人物专栏 | Marcel den Dikken教授访谈（上）

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《理论语言学五道口站》（2022年第40期，总第243期）“人物专栏”与大家分享本站采编人员雷晨对Marcel den Dikken教授进行采访的访谈录。Marcel den Dikken，匈牙利罗兰大学英美研究学院英语语言学系教授，匈牙利布达斯语言研究院高级研究员，北京语言大学语言学系国际教授委员会成员。

本期访谈中，Marcel den Dikken教授首先讨论了接口问题，并就句法学与音系学的关系进行分析，然后论述了最简方案对音系-句法接口研究的影响，最后表达了对宾语漂移的看法。

本次访谈内容内容由本站成员赵欣宇、雷晨、聂简荻、郭思源、丁子意翻译，共分为上下两期，后续内容将在下一期人物专栏中继续与大家分享，敬请期待。

采访人物简介

Marcel den Dikken教授

Marcel den Dikken，匈牙利罗兰大学英美研究学院英语语言学系教授，匈牙利布达斯语言研究院高级研究员，北京语言大学语言学系国际教授委员会成员。他曾任《剑桥生成语法手册》（2013年）、《自然语言与语言学理论研究》系列丛书的编辑及《自然语言和语言学理论》（2008-2015年）主编。他的研究涉及自然语言的句法及其与形态学和语义学的联系等多个方面。

Brief Introduction of Interviewee

Marcel den Dikken is a professor at the Department of English Linguistics of the School of English and American Studies at Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE) and a senior researcher at the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics in Budapest. He is also a member of the International Professors' Committee, Department of Linguistics, Beijing Language and Culture University. He is the former editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax (2013), the book series Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, as well as the chief editor of Natural Language & Linguistic Theory (2008-2015). His research covers a wide variety of aspects of the syntax of natural language and its interfaces with morphology and semantics.

访谈内容

01.

雷晨：“接口研究”（The interface program）是由M.Zwicky教授和Geoffrey K.Pullum教授在The Syntax-Phonology Interface（1988）一书中首先提出的。如今，语言研究中不仅存在单接口（mono-face）的研究，还有多接口（multi-face）的研究，您怎样看待语言研究过程中单接口和多接口研究的出现？

Marcel den Dikken教授：在生成语言学的假设下，所有事物之间都存在着直接或间接的联系。语言学的任何分支学科都不是独立存在的。当然，出于实际需要，人们完全可以从一个分支学科的角度来研究一种现象。但是既然这一系统已经建立起来，可以预见，“单接口研究”（一旦被充分考虑）将会对系统中的其他组成部分产生影响（你所使用的术语“mono-face”很棒！）。因此，我认为区分“单接口研究”和“多接口研究”并不重要，也没有必要。

02.

雷晨：国际语言学界一直存在“句法自足”（Autonomy of Syntax）、“句法不受韵律影响”（Principle of Phonology-free Syntax）与“韵律制约句法”（Prosodically Constrained Syntax）的争论，您更倾向于哪一种观点？原因是什么？

Marcel den Dikken教授：在句法、形式语义及信息结构的语用和音系方面，通常认为所涉及的语法成分之间存在密切联系。关于量词辖域歧义的研究（由Robert May教授的开创性论文带头）已经清楚地表明，语法和语义密切相关。与特定类型的焦点相关的穷尽性蕴含研究（Anna Szabolcsi教授和Julia Horvath教授关于匈牙利语的研究发挥主导作用）还将这种关系扩展至语用学领域。焦点（一般来说，还包括信息结构）也涉及句法-韵律接口研究，并且，韵律研究结果（Lisa Selkirk教授， Guglielmo Cinque教授， Arsalan Kahnemuyipour教授， Luis López教授， Michael Wagner教授，Maria-Luisa Zubizarreta教授等人的重要研究）已经明确了句法层级结构和韵律结构之间的密切联系。但是，在我看来，有明确的迹象表明句法学和音系学之间的联系远不止于此，将音系学和句法学结合起来研究超音段层级以下的音系及句法表征和过程也是非常有价值的。在与Harry van der Hulst教授的合作中，我们发现音系学和句法学深度相似。John Anderson教授在这方面也做了重要的研究，但他对句法的看法截然不同。

我坚定地相信句法自足性，因为句法不会被音系学或语义学所支配（反之亦然）。在句法生成过程中，输入过程只涉及形态特征，然后输出的过程再把语音和语义特征相继加入进来，这在我看来是目前最清晰、规范的假设，而用韵律和信息结构来约束句法其实就是本末倒置了。句法运作具有自主性，输出的结果完全取决于输入的形态特征和一些约束句法运作的原则；解释性成分解释所输出的结果，给这些结果赋予了特定的韵律和信息结构。句法成分并不会因为具有特定的韵律特征或信息结构就进行移位，它们在句法中的位置是句法本身所要求的或所允许的，并会对其韵律特征和信息结构产生影响。

03.

