讲座题目：Incorporating Relevance Theory with Spreading Activation Theory（关联理论与扩散激活理论相结合）
报告人：北京航空航天大学外国语学院林允清教授
讲座时间：2013年11月13日 13:30 pm
讲座地点：外国语学院一楼报告厅
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，博士生导师。1985年于中国矿业大学自动化系毕业后长期留学英国。在Essex大学计算机系师从逻辑学家Raymond Turner教授进行语言与思维推理研究，获计算机科学（人工智能）硕士及博士。之后在Cardiff大学（1990-1996）与系统功能语法学家Robin Fawcett教授合作进行计算语言学研究，用系统功能语法进行语句生成和建造智能对话系统。其间对语言学理论产生浓厚兴趣，遂于1996年入牛津大学语言学家及哲学家James Higginbotham教授门下专攻Noam Chomsky的语法学、Donald Davidson的语义学以及他们理论的哲学基础；同时得到了哲学大师Peter F. Strawson爵士的指导并与之经常探讨语言哲学问题。获牛津大学语言学硕士及博士。后任教于伦敦大学（2000-2004），获得永久教职。2004年夏受聘于北京师范大学外国语言文学学院，任语言学教授；同年被评为博士生导师，并入选教育部《新世纪优秀人才支持计划》。2010年6月作为“杰出人文教授”调入北京航空航天大学外国语学院工作。2011年出任新建的语言科学与工程系的系主任。
学术任职：全国中西语言哲学研究会副会长（2007–现在）；全国功能语言学研究会常务理事（2006–现在）；中国语言教育研究会常务理事（2010-现在）
研究兴趣：理论语言学（语法、语义、语用、认知）、语言哲学
