索引论:理论、争议与展望  

Indexicalism: Theories, Disputes, and Prospects

作　　者：马欣欣[1] MA Xinxin(School of International Studies,University of International Business and Economics)

机构地区：[1]对外经济贸易大学英语学院

出　　处：《当代语言学》2022年第3期447-458,共12页Contemporary Linguistics

摘　　要：索引论是语义-语用界面讨论中一个重要的理论派别,学界对其理论归属充满争议。本文从争议产生的背景即最小论与语境论之争入手,分析索引论的核心观点及论证过程,指出其理论贡献与不足,对相关误解予以澄清;区分经典索引论、索引性词论与隐藏论元论三个索引论的主要分支,明确三者在研究方法与理论目的上的区别,对相关争议做出解释。索引论在当前的语境论与相对主义之争中发挥着重要作用,未来应继续扩展其研究范围,提升其解释力,以不断丰富与推动对这一问题域的研究。Indexicalism is an important theory in the semantics-pragmatics interface discussion, yet the apparent controversy over its relationship with other theories remains to be resolved. This paper lays out the dispute between semantic minimalism and contextualism as the background of the controversy, and identifies three branches of indexicalism, namely classical indexicalism, theory of indexicality of expressions, and theory of hidden arguments, all serving as an effort to reconcile between extreme views of semantic minimalism and contextualism.Classical indexicalism(Stanley 2000, 2002, 2005;Stanley and Szabó 2000) creates a hidden syntactic component called “hidden indexicals” and by so doing attributes contextual influence on the truth value of a proposition to the logical form of the sentence. Common misunderstandings of this theory take hidden indexicals to be a semantic component of certain predicates. The theory of indexicality of expressions(Rothschild and Segal 2009) regards a large number of lexical items as indexicals in their own right, and the context influences the meaning of propositions by determining the referent of these indexicals. The theory of hidden arguments(Schaffer 2011) characterizes contextual influence on propositions by adding to predicates an extra argument that takes its value from the context. These two theories extend the discussion of indexicalism to expressions like color adjectives, predicates of personal taste and propositional attitude verbs, hence becoming the main proponents of contextualism in the recent debate between contextualism and relativism.The identification of three different branches of indexicalism helps to solve the apparent controversy over its relationship with semantic minimalism. The semantics-pragmatics interface discussion has many participants, each with a different research interest. If a theory intends to draw a line between semantic minimalism and contextualism, it has to give a clear definition, and delineate the theories within its scope. This paper

关 键 词：索引论 隐藏索引词 隐藏索引性 语境 

分 类 号：H03[语言文字—语言学]