（英语语言文学专业论文）缺省语义学框架下的话语理解研究.pdf

摘 要 iii 摘 要 语言常被定义为用于交际的工具， 因此意义的理解对于成功交际具有决定作用。 语 言学家业已提出多种意义理论，描写和阐释自然语言会话中的语言机制。格莱斯的“会 话含意”理论、斯珀伯和威尔逊的“关联理论”以及巴赫的“隐含含意”理论都倾向于 推理性理解策略， 认为语言交际要依靠规则和原则对意义进行推理。 这些理论虽然具有 强大解释力，占据主导地位，但自诞生之日起便受到来自“反推理主义”语言学者的攻 击， 他们强调话语理解是自动、 非自省以及缺省的过程。 二者之间的论战至今尚无定论。 本文引介了“缺省语义学”这一非推理性话语理解理论。 “缺省语义学”这一术语 由杰斯泽佐尔特于 2005 年在其同名专著中正式提出。该理论以“交际行为”为研究对 象，其对应的“合并表征”具有真值条件，各种信息来源同步作用，赋予“合并表征” 以真值。缺省语义学研究“首要意义”或称“显著意义” ，提出“首要意义”与“明说” 不同， 不受句法限制。 虽然当前很多语言学理论在一定程度上都表现出 “缺省” 的特点， 比如列文森的 “一般会话含意” ， 阿舍和拉斯卡里兹的 “分段语篇表征理论” ， 巴赫的 “缺 省推理”以及雷卡纳蒂的“自动充实” ，但是，相对于这些理论，缺省语义学更加明确 地描写了话语理解的缺省策略，提出了系统的缺省方案。 本文认为缺省语义学是针对话语理解的成熟理论， 从理论层面分析了缺省语义学相 对于传统推理主义的优势， 并在缺省语义学的基础上对汉语语篇进行了初步实验， 以验 证缺省语义学与汉语的兼容性，引起对于语言非推理特性的关注，进而证实“层次的经 济原则”假设，表明“缺省”不仅适用于语言，更体现了人类认知的特点。换言之，在 正常情况下，如果没有任何不利因素，人类能够并且擅长“直接下结论”和走捷径。只 有这样，意义的理论才能反映人类交际的速度和效率。缺省是话语理解的真实面目。 文章结构如下：第一章介绍本文的研究对象、研究方法、研究目的和研究意义；第 二章综述推理和缺省两大阵营的经典理论； 第三章对比两大阵营， 指出推理主义的缺陷 和缺省理解的优势；第四章详述缺省语义学，包括首要意义、总体原则、信息来源、算 法和应用； 第五章介绍了针对汉语话语的缺省推理实验， 证明缺省语义学强大的解释力 及其同汉语的相容性；第六章总结归纳全文，回答第一章所提出的问题，并指出本研究 摘 要 iv 的局限性以及今后的研究方向。 关键词 话语理解 缺省语义学 推理主义 首要意义 缺省推理 abstract i abstract since language is popularly defined as a tool for communication, the interpretation of meaning is crucial for successful communication. different linguists have proposed various theories of meaning to describe and analyze how language works in natural language conversations. paul grices implicature theory, sperber and wilsons relevance theory and kent bachs impliciture theory all advocate rule-governed or principle-governed inferential strategies. true that those theories have huge explanatory capacity and have gained dominance over others, but they have been under serious attack from anti-inferentialists who favor automatic, unreflective and default interpretation of utterances. the dispute between inferentialism and anti-inferentialism remains unsettled for decades. this thesis introduces a default-based approach to utterance interpretation, namely, default semantics (ds), formally proposed by kasia m. jaszczolt in her so entitled book in 2005. jaszczolt takes “act of communication” as the object of study, and the corresponding “merger representation” as the bearer of truth-condition contributed by different sources of information that operate on an equal footing. ds deals with primary meaning or salient meaning, free from the syntactic constraints to which explicatures are subjected. though many extant theories, to some extent, show “default” characteristics, such as stephen levinsons gci, asher and lascaridess sdrt, kent bachs “default reasoning” and franois recanatis automatic enrichment, ds proves to be the most explicit and systematic theory on default interpretation of utterance. this thesis agrees that ds is a mature theory on utterance interpretation and it presents various advantages over traditional inferential approaches. theoretical analysis is made to pin down the drawbacks of traditional models and to highlight the merits of ds. an experiment is implemented on chinese discourses to testify its compatibility with ds. by doing so, the author calls for attention to the default feature of language, tries to confirm the parsimony of levels principle and shows that “default” is not merely related to language but also the human cognition architecture. in other words, human beings are capable of and good at abstract ii “jumping to conclusions” and taking shortcuts in normal conditions, when circumstances do not stop them from doing so. only in this way can a theory of meaning mirror the speed and efficiency of human communication. default is the true picture of utterance interpretation. this thesis is organized as follows: chapter 1 is the introduction part, including the research object, methods, goals, and the significance; chapter 2 reviews theories of both the traditional models and ds; chapter 3 contrasts the two camps and points out their drawbacks and merits; chapter 4 expounds on ds, including primary meaning, general principle, sources of information, algorithm and application; chapter 5 is a tentative study of chinese discourses in terms of default interpretation, demonstrating ds explanatory capacity of and compatibility with the chinese language; chapter 6 concludes the thesis, points out limitations of the research and gives advice for possible future prospects. key words utterance interpretation default semantics inferentialism primary meaning default interpretation chapter 1 introduction 1 chapter 1 introduction this is the introductory chapter of the thesis. it begins with the issues the research intends to resolve, develops with the introduction of the research methodology, including theoretical analysis and empirical study, research goals and significance, and ends with the outline of the thesis. 