggests that there is much about this process that is shared across different languages. At the same time, there is evidence that languages do vary in how pronouns refer back to discourse entities. This raises the natural question: how much of our ability to refer using language is rooted in universal features of the mind, perhaps independent of language, and how much of it comes from the specifics of the language that one happens to speak? Answers to these questions inform us of the social and cultural factors that underlie language variation and change.This project investigates this question by looking at Romanian, a Romance language spoken by approximately 30 million people worldwide. Romanian appears to present a counter-example to a supposedly universal constraint on pronominal reference. In particular, in the English sentence 'Harry talked about him,' English speakers cannot naturally interpret 'him' to refer back to 'Harry.' In Romanian, this is not true, making Romanian an apparent counter-example to an otherwise robust cross-linguistic generalization. The present proposal tests hypotheses for why Romanian speakers can interpret pronouns in this apparently exceptional fashion. The researchers will investigate how different features of the context, such as the potential referential ambiguity of a pronoun and its syntactic position, impact the interpretations Romanian speakers assign to pronouns, as well as what types of pronouns Romanian speakers choose in production to refer to different antecedents within a context. The investigators take a psycholinguistic approach to their research questions, using a version of the picture description paradigm to investigate the production of pronouns, and a version of the preferential looking task to investigate comprehension. The proposed studies are the first of their kind on Romanian, and their results will be of interest to both theoretical linguists and psycholinguists interested in how language constrains our ability to refer in context.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

自然语言允许人类指代世界上的物体，但语言通常是通过使用看似信息不足的语言手段来实现这一点的：代词，如他或她。与《哈利·波特》等专有名词不同，代词没有固定的指代，因此只能根据特定的语境才能被理解。出于这个原因，它们提供了一个直接的窗口，让我们了解人类大脑是如何跟踪关于上下文中的人和事物的信息的。现有的关于听者如何理解代词的研究已经对他们如何追踪话语中不同实体的信息产生了实质性的洞察。研究表明，这个过程在不同的语言中有很多共同之处。与此同时，有证据表明，不同的语言在代词指向话语实体的方式上确实有所不同。这就提出了一个自然的问题：我们使用语言指代的能力有多少植根于思维的普遍特征，可能与语言无关，又有多少来自人们碰巧说的语言的特殊性？这些问题的答案告诉我们语言变异和变化背后的社会和文化因素。这个项目通过观察罗马尼亚语来研究这个问题，罗马尼亚语是一种罗曼语，全世界大约有3000万人使用。罗马尼亚人似乎为代词指称的普遍约束提供了一个反例。尤其是，在英语句子‘Harry Talk About Hhim’中，说英语的人很自然地不能把‘him’解释为‘harry’。在罗马尼亚语中，情况并非如此，这使得罗马尼亚语显然是对其他强有力的跨语言概括的反例。目前的提案测试了为什么罗马尼亚人能够以这种明显特殊的方式解释代词的假设。研究人员将调查语境的不同特征，如代词的潜在指称歧义及其句法位置，如何影响罗马尼亚说话者分配给代词的解释，以及罗马尼亚说话者在生产中选择什么类型的代词来指代语境中的不同先行词。研究人员对他们的研究问题采取了心理语言学的方法，使用一种版本的图片描述范式来调查代词的产生，使用一种版本的优先看任务来调查理解能力。拟议中的研究是第一次对罗马尼亚语进行此类研究，其结果将引起理论语言学家和心理语言学家的兴趣，他们对语言如何限制我们在上下文中的参考能力感兴趣。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。