Les temps verbaux font partie d’un ensemble d’expressions dites procédurales, dont le contenu n’est pas descriptif, mais instructionnel. La nature de ce contenu est à l’origine d’une grande variation dans leurs emplois. La question qui se pose est de savoir comment décrire, en termes sémantiques et pragmatiques, une telle variation. Dans cette communication, je proposerai un modèle de description, le modèle des inférences directionnelles (MID), qui a comme principale caractéristique d’être à la fois compositionnel et contextuel, à savoir de combiner de l’information linguistique et de l’information contextuelle. Je monterai comment les temps verbaux du français exploitent une propriété fondamentale du temps, sa directionalité.
All logical words in natural languages exhibit a peculiar property: their logical semantics differ with their pragmatic meaning. Negation takes generally narrow scope in use, whereas its logical content is propositional (wide scope); existential quantifiers have a semantic meaning compatible with universal quantifiers, whereas their pragmatic meaning negates them by implicature; logical connectives have a pragmatics corresponding to a restriction on their truth tables. In this communication, I will propose a general explanation: semantic meaning is underspecified, whereas pragmatic meaning is specific. This description has a cognitive and communicative explanation: the semantics of logical words allows demonstrative inferences, whereas their pragmatics is connected to non-demonstrative inferences and more specific tasks in verbal communication.
In a classical sense, pragmatics deals with language uses in context, but is also concerned with context-dependent aspects of language structure (Levinson 1983). Several questions arise from these apparent contradictory domains of investigation: How does linguistic information contribute to pragmatic meaning? Is a contextual framework compatible with a linguistic-driven one? And more generally: How does cognition play a role in context construction and conceptual information. In this communication, I argue is that pragmatic meaning, which is common sense, is the result of a complex interplay between semantics, which is not common sense, and contextual information. Examples based on tenses, connectives and negation will be given.
Natural languages have a singular property, which distinguishes them radically from formal languages as predicate calculus. They do not have words to express what is called, following the classical analysis of quantifiers and negation, negative particulars. Horn (1989, 2004) proposed an interesting conjecture to explain this phenomenon: natural languages tend not to lexicalize complex values. This conjecture explains why some…not, not always, not both, not… and are not lexicalized. Horn’s conjecture is given through a neo-Gricean analysis of scalar implicatures (Gazdar 1979, Levinson 2000, Horn 1989). From an observational point of view, Horn’s conjecture is adequate, but it raises questions from descriptive and explanatory ones. My analysis will not insist on the non-necessity of the lexicalization of O (the negative particular edge of Aristotle’s logical square), but on its impossibility, for reasons related to its content. The revisited version of Horn’s conjecture takes the following form: Lexicalize only concepts whose specifications (explicatures) are calculable. Moreover, the calculability of quantifiers inferred contents will not be defined in terms of information, but of relevance.
Causality is one of the main properties of human cognition. We reason through causal relations, we infer causal relations, we think causally. But language is certainly one of our human cognitive abilities that have played a major role in developing human causal cognition. Causality is expressed in natural languages through lexical units, syntax and discourse. In this lecture, I will give arguments in favor of the non-iconic order of causal relations in discourse. Empirical evidences, as well as psycholinguistics ones, will support the consequence-cause order hypothesis for causal discourses. Some issues about Japanese will be raised, since Japanese, as a SOV language, exhibits the iconic cause-consequence order [[P1-kara] P2].