The Historical Development of the English Anaphora System

在国家科学基金会的支持下，爱德华·基南博士将进行为期一年的语言学研究。他的项目重点是定量记录英语逻辑表达能力的历史变化。在现代英语中，“the king defend myself”和“the king defend him”的逻辑意义是截然不同的。在前者中，防守者和被防守者必须是相同的。在后一种情况下，它们必须是不同的。但是古英语（700 - 1150）缺乏反身词，比如“他自己”。在古英语中，像“He defend him”这样的句子根据防御者和被防御者是否是同一个人而有歧义。这个项目将从750年到1750年的100多个文本中抽取大约11000个例子，记录英语反身反语的创造和解释。数据显示，自反词在公元1200年左右出现，在16世纪突然有了现在的语义解释。这个项目的语言学意义是双重的。首先，这是对自然语言的逻辑表达能力变化的第一次实证研究。这项研究表明，我们在现代英语中认为理所当然的一些逻辑区别并不一定是语言的一般特征。其次，这项研究记录的变化类型相对新颖：新的形式是在语言内部创建的，而不是借用的。因此，这项研究扩展了我们对语言如何随时间变化的理解。最后，这个项目将为基南博士自1989年以来一直在建立的一个大型数据库做出贡献。这些数据将在网上公开，以便其他学者可以验证这项研究得出的结论。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Edward Keenan will conduct one year of linguistic research. The focus of his project is documenting quantitatively a historical change in the logical expressive power of English. In Modern English, the logical meanings of 'The king defended himself' and 'The king defended him' are distinct. In the former, the defender and defendee must be the same. In the latter, they must be different. But Old English (700 - 1150) lacked reflexives, like 'himself'. In Old English, a sentence like 'He defended him' was ambiguous according to whether the defender and defendee were the same person or not. Based on some 11,000 examples drawn from over 100 texts dating from c750 to c1750, this project will document the creation and interpretation of reflexives in English. The data show that reflexives come into being around 1200 and assume their current semantic interpretation rather suddenly in the 1500s. The linguistic interest of the project is twofold. First, this is the first empirically substantiated study of change in logical expressive power of a natural language. The study shows that some logical distinctions that we take for granted in Modern English do not necessarily characterize languages in general. Second, the type of change that this research documents is relatively novel: New forms are created internal to the language rather than borrowed. So this research expands our understanding of how languages may change over time. Finally, this project will contribute to a large database that Dr. Keenan has been building since 1989. The data will be publicly accessible on the web so that other scholars can verify the generalizations produced by this research.