The Development of Syntactic Alternations

句法交替的发展

• 批准号: 1025602
• 负责人: Joan Bresnan
• 金额: $ 27.5万
• 依托单位: Stanford University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-09-15 至 2015-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1025602&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Development; Syntactic; Alternations

Mastering spoken and written discourse is vitally important in human cognitive development, and it is increasingly recognized that this mastery depends on the implicit knowledge of "linguistic probabilities"--the likelihoods of types of expressions occurring in ordinary language use. For example, psychologists have shown that while reading or hearing a sentence, people instantaneously anticipate the more likely of two types of continuations, even when they are semantically equivalent. For another example, researchers of the historical and social dimensions of language have demonstrated that speakers of different regional varieties of the same language (such as British and American English) are characterized by different models of their speech probabilities, and that these probabilities have been changing over historical time. Finally, developmental studies have revealed children's sensitivity to the statistical regularities of their linguistic environment and their mastery of the variable higher-level linguistic structures that occur in spontaneous discourse. Combing these psychological, historical/social, and developmental perspectives, the present project will investigate how the implicit knowledge of linguistic probabilities develops in the individual and in historically diverging groups of speakers. The project will make use of a common theoretical framework for studying linguistic probabilities as well as a common set of semantically equivalent types of linguistic expressions which differ in their linguistic probabilities. The latter, called "syntactic alternations", are alternative ways of paraphrasing the same message (such as "give her a book/give a book to her" or "the woman's shadow/the shadow of the woman"). The project will enlist an international team of experts to conduct on-site field research of the same syntactic alternations in three suites of studies: (i) parallel observational studies and experiments across groups of speakers of closely related dialects of English to investigate the varying probabilities of syntactic alternations in speaking or writing and their effect on understanding, (ii) studies of how probabilistic models of higher-level linguistic structures from the spontaneous spoken language of children and their caretakers develop over the time-course of primary language learning, and (iii) studies of how the predictors of probabilistic changes in the same high-level linguistic structures develop in historical time.The project has unusual intellectual scope, because it applies multiple methods of expert collaborators that are seldom brought together within an integrated theoretical approach. New datasets built for this project will be made publicly available to all researchers. This work also has potential applications in reading, second language education and language impairment. Working as a multidisciplinary team on this central set of fundamental linked problems in the comprehension, production, and development of spoken and written discourse will more rapidly advance the growing convergence of probabilistic approaches to language in all of the language sciences, including computer science, communication engineering, psychology, and linguistics.

掌握口语和书面话语在人类的认知发展中至关重要，人们越来越认识到，这种掌握取决于对“语言概率”的隐含知识，这是普通语言使用中表达式类型的可能性。 例如，心理学家表明，在阅读或听到句子时，人们即使在语义上等同于两种类型的连续性，人们就会立即预期两种类型的延续。 在另一个例子中，语言的历史和社会层面的研究人员表明，相同语言不同区域品种（例如英语英语）的说话者的特征是其语音概率的不同模型，并且这些概率在历史时期一直在变化。 最后，发展研究揭示了儿童对他们语言环境的统计规律的敏感性以及对自发话语中发生的可变高级语言结构的掌握。 梳理这些心理，历史/社会和发展的观点，本项目将调查对语言概率的隐性知识在个人和历史上不同的说话者群体中如何发展。 该项目将利用一个共同的理论框架来研究语言概率，以及一组共同的语言等效性语言表达式，其语言概率有所不同。 后者被称为“句法替代”，是释义相同信息的替代方法（例如，“给她一本书/给她一本书”或“女人的阴影/女人的阴影”）。 该项目将邀请国际专家团队在三个研究套件中对相同的句法交替进行现场现场研究：（i）与英语紧密相关的方言的跨群体的平行观察性研究和实验，以调查句法在讲话中的不同概率的不同概率，从而及其对知识的构建方式，（ii）构建的效果，（ii）（ii）（ii）（ii）（ii）（ii）（ii），（ii）（ii）cornement cornemistion cornemistion cornemist of consection，（ii）（II）儿童及其看护者在基本语言学习的时间课程中发展，（iii）研究如何在历史时期发展相同高级语言结构中概率变化的预测因素。该项目具有不寻常的智力范围，因为它应用了多种专家合作者的多种方法，这些方法很少被融合在综合的理论上。 为该项目构建的新数据集将向所有研究人员公开使用。 这项工作在阅读，第二语言教育和语言障碍方面也有潜在的应用。 在理解，生产和书面话语中的理解，生产和发展中，将作为一个跨学科团队，将更快地提高所有语言科学中概率方法对语言的融合，包括计算机科学，交流工程，心理学和语言学。