雷晨：您认为乔姆斯基教授提出的最简方案（1995）在音系-句法接口研究中发挥了怎样的作用？

Marcel den Dikken教授：在语言学最简主义理论发展的早期，人们认为句法移位需要动因，否则就无法进行移位（这一看法与早期的“原则与参数理论”研究形成鲜明对比，“原则与参数理论”认为句法运作是自由的，只有违反到原则才会停止），这一看法推动了对音系-句法接口的研究。在过去的三十年里，最简方案催生了大量的观点，对句法、韵律和信息结构之间的关系看法各有不同。在我看来，“话题”和“焦点”一类的特征假设被看作是功能核心，可以激发句法移位，能够参与短语的特征匹配过程，这其实就是过度扩展和错误诠释最简主义思想的典型案例。“话题”和“焦点”不能看作是句法生成的输入过程中的词汇形态特征。这就类似于把“重音”这样的特征假设看作句法移位的动因；或更实际一点，类似于把人的“身高”特征看作是摄食量的动因。话题性、焦点性和韵律性是短语单位（非核心）在句法结构中的属性，这已经超出了狭义的句法范畴，通常出现在语篇中，因此它们不能看作是推动句法运算的特性。我之前已在别处讨论过这一问题（如在我Relators and Linkers一书中，关于特征的可解释性和继承性的章节；以及我最近的一篇评估信息结构的制图方法的手稿）。广泛分析了三十年来大量受最简方案启发所做的研究后，我认为“最简方案”在音系-句法接口研究中发挥的作用有限。

04.

雷晨：您在之前的文章（den Dikken, 2018）中曾提到：“在英语中主语到宾语的提升（‘宾语漂移’）是肯定存在的，但它只对动词补语小句的主语具有强制性”。请问这种规定是否具有跨语言意义？

Marcel den Dikken教授：如果我的观点是正确的，它一定具有跨语言意义。在你提到的那篇论文中对这个问题有一些讨论（也可参见我在文章中提及的Hong & Lasnik （2010）），但补语小句的主语位置不允许名词短语停留的原因仍有待更进一步的探寻，因此这一观点的跨语言意义目前仍是未知的。遗憾的是，对该问题进行比较研究所面临的一个问题是，我们并不清楚我们是在处理一个补语小句，还是在处理更大或完全不同的成分。在英语中，我们能很容易分辨出小句和TP；但在其他语言中却要难得多。例如，允许无副词的非限定性TP的语言就是个难题。时间副词修饰和句子否定的分布（都与T的存在有关）可能会在区分小句和无副词的TP时起到重要作用。我们所预期的是，只要在一种特定的语言中能够区分小句补语和非限定性TP补语，那么前者的主语就会产生我在2018年的文章中讨论的那种现象。

English Version

01.

Chen Lei: The notion of “The interface program” is initially proposed in The Syntax-Phonology Interface (1988) by Professor Arnold M. Zwicky and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Nowadays, there are not only mono-face studies but also multi-face studies in linguistic research. In your opinion, why should we make this distinction? Is it necessary?

Prof. Marcel den Dikken: By hypothesis, in generative linguistics everything is connected to everything, directly or indirectly. No subdiscipline of linguistics is an island unto itself. Of course, for practical purposes one can perfectly legitimately study a phenomenon from the perspective of just one subdiscipline. But given the way the system has been set up, it is to be expected that ‘mono-face studies’, as you call them (nice term!), will (once they have been thought through in full detail) have their repercussions for other components of the system. I therefore do not find it important or necessary to make a distinction between ‘mono-face’ and ‘muti-face’ studies.

02.

Chen Lei: There has been a debate on the relationship between Syntax and Phonology, they are the “Autonomy of Syntax”, “Principle of Phonology-free Syntax” and “Prosodically Constrained Syntax”. Which opinion do you prefer? And why?

Prof. Marcel den Dikken: For syntax, formal semantics and the pragmatic and phonological aspects of information structure, it is entirely standard to think that there are intimate connections between the components of the grammar involved. The work on quantifier-scope ambiguity (spearheaded by Robert May’s seminal dissertation) has made it clear that syntax and semantics are intimately related. The literature on the exhaustiveness implicature associated with certain types of focus (with work on Hungarian by Anna Szabolcsi and Julia Horvath playing a leading role) has extended this relationship into pragmatics. And focus (and information structure, more generally) has also made its mark on the syntax–phonology interface, where work on prosody (think here of important studies by Lisa Selkirk, Guglielmo Cinque, Arsalan Kahnemuyipour, Luis López, Michael Wagner, Maria-Luisa Zubizarreta and others) has established that there are close connections between syntactic hierarchical structures and prosodic structures. But there are, to my mind, clear indications that the connections between syntax and phonology run deeper than this, and that for the analysis of phonological representations and processes below the supra- segmental level as well as for the analysis of syntactic representations and processes it is also highly beneficial to look at phonology and syntax in tandem. I have explored the deep parallels between phonology and syntax in joint work with Harry van der Hulst. John Anderson has done important research in this connection as well, but from a rather different outlook on syntax.

