跨语言视阈下名词融合研究的现状与前瞻

Noun incorporation in a cross-linguistic perspective:The state of the art and future prospects

20世纪初,语言学家在考察以美洲印第安语言为代表的多式综合型语言时,将名词融合现象引入研究视野。此后,相关研究贯穿了语言学的各个历史发展阶段,研究结论对当代语言学的基础理论,如形态学、句法学、形态-句法界面等,产生了深远影响。跨语言研究的不断深入又为该研究带来了新的议题:1)融合结构的语法本质是什么?2)名词融合结构是否局限于多式综合型语言?如不是,如何界定分析型语言中的融合现象?3)融合结构的语义组合机制是怎样的?对这些问题的探索促成了从形态融合到语义融合的转向,并催生了一种新的理论思潮——语义融合理论。语义融合理论改写了词法/形态与句法的边界,为语法的界面研究以及形式语义学研究引入了新的课题。语义融合视角下的汉语研究为深化对融合现象本质的认识以及完善名词融合的类型特征作出了贡献。对汉语融合现象所蕴藏的普遍价值的探索和挖掘,为中国语言学“摆脱印欧语眼光的束缚”提供了新的契机。

Noun incorporation(NI)was discovered when linguists and anthropologists explored American Indian languages on a large scale at the beginning of the 20th century.Since then,studies on NI have occupied an important position at various stages in the history of modern linguistics and have greatly advanced the theoretical build-up of morphology,syntax,and morphology-syntax interface.As the increasing amount of cross-linguistic data has attracted the attention of linguists,several new issues have emerged:1)What is the grammatical nature of incorporated structures?and 2)Is NI restricted to polysynthetic languages?If not,how can NI then be identified in an analytic language?3)What is the compositional mechanism of the NI?In-depth exploration of these issues has shifted the focus of inquiry from morphological to semantic incorporation and has given birth to a booming trend in research:the theory of semantic incorporation.Studies along this new line of thought have not only shed light on the boundary between morphology and syntax but have also provided new impetus to studies on interfaces and formal semantics.Studies on Chinese,in light of semantic incorporation,have greatly deepened our understanding of the nature of incorporated structures and enriched the typological description of NI.The theory of semantic incorporation provides an excellent window into unveiling the universal value adumbrated in the facts of Chinese and other languages in China,which is essential for Chinese linguistics to break away and“go beyond”the centralism of Indo-European frameworks and to make a greater contribution to the development of general linguistics.