Collaborative Research: Typology and Theory of Anaphora

尽管人类社会组织存在着重要的表面差异，但人类的面部或身体基本上都是以相同的方式构成的，它们的结构反映了一种独特的、基于生物学的蓝图。同样，人类的语言在表面上对社会组织的重要性也有很大的不同，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。本项目探讨这些问题的普遍性在中央域的参考，作为第一步解决问题的语言特异性的相关认知原则所涉及的。研究指称意味着询问世界上的实体是如何通过语言表达被挑选出来的。更准确地说，这个项目集中在照应，这是表达，如英语“自己”似乎存在于所有语言中，其指称功能必须依赖于另一个表达式或话语突出实体的指称输入。该项目旨在开发精确的工具和测试，以深入记录，分析和解释回指语所显示的经验模式，这对语言学理论，类型学等都很有意义。这项调查最初将以一组类型学上不同的语言进行。收集的数据将通过使用的分析工具和得出的结论进行组织，这将丰富开放获取的众包SSWL（世界语言的句法结构）数据库，不仅应为语言学理论的进一步发展，而且为哲学、心理语言学、神经心理学和计算方法的参考提供坚实的基础，甚至--考虑到回指语对语篇参与者的显性或隐性观点的敏感性--用于文学分析和翻译。

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.