Action sensitivity in grammar

语法中的动作敏感性

• 批准号: 463357133
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Hedde Zeijlstra, Ph.D.
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Seminar für Englische Philologie
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 资助国家: 德国
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/463357133?language=en
• 关键词: Action; sensitivity; grammar

But what are intentions and how do they manifest themselves in human behaviour? Philosophy and psychology have pondered over these questions for centuries and come to the consensus that our capacity to intend and, more importantly, recognize and share intentions of others constitutes the foundation for social behaviour. Natural languages have multiple ways to mark the presence or absence of intentions ranging from a dedicated ‘out-of-control’ morpheme in Lillooet (Salish) and different case marking for subjects of intentional and unintentional actions in Hindi/Urdu to the availability of a co-referential interpretation in subjunctive constructions and nuanced distribution of polarity sensitive indefinites in European languages. It would seem that understanding how natural languages express intentions is a pressing task for linguistics. However, modulo a few notable exceptions, manifestations of intentions in natural languages have mostly been understudied in linguistics. The project is the first systematic inquiry into the issue. Its goal is to answer two principal questions: How is the presence or absence of intentions encoded in natural languages? and Why is it encoded in these particular ways?The first question is addressed by establishing an empirical landscape of linguistic manifestations of intentions across different languages via series of experimental studies and data elicitation inquiries. This empirical contribution to the problem will be useful not only to theoretical linguists interested in the topic, but also to researchers in experimental philosophy and diagnostic psychology. The second question is addressed by developing a theoretical model that explains the effect of interpreting an action as intentional or accidental on the meaning of the sentence and all its composite parts. This model will be an integral part of our representation of the language faculty because manifestations of intentions have been discovered in different domains of the grammar.

但是，什么是意图，它们如何在人类行为中表现出来？几个世纪以来，哲学和心理学一直在思考这些问题，并达成共识，即我们的意图能力，更重要的是，认识和分享他人的意图，构成了社会行为的基础。自然语言有多种方式来标记意图的存在或不存在，从Lillooet（Salish）中专用的“失控”语素和印地语/乌尔都语中有意和无意行为主体的不同情况标记，到虚拟结构中的共指解释和欧洲语言中极性敏感不定式的细微分布。理解自然语言如何表达意图似乎是语言学的一项紧迫任务。然而，除了少数明显的例外，自然语言中的意图表现在语言学中大多没有得到充分的研究。该项目是对这一问题的首次系统调查。它的目标是回答两个主要问题：意图的存在或不存在是如何在自然语言中编码的？为什么它以这些特殊的方式编码？第一个问题是通过建立一个跨不同语言的语言表现的意图，通过一系列的实验研究和数据引出查询的经验景观。这种对该问题的实证贡献不仅对对该主题感兴趣的理论语言学家有用，而且对实验哲学和诊断心理学的研究人员也有用。第二个问题是通过发展一个理论模型来解决的，该模型解释了将一个行为解释为故意或偶然对句子及其所有组成部分的意义的影响。这个模型将是我们语言能力表征的一个组成部分，因为在语法的不同领域已经发现了意图的表现。