Collaborative Research: Typology and Theory of Anaphora

尽管表面上的重大差异对人类社会组织很重要，但人的脸或身体从根本上是以相同的方式构造的，它们的结构反映了一种独特的、基于生物的蓝图。同样，从表面上看，人类语言在对社会组织很重要的方式上大相径庭，但我们不知道它们的结构是否以及在多大程度上反映了一种独特的蓝图，也不知道--如果有的话--它是语言所独有的，还是反映了更普遍的认知能力。本项目探讨了中央参照领域的这些普遍性问题，作为解决有关认知原则的语言特殊性问题的第一步。研究指称意味着询问世界上的实体是如何被语言表达挑选出来的。更确切地说，这个项目集中在照应的指代意义上，这些指代是似乎存在于所有语言中的英语“他自己”之类的表达，其指涉功能必须依赖于另一种表达或话语突出的实体。该项目旨在开发精确的工具和测试来深入记录、分析和解释回指所显示的经验模式，这对语言学理论、类型学和其他领域都有意义。这项调查最初将以一套不同类型的语言进行。收集到的数据将通过所使用的分析工具和得出的结论来组织，将丰富开放获取的众包SSWL(世界语言的句法结构)数据库，不仅应该为语言学理论的进一步发展提供可靠的基础，而且应该为哲学、心理语言学、神经心理学和计算方法的参考，甚至为文学分析和翻译提供可靠的基础--考虑到回指对话语参与者显性或隐性观点的敏感性。

Despite significant superficial differences important to human social organization, human faces or bodies are fundamentally structured in the same way, and their structures reflect a unique, biologically based, blueprint. Similarly, human languages are superficially vastly dissimilar in ways important to social organization, but it is not known if and to what extent their structures reflect a unique blueprint, nor is it known - if there is one - whether it is unique to language or reflects cognitively more general capacities. The present project explores these questions of universality in the central domain of reference, as a first step towards settling the question of the linguistic specificity of the relevant cognitive principles involved. Investigating reference means asking how entities in the world are picked out by linguistic expressions. More precisely, this project concentrates on the referential import of anaphors, which are expressions such as English "himself" seemingly present in all languages, and whose referential function must rely on another expression or a discourse prominent entity. The project aims to develop precise tools and tests to document in depth, analyze and explain the empirical patterns displayed by anaphors, which are of interest to linguistic theory, typology and beyond. This investigation will initially be carried out in a set of typologically diverse languages. The gathered data, whose organization will be informed by the analytical tools used and the conclusions reached, will enrich the open access crowd-sourced SSWL (Syntactic Structures of the World's Languages) database, and should provide a sound basis not only for further development of linguistic theories, but also for philosophical, psycholinguistic, neuropsychological and computational approaches of reference, and even - given the sensitivity of anaphors to explicit or implicit points of view of discourse participants - for literary analysis and translation.