The interpretation and processing of quantifiers in structurally ambiguous sentences: insights from child language

结构歧义句子中量词的解释和处理：来自儿童语言的见解

• 批准号: 385963910
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Hedde Zeijlstra, Ph.D.
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Georg-Elias-Müller-Institut für Psychologie
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2016-12-31 至 2020-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/385963910?language=en
• 关键词: interpretation; processing; quantifiers; structurally; ambiguous

It is a well known fact that sentences like *All the pirates did not go back to the ship* and *The captain did not dance with a mermaid* generate so-called scope ambiguities: they yield different interpretations depending on whether the operators all/a and not are interpreted according to the order in which they appear (surface-scope) or the reversed order (inverse-scope). As a result, the former sentence can be interpreted as *not all the pirates went back to the ship* or *no pirates when back to the ship* and the latter sentence can be interpreted as *the captain did not dance with any mermaid* or *there is a mermaid with whom the captain did not dance*. Remarkably, to obtain the inverse-scope interpretation from analogous sentences in which all occurs after not and a occurs before not is much more difficult if not impossible. Sentences *The captain did not eat all the strawberries* and *A mermaid did not dance with the captain* only seem to allow the surface-scope interpretation. Is there a general principle that explains this pattern? The theoretical generalization that correctly predicts the availability of inverse-scope builds on the concept of logical strength. Inverse-scope interpretations are available only if they are not logically stronger than the correspondent surface-scope reading. I.e. *not all the pirates went back to the ship* is not logically stronger than *no pirates went back to the ship* because there is at least one situation in which the former sentence is true and the latter is false, such as a situation in which only one pirate went back to the ship but other pirates did not. Built on these observations we address the following key questions in this project: (i) Why and how does logical strength determine the availability of scopal interpretations? (ii) Is there a semantic filter that blocks the syntactic mechanism switching the scope of the operators? (iii) Is this behavior due to the interplay of pragmatic inferences (e.g. scalar implicatures) that are known to be governed by logical strength? (iv) Does prosodic intonation ultimately signals which interpretation is conveyed by the speaker? Research on language acquisition constitutes an optimal mean to obtain insights aimed to addressing the questions above, in that it allows to identify the different phases in which children acquire relevant grammatical aspects may control scope ambiguities (pragmatic strengthening, prosody, etc.). So, the extent to which scope shift is linked to pragmatic inferencing, prosody and other processing factors can be revealed by how children cope with these phenomena in interaction.The present proposal involves a series of six experiments with adults and 4- to 5-year-old children to collect offline semantic judgments and online eye tracking data. The results will lead to a novel and better understanding of scope ambiguity and its interaction with syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic principles and processing factors.

众所周知，像 *All the pirates did 't go back to the ship* 和 *The captain did 't dance with a mermaid* 这样的句子会产生所谓的作用域歧义：它们会产生不同的解释，这取决于运算符all/a和not是按照它们出现的顺序（表面作用域）还是相反的顺序（反作用域）来解释的。因此，前一句可以解释为 * 不是所有的海盗都回到船上 * 或 * 没有海盗回到船上 *，后一句可以解释为 * 船长没有与任何美人鱼跳舞 * 或 * 有一个美人鱼船长没有与之跳舞 *。值得注意的是，从所有发生在not之后而a发生在not之前的类似句子中获得逆范围解释要困难得多，如果不是不可能的话。句子 * 船长没有吃所有的草莓 * 和 * 美人鱼没有与船长跳舞 * 似乎只允许表面范围的解释。有没有一个普遍的原则来解释这种模式？正确预测逆作用域可用性的理论概括建立在逻辑强度的概念上。只有当反作用域解释在逻辑上不比相应的表面作用域阅读更强时，它们才是有效的。也就是说，* 不是所有的海盗都回到船上 * 在逻辑上并不比 * 没有海盗回到船上 * 更强，因为至少有一种情况是前一句为真，后一句为假，例如只有一个海盗回到船上，但其他海盗没有。基于这些观察，我们在这个项目中解决了以下关键问题：（一）为什么以及如何逻辑强度确定范围解释的可用性？(ii)是否有一个语义过滤器来阻止语法机制切换操作符的作用域？(iii)这种行为是由于语用推理（如标量含义）的相互作用，已知是由逻辑强度？(iv)韵律语调是否最终表明说话者所传达的是哪种解释？对语言习得的研究构成了获得旨在解决上述问题的见解的最佳手段，因为它允许确定儿童获得相关语法方面的不同阶段，这些语法方面可能控制范围歧义（语用强化，韵律等）。因此，儿童在互动中如何科普这些现象，可以揭示范围转移与语用推理、韵律等加工因素的联系程度。本研究以成人和4 ~ 5岁儿童为被试，通过六个实验收集离线语义判断和在线眼动数据。研究结果将有助于我们对辖域歧义及其与句法、语义、语用原则和加工因素的相互作用有一个新的、更好的理解。