Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Semantics, Pragmatics, and Social Meaning of Additive Expressions

话语助词是指通过澄清信息片段之间的关系以及与共同话语目标之间的关系来促进对话中信息顺畅流动的词语。这篇博士论文项目研究了一类特殊的语篇助词的含义，这些助词包括英语中的“too”、“either”、“also”和“as well”。加词表示它出现的句子增加了另一条信息。例如，一个说话者说，“我喜欢披萨。I like spaghetti too，表达了“我喜欢披萨”和“我喜欢意大利面”这两个句子都有助于确定说话者喜欢什么食物的话语目标。本项目使用来自自然发生的英语文本语料库的数据和大规模的基于网络的实验来了解英语添加剂如何在话语中连接信息片段。通过咨询另外四种语言的母语人士，该项目还旨在确定添加剂在不同语言中发挥相似功能的方式，以及它们在不同语言中的不同方式。除了促进信息交换以实现共同的话语目标外，助词还传达了社会意义，即关于说话人社会身份的信息。当加词“too”用来表示不同意时，会产生特别显著的社会效应。例如，如果父母对孩子说：“你没做家庭作业”，孩子可能会回答：“我也做了！”“too”的这种用法被称为“反驳用法”，只适用于非正式场合，而且往往会让说话者听起来很幼稚。这个项目试图描述各种添加剂所传达的社会意义，并理解它们的社会意义是如何与它们的语义相关的。该项目的成果通过在俄亥俄州哥伦布市当地科学博物馆科学与工业中心（COSI）的外展活动与公众分享。这次活动向所有年龄段的公众介绍了语义学和社会语言学的关键概念，为科学教育做出了贡献，并提高了语言学作为一个领域的知名度。利用形式语义学和语用学的工具，本博士论文项目分析了加法表达在如何塑造话语结构方面的意义。这包括精确地指定加词的主句和它所增加的先前重要信息（称为“先行词”）之间必须保持什么样的关系。换句话说，为了让说话者表示其中一条信息是在另一条信息的“补充”之外提供的，两条信息必须以何种方式联系在一起？分析还解释了一些附加粒子的含义如何随着时间的推移而延伸，从而产生反驳用法，其含义在以前的研究中没有得到严格的研究。为了更好地理解它们的含义，进行了一项大规模的基于网络的实验，以调查反驳使用的精确上下文范围。为了确定英语添加剂的分析在多大程度上可以扩展到其他语言，并确定不同语言之间添加剂的差异，我们咨询了另外四种语言的母语人士。这项跨语言调查的一个成果是一份问卷，其他研究人员可以与该领域的顾问一起使用该问卷来研究本项目研究之外的其他语言的附加清单。为了研究加性表达的反驳和加性用法的社会意义，我们还进行了两个大规模的实验，测量听者从不同语境中使用这些表达中得出的社会推论。利用这些数据，该项目调查了添加和反驳用法的社会意义之间的差异是如何植根于语义差异的。通过将语义学的形式严谨性与人类学和社会学的见解结合起来，这是社会语言学的基础，从而推动了跨学科的发展。总而言之，本论文对加成助词的意义进行了全面的研究，包括意义的语义、语用和社会维度，并采用了形式和实验方法。本研究的结果揭示了说话者如何调节话语中的信息流动，以及语义和社会意义之间的相互作用。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Discourse particles are words that facilitate the smooth flow of information in conversation by clarifying how pieces of information relate to each other and to shared discourse goals. This doctoral dissertation project investigates the meaning of a particular class of discourse particles known as additives, which include English 'too', 'either', 'also', and 'as well'. An additive signals that the sentence it occurs in augments another piece of information. For example, a speaker who utters, 'I like pizza. I like spaghetti too,' conveys that the sentences 'I like pizza' and 'I like spaghetti' both contribute to the discourse goal of determining what foods the speaker likes. This project uses data from corpora of naturally-occurring English texts and large-scale web-based experiments to understand how English additives link pieces of information in discourse. By consulting with native speakers of four additional languages, the project also aims to identify ways in which additives perform similar functions across languages as well as ways in which they vary across languages. In addition to facilitating the exchange of information to achieve shared discourse goals, additives also convey social meaning — that is, information about a speaker’s social identity. A particularly salient social effect arises when the additive particle 'too' is used to express disagreement. For example, if a parent says, 'You didn’t do your homework' to a child, the child might respond, 'I did too!' This use of 'too', which has been called the 'refutational use', is only appropriate in informal contexts and tends to make the speaker sound childish. This project seeks to characterize the social meanings that various additives convey and understand how their social meanings might be related to their semantics. Results of this project are shared with the public through an outreach activity at the Center of Science and Industry (COSI), a local science museum in Columbus, Ohio. This outreach introduces members of the public of all ages to key concepts in semantics and sociolinguistics, contributing to science education and raising the visibility of linguistics as a field.Using the tools of formal semantics and pragmatics, this doctoral dissertation project analyzes the meaning of additive expressions in terms of how they shape the structure of discourse. This involves precisely specifying what relationship must hold between an additive’s host sentence and the previously salient piece of information that it augments (called its 'antecedent'). In other words, in what way must two pieces of information be related in order for a speaker to signal that one is offered 'in addition to' the other? The analysis also explains how the meaning of some additive particles could have been extended over time to give rise to the refutational use, whose meaning has not been rigorously studied in previous research. To better understand their meaning, a large-scale web-based experiment is conducted to investigate the precise range of contexts for the refutational uses. To determine the extent to which the analysis of English additives can be extended to other languages and to identify dimensions along which additives vary between languages, native speakers of four additional languages are consulted. One product of this cross-linguistic investigation is a questionnaire that other researchers can use with consultants in the field to study the additive inventories of other languages beyond those studied in this project. To study the social meaning of both the refutational and the additive uses of additive expressions, two large-scale experiments are also conducted measuring the social inferences that listeners draw from the use of such expressions in various contexts. Using those data, the project investigates how differences between the social meanings of the additive and refutational uses might be rooted in semantic differences. This advances interdisciplinarity by bringing the formal rigor of semantics together with insights from anthropology and sociology that are foundational to sociolinguistics. In sum, this dissertation undertakes a holistic investigation of the meaning of additive particles, encompassing semantic, pragmatic, and social dimensions of meaning and employing both formal and experimental methods. The results of this investigation sheds light on how speakers regulate the flow of information in discourse and on the interplay between semantics and social meaning.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.