A Study of Procedural Constraints Encoded by Linguistic Construction and its Pragmatic Inference

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24520430
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Kyushu University
• Principal Investigator: OTSU Takahiro 九州大学, 言語文化研究科(研究院), 教授 (90253525)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 手続き的制約 / 言語構造 / 照応 / 直示的表現 / 省略 / 文断片的発話 / 飽和 / 自由拡充

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Procedural constraints are successful in differentiating a variety of linguistic constructions. “Do it” anaphora and Null complement anaphora involve saturation in that those anaphora encode a semantic cue to instruct the obligatory supplementation of the referent from the contextual information. In contrast, deictic expressions such as “do this” instruct the shift of the addressee’s attention focus into a particular item in the deictic situation. On the other hand, VP ellipses, whose logical form have missing constituents, involve saturation in that they encode a syntactic clue to instruct the obligatory supplementation of those constituents. In contrast, the interpretation of sentential fragments involves free enrichment. Sentential fragments provide cognitive effects to offset the relatively greater processing cost than the typical constructions requiring free enrichment because they are used conventionally.

Free Research Field

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