学术活动发布与订制系统

Yan Huang is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Auckland. He received his BA and MA at the University of Nanking, and obtained his PhD at the University of Cambridge. He also holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford. He has previously taught linguistics at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Reading, where he was Professor of Theoretical Linguistics. He has also spent his sabbatical and lectured at both Yale and Harvard universities. His main research interests are in pragmatics, especially the pragmatics-semantics interface and pragmatics-syntax interface including anaphora. His books include The Syntax and Pragmatics of Anaphora (Cambridge University Press 1994, re-issued in 2007), Anaphora: A Cross-Linguistic Study (Oxford University Press 2000), Pragmatics (Oxford University Press 2007) and The Oxford Dictionary of Pragmatics (Oxford University Press 2012). His Pragmatics has been, and is being, translated into a number of languages. He has also published numerous articles and reviews in leading internationally journals of linguistics. He is on the editorial board of a number of international linguistics journals and research monograph series. He has been invited to lecture in more than 120 universities and research institutes in many countries in Europe, North America, Asia, Australasia, and North Africa. Currently he is editing The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics, contracted to be published by Oxford University Press in 2014.

In the study of the lexicon, a number of interesting questions or myths can be identified. These include: (i) why we normally do not say cow’s milk, but we do say goat’s milk, (ii) what the meaning of a lexical clone is, which involves contrastive focus reduplication such as DRINK-drink in English, neri neri ‘black black’ in Italian and Salat-Salat ‘salad-salad’ in German, (iii) why cunzhang ‘village head’, xiangzhang ‘town head’, xianzhang ‘county head’ shizhang ‘mayor’ and shengzhang ‘provincial governor’ are words, but *guozhang ‘state president’ is not a word in Chinese, (iv) why unlike teacher ‘a person who teaches’, cooker does not mean a person who cooks, (v) why pale red is used far less frequently than pale blue, pale green and pale yellow, and finally (vi) why words used to express universal negation can be lexicalized (e.g. not some > none), but words used to express particular negation are normally not (e.g. not all > *nall) in a number of languages. In this talk, I shall provide an answer to questions and myths like these in terms of neo-Gricean lexical pragmatics, drawing on previous work by McCawley (1978), Huang (1998, 2005, 2008, 2009), Levinson (2000), and especially Horn (1984, 1989, 2003, 2006a, b, 2007). More specifically, I shall (re)-demonstrate that by utilizing some general neo-Gricean pragmatic principles such as Horn’s (1984, 1993, 2006a, b, 2007) Q- and R-principles and Levinson’s (1987, 1991, 2000) Q-, I- and M-principles, and the resolution schemas regulating their interaction, all of the questions posited above can be given a satisfactory and elegant answer.