Asymmetries in Presupposition Projection and the Nature of Meaning

预设投射的不对称性和意义的本质

• 批准号: 522349364
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Jacopo Romoli
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Abteilung für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
• 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/522349364?language=en
• 关键词: Asymmetries; Presupposition; Projection; Nature; Meaning

Linguistic utterances are processed incrementally as they unfold in time, resulting in a temporal asymmetry between the before and after of a given expression. The present project addresses the fundamental question of whether observed asymmetries are merely a by-product of linguistic utterances unfolding in time, or whether they play a direct role in linguistic knowledge and representations. Addressing this question is critical because it has important potential consequences on the very way we conceptualize the meaning of sentences and how they interact with contextual information. This bears on the general issue of how linguistic knowledge and other cognitive faculties interact; a core issue in the study of language and the human mind. Asymmetries in the interpretation of presuppositions - a particular aspect of linguistic meaning, which characteristically interacts with both the linguistic and extra-linguistic context - provide an ideal case study for investigating this issue. To illustrate, the presupposition trigger 'stop' in the sentence in (1) introduces the presupposition that Mary used to come to class, i.e., (1) is typically uttered in contexts where this is already taken for granted: (1) Mary stopped coming to class. Importantly, presuppositions in complex sentences are traditionally thought to be asymmetrically computed, such that the presupposition of a trigger (e.g. 'stop') requires support in the preceding discourse context. This is illustrated by the contrast in (2). Introducing the material supporting the presupposition before the trigger, as in (2a), makes for a felicitous utterance, while the reverse configuration (2b) does not (indicated by '#'). (2) a. Mary used to come to class and she stopped (coming to class). b. #Mary stopped coming to class and she used to (come to class). However, such contrasts may (at least in part) be due to independent factors, e.g. redundancy constraints, and could reflect violable processing constraints rather than being grammatically hard-wired. The effect also may vary across connectives, e.g., in disjunctions or conditionals. Finally, basic data points such as (2) leave open whether the effect is due to linear order or the underlying hierarchical structure assumed to be crucial for the computation of meaning. Thus, the issue of asymmetry in presupposition projection is far from resolved, and so multi-faceted that careful experimental investigation is called for. The present project will explore these issues experimentally and theoretically, combining fine-grained theoretical predictions about presuppositions, rooted in formal semantics and philosophy of language, with models of language processing. The outputs of this project will contribute to a number of ongoing debates in several disciplines in the cognitive sciences, e.g., linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and neurolinguistics, thereby informing our understanding of the human mind more generally.

语言话语随着时间的推移而逐渐被处理，导致给定表达的前后之间的时间不对称。本项目解决的根本问题是观察到的不对称是否只是一个副产品的语言话语展开的时间，或者他们是否在语言知识和表征中发挥了直接的作用。解决这个问题是至关重要的，因为它对我们概念化句子含义的方式以及它们如何与上下文信息相互作用具有重要的潜在影响。这关系到语言知识和其他认知能力如何相互作用的一般问题;这是语言和人类思维研究的核心问题。预设是语言意义的一个特殊方面，它与语言语境和语言外语境相互作用，预设阐释中的不对称性为研究这一问题提供了一个理想的案例。为了说明，（1）中句子中的预设触发语“停止”引入了玛丽过去常来上课的预设，即，(1)通常是在已经被认为是理所当然的情况下说出来的：（1）玛丽不再来上课。重要的是，复杂句子中的预设传统上被认为是不对称计算的，因此触发器（例如“停止”）的预设需要在前面的话语上下文中得到支持。这一点可以用（2）中的对比来说明。在触发语之前引入支持预设的材料，如（2a）中，有助于恰当的话语，而相反的配置（2b）则不会（用“#”表示）。(2)a.玛丽过去常来上课，现在她不来了。B.玛丽不再来上课了，她过去常常来上课。然而，这样的对比可能（至少部分地）是由于独立的因素，例如冗余约束，并且可能反映可违反的处理约束，而不是语法上的硬连线。这种影响也可能因连接词而异，例如，在析取或条件句中。最后，基本的数据点，如（2）留下开放的效果是由于线性秩序或潜在的层次结构假设是至关重要的意义的计算。因此，预设投射的不对称性问题远未解决，而且是多方面的，需要仔细的实验研究。本项目将从实验和理论上探讨这些问题，结合细粒度的理论预测的前提，植根于形式语义学和语言哲学，与语言处理模型。该项目的成果将有助于认知科学中若干学科正在进行的辩论，例如，语言学、哲学、心理学和神经语言学，从而使我们更普遍地理解人类的思想。