This said, I do firmly believe in the autonomy of syntax in the sense that syntax does not get (over)ruled by either phonology or semantics (or vice versa, for that matter). The hypothesis that the input to syntactic derivations is constituted just by bundles of morphological features, with phonological and semantic properties subsequently being added to the output of syntactic derivations, seems to me to be the cleanest, most restrictive hypothesis that can be postulated. Having prosody or information structure constrain syntax is like putting the cart before the horse. Syntax operates autonomously, delivering the outputs that it does based on the morphological input that it receives and the principles that constrain syntactic operations; the interpretive components (as their name suggests) interpret these outputs, leading to the assignment of particular prosodic and information-structural contours to these outputs. Things do not move into certain positions in syntax because they have a particular prosody or information-structural role; rather, things are where they are in syntax because syntax wants them there (or allows them to be there, on a freer, less ‘triggered’ approach), and the fact that they are where they are has repercussions for prosody and information structure.

03.

Chen Lei: How do you think of the role the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995) plays in the study of the phonology-syntax interface?

Prof. Marcel den Dikken: Already quite early on in the evolution of linguistic minimalism, the original minimalist thesis that syntactic movement requires a trigger and is otherwise prohibited (which stood in stark contrast to the idea, dominating earlier principles-and-parameters work, that syntactic movement is free unless it violates the principles of the grammar) gave a fresh impetus to explorations of the phonology–syntax interface. Minimalism has, over the past three decades, given birth to widely diverging views on the relationship between syntax, prosody and information structure. To my mind, the postulation of features such as [topic] and [focus], conceived of as properties of functional heads and triggers of syntactic movement, engaging in feature-matching relations with phrases, is an example of how a restrictive minimalist idea has been overextended and mis- construed. [topic] and [focus] cannot sensibly be treated as lexical-morphological features of elements serving in the input to syntactic derivations. This is a category error similar to the postulation of a feature [stress] as a trigger for syntactic displacement, or, for that matter, a feature [height] (in the sense of the measurement of the human body) as a trigger for food consumption. Topicality, focality and prosodic prominence are properties of phrasal units (not lexical heads) in syntactic structures that are assigned to these units beyond narrow syntax, often in discourse; they cannot reasonably be viewed as a driving force for syntactic operations. I have talked about this elsewhere (for instance, in my book Relators and Linkers, in my book chapter on feature interpretability and inheritance, and in a recent manuscript evaluating the cartographic approach to information structure). Broadly surveying three decades of research inspired by it, I would say that the minimalist programme has not played a particularly beneficial role in the study of the phonology–syntax interface.

04.

Chen Lei: den Dikken (2018) concluded that “overt subject-to-object raising (‘object shift’) definitely exists in English but is obligatory only for subjects of small-clause complements of verbs”. Does this obligation have cross-linguistic significance?

Prof. Marcel den Dikken: If it is correct, it certainly should. There is some discussion of this in the paper to which you are referring (see also the paper by Hong & Lasnik 2010, to which reference is made in my piece), but there remains plenty of space for exploration in much greater detail of the question of why the subject position of a complement small clause is not a position in which a noun phrase is allowed to stay, and the cross-linguistic consequences of the idea that the subject position of a complement small clause is an ‘unlicensed’ position. Unfortunately, a major complication faced by a comparative investigation of these matters is that it is not always perfectly clear whether we are dealing with a small-clause complement or with something larger or altogether different. In English, the difference between a small clause and a TP is quite easy to diagnose; but in other languages this may be much harder. Languages allowing copula-less non-finite TPs pose a particularly difficult challenge in this connection. The distribution of temporal adverbial modification and sentential negation (both tied to the presence of T) may come to the rescue in telling small clauses and copula-less TPs apart. But certainly, the expectation is that, to the extent that it is possible in a particular language to formally distinguish between small-clause complements and non-finite TP complements, the subject of the former should consistently give rise to the kinds of behaviour discussed in my 2018 paper.

References

Chomsky N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

den Dikken, M. (2018). Secondary predication and the distribution of raising to object. Acta Linguistica Academica Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 65(1), 87-117. Retrieved Jun 13, 2022, from https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2062/65/1/article-p87.xml

Hong, Sungshim and Howard Lasnik. 2010. A note on ‘Raising to Object’ in small clauses

and full clauses. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 19. 275–289.

Pullum, G. K., & Zwicky, A. M.. (1988). The syntax-phonology interface.

Note

(1)restriction on recursion

a phasal category of type á can be embedded in a phasal category of the same type where there is an asymmetric c-command relation between the heads of the two instances of á only if the two instances of á are separated by a phase head

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编辑：闫玉萌 赵欣宇 雷晨

排版：闫玉萌 赵欣宇 雷晨

审校：李芳芳 田英慧

英文编审责任人：赵欣宇