1.1 issues to be resolved this thesis is both a theoretical and an empirical study of default semantics (ds). with language as a privileged endowment, human beings are capable of interpreting utterances with full speed and extraordinary efficiency. in ordinary language utterances, interlocutors do not always talk explicitly, instead, speakers vary their language to convey implicit meaning and hearers can rapidly identify it with minimal efforts. this can hardly be explained by traditional truth-conditional semantics, for example: 1 honey, you are not going to die.1p267 when this is uttered by a mother to his little son who cuts his finger and cries, the boy, if reasonably normal, can quickly interpret it as “it is no big deal”. truth conditional semantics can only translate the sentence into a proposition, as “youx are not going to stop being alive at timex”, and thus produces an immortal boy. modern pragmaticians explain this by postulating maxims and principles, dividing meaning into the explicit and the implicit, and proposing inferential models to the recovery of implicit meaning. according to them, “it is no big deal” is the implicated meaning, or implicature in grices terms2p24, that is recovered by the boy through pragmatic inferences from what the mother utters. though seeming powerfully explanatory, those pragmatic theories have obvious drawbacks: (1) are the distinctions of meaning too tedious to be psychologically real? (2) are the inferences reasonable? in other words, are they made by hearers at will? in view of these questions, this thesis introduces a new theory called default semantics “speakers” in this thesis refer to utterance givers of a language who use the language in both oral and written forms. “hearers”, or listeners, interpreters, recipients, addressee, refer to utterance receivers of utterances produced by “speakers”. 河北大学英语语言文学硕士学位论文 2 which deals with primary meaning and default interpretation. according to ds3p1, meaning is automatically, unconsciously and unreflectively derived from the utterance, without bothering to refer to explicature, implicature or impliciture or whatever. the only significant and justified meaning there is the primary meaning, compositional and truth-conditionally evaluable. the primary meaning is modeled by “”, or the merger. it is the act of communication that bears truth condition contributed by different sources of information. the following issues are to be covered: (1) how an utterance like “you are not going to die” is interpreted under the ds framework? (2) is this a successful or at least feasible theory? if so, what are its advantages over other models? (3) is it compatible with chinese discourses? 1.2 research methodology 1.2.1 literature analysis this thesis introduces and analyzes various theories on utterance interpretation, including both inferentialist models and default models. extant theories propose mature solutions to utterance interpretation but they tend to be totally inferential or just partly default. the research will point out their similarities and differences, as well as their drawbacks to pave the way for ds. a profound introduction and analysis of ds is then provided. not much attention has been paid to ds in current chinas linguistics circle, partially because cognitive linguistics now occupies a dominant position and unfortunately ds is a truth-conditional theory of meaning. however, ds provides brand-new perspective and insightful ideas to utterance interpretation, which is supposed to be attractive to the academic field. by introducing ds, many of the debates in current pragmatic research may be settled, including semantic underspecification, layers of meaning, role of pragmatic inference, etc. by introducing the philosophical background, guiding principles, the ds model and its formalization, the literature analysis section highlights ds advantages over other theories. 