Corinne Rossari

Pragmatic Connectives as Predicates. The Case of Inferential Connectives

This chapter investigates the linguistic description and formal representation of some pragmatic inferential connectives in French. We show that connectives expressing consequence, opposition or reformulation (like anyway in English) presuppose an abstract relation between propositional arguments of certain semantic types. We first contrast inferential and non-inferential connectives, then we turn to the semantic types of the propositional arguments to lay down some basic distinctions. Finally we substantiate the relations themselves. We use a version of generalized quantification over proofs to describe the inferential constraints which define the various relations presupposed by the connectives. The very possibility of such a description suggests that inferential connectives have a genuine (presupposed) predicative content.

Grammaticalization and persistence phenomena in two hybrid discourse markers - la preuve and regarde

Abstract La preuve and regarde are two discourse markers that have undergone a grammaticalization process. As a consequence of this process they have partly lost their lexical value and have acquired a rhetorical one. The latter makes them function as connectives that can mark a justification relation. We shall see that in spite of this newly acquired discourse value, these two forms have preserved the perceptual aspect of their original meaning: la preuve by recalling a fact that is likely to be materialized in the sense of ‘montré’ (‘shown’), regarde by recalling a state of affairs which is likely to be assessed by the addressee. The co-existence of these values is a result of the persistence phenomena that may affect grammaticalized items.

The Polysemy of Devoir: A Contrastive and Diachronic Analysis

The French verb devoir has a lexical value (referring to the notion of debt) and several modal values. Among the latter, the epistemic value is looked at as being essentially pragmatic insofar as devoir is supposed to code a form of inference. The analysis proposed below will assign a pragmatic value to this verb for the whole series of its modal values. We shall posit that devoir indeed codes a form of evidentiality, but we shall not associate it with an inference. Devoir1 indicates that the speaker has motivated his/her utterance by making it depend on a source that coincides with one of the three parameters involved in the classical logical reasoning: the major premise, the minor premise and the conclusion. Our analysis will not join either of the two main explanations traditionally given to the meaning of devoir. First, we do not conceive of devoir as encoding an indication related to epistemic modality, implying a quantifi cation of the worlds where the proposition is true (as probablement or peut-être would do). Second, we do not consider devoir as encoding a form of inference either. In other words, we do not assume that devoir indicates that the information conveyed by the

'Si j'étais une pauvre paysanne' ou les difficultés pragmatiques dans l'argumentation orale des apprenants FLE : Les apports d'une approche pluridimensionnelle

Starting from a multidimensional analysis of a corpus based upon a confrontation between oral productions of native and non-native speakers of French, this paper examines certain of the pragmatic difficulties of discourse constructed by the non-native speakers. The corpus examined was collected from a simulated debate concerning the liberation of hard drugs in developed countries. An extract is analyzed in terms of its different discourse dimensions (i.e., enunciative, relational, informational, and polyphonic dimensions). Through a relational analysis of these different dimensions and a comparison between the productions of the native speakers of French with those of the non-native speakers, different difficulties observed are examined in order to ascertain if they result from a more general order difficulty.