Logic across languages: Expressing and interpreting connectives cross-linguistically

跨语言逻辑：跨语言表达和解释连接词

• 批准号: 426668767
• 负责人: Dr. Andreea Nicolae, Ph.D.
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS)
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2018-12-31 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/426668767?language=en
• 关键词: Logic; across; languages; Expressing; interpreting

Logical connectives are one of the building blocks of human formal thought along with number and geometry. 170 years ago the British logician Boole formulated Boolean logic, arguing that ‘or’ corresponds to the ‘|’ operator and that ‘and’ corresponds to the ‘&’ operator. Boolean logic is ubiquitous in math, computer science and other fields, even though Boole’s goal was never to provide evidence that and and or really are primitives of thought. Much of the later formal linguistic work has been biased by virtue of being stud- ied from a Eurocentric perspective, where the mapping between natural language and logic is deceptively straightforward. Yet there are reasons to question the Boolean picture. For example, Boolean laws tell us that once we have negation in the system we only need one of the two connectives to derive the other, so we might expect only conjunction, or only disjunction, to be a primitive, and yet that has not been borne out in the well-studied languages of Europe.Moving away from the Indo-European languages, to date, no in-depth cross-linguistic study has been con- ducted that not only documents all the different ways a single language may express coordination, but also describes the differences among these constructions with respect to their semantic and morphosyntactic distribution. One would expect that it should be pretty trivial to detect how a language expresses concepts as basic as and and or, yet there are languages that lack conjunction altogether, i.e. they have no single morpheme that can be reliably translated as and across all contexts. Such languages, as it turns out, recycle disjunction to express conjunctive meanings (e.g. Warlpiri, American Sign Language). On the flip side, there are languages where expressing disjunction involves an appeal to what is otherwise used to express conjunc- tion in that language (e.g. Cheyenne where disjunction is built off of the conjunctive element). This project constitutes the first serious contribution to this formal study of the matches and mismatches between natural language and Boolean logic, as it is underpinned by a strong cross-linguistic investigation. The develop- ment of frameworks that enable us to conceptualize the strategies for forming conjunctive and disjunctive meanings and the dimensions along which such strategies may vary is fairly recent, making this project well timed. The three main ways we will proceed with this investigation are the following: (i) interaction between connectives and negation and identifying mismatches between the predicted interpretation of the Boolean connective and the actual natural language interpretation, (ii) the function of complex connectives as opposed to simplex connectives, and (iii) the extent of the poly-functionality of connectives.

逻辑连接词是人类形式思维的基石之一，沿着的还有数字和几何。170年前，英国逻辑学家布尔阐述了布尔逻辑，认为“或”对应于“|“运算符，并且"and”对应于“&”运算符。布尔逻辑在数学、计算机科学和其他领域无处不在，尽管布尔的目标从来不是提供证据证明和和或真的是思想的原始形式。后来的许多正式语言学著作都是从欧洲中心主义的角度进行研究的，自然语言和逻辑之间的映射看似简单。然而，我们有理由质疑布尔图。例如，布尔定律告诉我们，一旦系统中有了否定，我们只需要两个连接词中的一个就可以导出另一个，所以我们可能会认为只有合取或析取是原语，但这在研究得很好的欧洲语言中还没有得到证实。目前还没有深入的跨语言研究，不仅记录了单一语言表达协调的所有不同方式，而且还描述了这些结构在语义和形态句法分布方面的差异。人们可能会认为，检测一种语言如何表达像and and or这样的基本概念应该是非常微不足道的，但有些语言完全缺乏连接词，即它们没有一个可以可靠地翻译为和跨所有上下文的语素。事实证明，这些语言循环使用析取来表达连接意义（例如Warlpiri，美国手语）。另一方面，有些语言在表达析取时会诉诸于该语言中用来表达连词的东西（例如，夏延语中的析取是由连词成分构成的）。该项目是对自然语言和布尔逻辑之间的匹配和不匹配的正式研究的第一个重要贡献，因为它得到了强大的跨语言调查的支持。框架的发展使我们能够概念化形成连接和分离意义的策略以及这些策略可能变化的沿着维度，这是相当新的，使得这个项目非常及时。我们将进行这项研究的三个主要方式是：（i）连接词和否定之间的相互作用，并确定布尔连接词的预测解释和实际自然语言解释之间的不匹配，（ii）复杂连接词的功能，而不是简单连接词，（iii）连接词的多功能性的程度。