講座題目：Incorporating Relevance Theory with Spreading Activation Theory（關聯理論與擴散激活理論相結合）
報告人：北京航空航天大學外國語學院林允清教授
講座時間：2013年11月13日 13:30 pm
講座地點：外國語學院一樓報告廳

摘要： Relevance Theory (RT) divides the meaning of a sentence into explicatures and implicatures. It proposes a Relevance-theoretic Comprehension Process to calculate them: follow the path of least processing effort to find a hypothesis, if it meets the expected level of relevance then stop. But a main problem with RT is how least effort is computed. It would not do if the brain had to compute the processing efforts of all the possible hypotheses serially and choose the one with the smallest value, for that would take too much time. Therefore, the processing efforts of hypotheses must be calculated in parallel. But how could such a parallel calculation be achieved? RT does not give an explicit answer to this.

Spreading Activation Theory (SAT) is a theory in psychology, it describes how the brain functions in general. The brain is seen as a huge network of nodes, activation is spread parallel in the brain and a node is activated if its activation value exceeds the threshold. SAT thus is a natural option for explaining the least processing effort problem in RT. In fact, Recanati proposes to account for explicatures in terms of activation. Mazzone submits that both explicatures and implicatures be explained using activation.

Relevance theorists have been arguing against the idea of using SAT to explain linguistic relevance. In this talk, I shall review their criticisms, and shall explore a way of meeting the criticisms, using SAT to explain the problem of linguistics relevance.

林允清，教授，博士生導師。1985年于中國礦業大學自動化系畢業后長期留學英國。在Essex大學計算機系師從邏輯學家Raymond Turner教授進行語言與思維推理研究，獲計算機科學（人工智能）碩士及博士。之后在Cardiff大學（1990-1996）與系統功能語法學家Robin Fawcett教授合作進行計算語言學研究，用系統功能語法進行語句生成和建造智能對話系統。其間對語言學理論產生濃厚興趣，遂于1996年入牛津大學語言學家及哲學家James Higginbotham教授門下專攻Noam Chomsky的語法學、Donald Davidson的語義學以及他們理論的哲學基礎；同時得到了哲學大師Peter F. Strawson爵士的指導并與之經常探討語言哲學問題。獲牛津大學語言學碩士及博士。后任教于倫敦大學（2000-2004），獲得永久教職。2004年夏受聘于北京師范大學外國語言文學學院，任語言學教授；同年被評為博士生導師，并入選教育部《新世紀優秀人才支持計劃》。2010年6月作為“杰出人文教授”調入北京航空航天大學外國語學院工作。2011年出任新建的語言科學與工程系的系主任。

學術任職：全國中西語言哲學研究會副會長（2007–現在）；全國功能語言學研究會常務理事（2006–現在）；中國語言教育研究會常務理事（2010-現在）

研究興趣：理論語言學（語法、語義、語用、認知）、語言哲學