Udayana University.
Institute of Population Health Sciences, University of Liverpool.
Cogn Sci. 2021 Apr;45(4):e12974. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12974.
The aim of this study was to test the claim that languages universally employ morphosyntactic marking to differentiate events of more- versus less-direct causation, preferring to mark them with less- and more- overt marking, respectively (e.g., Somebody broke the window vs. Somebody MADE the window break; *Somebody cried the boy vs. Somebody MADE the boy cry). To this end, we investigated whether a recent computational model which learns to predict speakers' by-verb relative preference for the two causatives in English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, and K'iche' Mayan is able to generalize to a sixth language on which it has never been trained: Balinese. Judgments of the relative acceptability of the less- and more-transparent causative forms of 60 verbs were collected from 48 native-speaking Balinese adults. The composite crosslinguistic computational model was able to predict these judgments, not only for verbs that it had seen, but also--in a split-half validation test--to verbs that it had never seen in any language. A "random-semantics" model showed only a relatively small decrement in performance with seen verbs, whose behavior can be learned on a verb-by-verb basis, but achieved zero correlation with human judgments when generalizing to unseen verbs. Together, these findings suggest that Balinese conceptualizes directness of causation in a similar way to these unrelated languages, and therefore constitute support for the view that the distinction between more- versus less-distinct causation constitutes a morphosyntactic universal.
本研究旨在验证以下观点，即所有语言都普遍使用形态句法标记来区分更直接和更不直接的因果事件，并分别使用更不明显和更明显的标记来标记它们（例如，Somebody broke the window 与 Somebody MADE the window break；*Somebody cried the boy 与 Somebody MADE the boy cry）。为此，我们调查了一个最近的计算模型，该模型学习预测英语、希伯来语、印地语、日语和基切玛雅语中说话者对两种使役动词的相对偏好，该模型是否能够推广到它从未受过训练的第六种语言：巴厘语。从 48 名母语为巴厘语的成年人那里收集了 60 个动词的较少和较多透明使役形式的相对可接受性判断。综合跨语言计算模型不仅能够预测它所见过的动词的这些判断，而且在分半验证测试中，还能够预测它从未在任何语言中见过的动词的判断。“随机语义”模型在见过的动词方面表现出相对较小的性能下降，这些动词的行为可以基于动词逐个进行学习，但在推广到未见动词时与人类判断相关性为零。这些发现表明，巴厘语以类似于这些不相关语言的方式概念化因果关系的直接性，因此支持了这样一种观点，即更明显和不太明显的因果关系之间的区别构成了形态句法的普遍性。