1.2.2 empirical research an experiment is carried out to testify parsimony of levels principle of ds and its chapter 1 introduction 3 interpretative strategy, as well as the compatibility of ds with the chinese language. the experiment will follow former experimental paradigms in experimental pragmatics. a list of discourses in chinese is carefully designed and sent out via internet to native speakers of chinese, who are required to tick the most suitable answer, according to intuition, in very short time periods. statistical work is done to the feedback results. it is hoped that parsimony of levels could be a reasonable principle governing utterance interpretation and verbal communication, the ds model can be a feasible description of real utterance interpretation, and that ds is also compatible with the chinese language. 1.3 research goals and significance (1) research goals this research aims to achieve the following goals: a: to find out the flaws and drawbacks of traditional theories on utterance interpretation; b: to introduce default semantics, calling for enough attention to the non-inferentialist model of utterance interpretation; c: to identify the default feature of human language; d: to shed lights on future research into default interpretation. (2) research significance traditional theories on utterance interpretation abound but almost all of them are to some extent unsatisfactory, in terms of terminology, theoretical model and division of levels of meaning. ds offers a new model to utterance interpretation and tries to resolve traditional disputes in the new framework. by being a compositional theory of meaning, ds allows various inputs to the merger meaning, including pragmatic, cognitive, social and cultural factors, to form a highly comprehensive theory of meaning. therefore, ds can be highly compatible and explanatorily powerful. the introduction of ds can be an initial move towards the research on default utterance interpretation in china, and will hopefully enlarge the vision of linguists and inspire future research. 河北大学英语语言文学硕士学位论文 4 1.4 outline of the thesis chapter 1 introduces the research object, methods, goals, and significance; chapter 2 reviews different theories of meaning, including inferentialist theories, theories that partially agree with default and default semantics; chapter 3 contrasts the theories mentioned in chapter 2 and points out their drawbacks and merits; chapter 4 introduces and analyzes ds, including primary meaning, default interpretation and its application; chapter 5 is a tentative empirical study of chinese discourses in terms of default interpretation, demonstrating ds explanatory capacity of and compatibility with the chinese language; chapter 6 concludes the thesis, points out limitations of the research and gives advice for future research. chapter 2 theory of meaning 5 chapter 2 theories of meaning “meaning” is a core issue for the study of linguistics. if a linguist regards language as being a basic tool for communication, whatever research discipline he/she is interested in, he/she will inevitably set up his/her own agreed theory of meaning. a successful theory of meaning expounds how utterances are produced with meanings and/or how meanings conveyed in utterances are interpreted in actual verbal communication. any “language is a system of meanings, accompanied by forms through which the meanings can be realized”4pf40. regular speakers have no problem constructing a “meaning”, but how is it interpreted by hearers, especially in cases when speakers dont talk explicitly? 2.1 extant theories on explicit/implicit meaning it is intuitively true that a distinction needs to be made between the explicit and implicit part of an utterance, or to put it simple, what the speaker says may differ from what they actually mean. for instance, when speaker a recommends a movie to b who hates the movie, b says “thats a gooooood (good) movie” to imply a negative judgment. therefore, “good” means “lousy”. to give theoretical explications to such a seemingly contradictive proposition, semanticists can only add a dictionary item “bad” to the word “good”, and say “good” also means “lousy”. but the problem with traditional semantics is that it treats meaning in a narrowed-down micro style, to the level of lexical meaning and sentence meaning regardless of context.5p21 when it comes to speaker meaning, things are different. for instance, two speakers are discussing a movie plan: 2 a: lets go see avatar tonight. b: man, i wish i could, but i have an early morning. a can immediately interpret bs answer as an implied refusal. in this case, it makes no sense to define “i have an early morning” as meaning “i dont want to”. actually, this intuitively simple utterance gets different explanations under the frameworks of various theories. 