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

自然语言允许人类指代世界上的物体，但通常语言是通过使用看似信息不足的语言手段来实现的：代词，如“他”或“她”。与“哈利·波特”等专有名词不同，代词没有固定的指称，因此只能相对于给定的上下文来理解。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如何在上下文中跟踪有关人和事物的信息。关于听者如何理解代词的现有研究已经对他们如何跟踪话语中不同实体的信息产生了实质性的见解。研究表明，这个过程在不同语言中有很多共同之处。与此同时，有证据表明，语言在代词如何指代话语实体方面确实存在差异。这就引出了一个自然的问题：我们使用语言指称的能力有多少是植根于思维的普遍特征，也许是独立于语言之外的，又有多少是来自于一个人碰巧说的语言的具体特征？这些问题的答案让我们了解了语言变异和变化背后的社会和文化因素。该项目通过研究罗马尼亚语来调查这个问题，罗马尼亚语是一种罗曼语，全球约有3000万人使用。罗马尼亚语似乎提出了一个反例，以假定普遍约束代词的参考。特别是在“Harry talked about him”这句话中，说英语的人不能自然地把“him”理解为“Harry”。在罗马尼亚语中，这是不正确的，使罗马尼亚语成为一个明显的反例，否则就会出现强大的跨语言泛化。本提案测试的假设，为什么罗马尼亚人可以解释代词在这种明显的特殊方式。研究人员将调查如何不同的背景下，如代词及其句法位置的潜在的指涉歧义，影响的解释罗马尼亚扬声器分配给代词，以及什么类型的代词罗马尼亚扬声器在生产中选择指不同的先行词在上下文中。研究者采用心理语言学的方法来研究他们的研究问题，使用图片描述范式的一个版本来研究代词的产生，以及优先观看任务的一个版本来研究理解。这项研究是对罗马尼亚语的首次研究，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指称能力感兴趣。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.