Exploring linguistic competence through silence

摘要

The Chinese language is widely characterized as being highly context dependent. Speakers frequently omit arguments (silent arguments) that remain easily recoverable from the discourse. For example, when the predicate phrase is a verb like ‘cook’ without an object such as zhǔ-le (煮了, 'cooked'), it can still be used to convey that "someone has cooked something." In such instances, pragmatic world knowledge and discourse salience facilitate seamless communication despite the absence of overt lexical items. This phenomenon might suggest a general principle of economy: that whenever a constituent is understood, it may remain unsaid.

However, my research has shown that this claim is empirically inadequate. Contextual clarity does not grant a speaker unlimited license for omission. There are specific environments where constituents must be verbalized—regardless of how redundant they may seem—and other cases where a null element cannot be interpreted in a manner strongly favored by pragmatics or world knowledge. This indicates that the "unsaid" is governed by a rigorous set of underlying rules that constitute the linguistic competence of the speaker. However, linguistic knowledge is largely implicit. Explicitly defining these rules remains a formidable challenge. Speakers possess robust intuitions regarding grammaticality and felicity but are seldom able to articulate the underlying principles. Uncovering these mechanisms requires a methodical investigation of logical possibilities and their consequences. In this talk, I demonstrate how the formal linguistic framework provides a roadmap for externalizing these intuitions. Through a diverse range of examples involving null elements, I outline the procedural steps of this methodology and show how to achieve an adequate, explicit description of the mental grammar of Chinese.

活動說明

中央研究院第34屆新科院士演講