2.1.1 paul grice: implicature 河北大学英语语言文学硕士学位论文 6 1948 witnesses a big breakthrough when paul grice distinguishes meaningnn from meaningn, with the former his focus of research. he introduces the notion of “implicature” to contrast with “say” . according to grice, it is not painstaking to understand “what is said” because saying something is “closely related to the conventional meaning of the words (the sentence) has uttered”2p25. understanding the conventional meaning involves only semantic efforts and, to allow at most two pragmatic processes if needed, reference assignment and disambiguation. for an utterance with no deixis or ambiguous constructions, its meaning can easily be worked out as what is called sentence meaning. grice views human verbal exchanges as successions of connected remarks given by rational speakers who would make, at least to some extent, cooperative efforts and “would recognize a common purpose” (or sets of purposes), “or at least a mutually accepted direction”.2p26 grices theory of meaning is based on speaker-meaning, that is, meaning intended by the speaker via utterances and meaning expected to be recognized by the hearer. grice describes communication as delivering and identifying speakers intentions. based on what is said above, participants will be expected to observe the so-called cooperative principle (henceforth: cp): make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.2p26 grice has categorized cp, the general principle, into four maxims and sub-maxims for each. however, this is just the prelude of grices theorization. in many cases of natural language conversation, it is so common that people do not feel guilty disobeying, or in grices words, flouting any of these maxims. hence comes the interesting part of the “implicature” theory: for whatever reasons the speakers fail to honor the maxims, a conversational implicature is produced. for 2, according to grice, b is expected to observe the quality, quantity, relevance and manner maxims. a knows that bs answer will be either affirmative or negative and nothing variations include “saying” and “what is said”. actually, grices original term is “implicatum” (pl. implicata). “implicature” roughly means “implicating”. however, those two are used interchangeably by linguists, including even grice himself. chapter 2 theory of meaning 7 else; since b apparently flouts the relevance maxim and thus fails at the quality and quantity maxims, this will lead up to an implicature. in grices term, an implicature is present.2p30 for the participant to know that an implicature is present, the participant has to turn to different sources, including conventional meaning of words and the identity of references, cp and its maxims, linguistic and non-linguistic context, background knowledge and assumption that anything derived from the above four sources is known to both participants and this, in turn, is known to both participants.2p31 grice is an inferentialist in that he believes pragmatic inferences are needed to work out implicature. in terms of the recovery of the implicature of bs utterance, a value is assigned to “i have an early morning” as p, and “i dont want to” as q. the derivation of implicature goes along the following route: a b has uttered p; b a has no reason to suppose that b is not observing the maxims or the cp; c b has no reason to flout the cp unless q; d b knows (and knows that a knows that b knows) that a can see the supposition that b thinks that q is required; e b has done nothing to stop a from thinking that q; f b intends or is willing to allow a to think that q; g hence b has implicated q.2p31 grices conversational implicature theory is the foremost and fundamental suggestion for the explicit and implicit distinction. this theory solves the problem via “implicature” and most gricean heirs have based their theories on this. grice indirectly triggers the iss