Jacques Moeschler

How Do Empirical Methods Interact with Theoretical Pragmatics? The Conceptual and Procedural Contents of the English Simple Past and Its Translation into French

One major theoretical issue that has dominated the field of theoretical pragmatics for the last twenty years is the conceptual vs. procedural distinction and its application for verb tenses. In this chapter, we address this distinction from both theoretical and empirical perspectives following a multifaceted methodology: work on parallel corpora, contrastive analysis methodology and offline experimentation with natural language processing applications. We argue that the conceptual/pro- cedural distinction should be investigated under the aegis of empirical pragmatics. In the case study, we bring evidence from offline experimentation for the proce- dural and conceptual contents of the English Simple Past and we use this informa- tion for improving the results of a machine translation system.

Relevance and conversation

This paper presents a general argument for a relevance-based approach to the problem of connectivity in conversation. First, the potential relevance of conversation for pragmatic theory is discussed, as examples in pragmatic theory generally consist of small conversations. A typical problem for conversation analysis and pragmatic analysis is the description of uses of pragmatic connectives. The French connective parce que is described using first a model of coherence (Ducrot’s theory of argumentation) and second an inferential approach. With a view to improving these models, conversational uses of parce que are presented, which show some difficulties which coherence-based approaches face in attempting to make the correct predictions about common uses of connectives in conversation.This is explained in terms of, first, an implicit theory of conversation underlying Ducrot’s theory of argumentation and second, relevance theory. The less discourse oriented approach (relevance theory) is better-equipped to account for conversation in general, and to solve the sequencing problem and the interpretive problem in conversation in particular. 1 Special thanks are due to Billy Clark and Deirdre Wilson for rewriting my French-English pidgin and for their relevant suggestions ! Many thanks to Neil Smith and Deirdre Wilson who endured a spoken version of this paper at UCL and have invited me to prepare a written version of it.

When the Present is all in the Past

In (1a), the relative clause present tense (on comes back) is interpretable as simultaneous with the embedding sentence past tense (i.e., the letting time) and not with t* (i.e., today: May 2, 2005). Similarly, the present tense in (1b) and (1c) need not include t*. These facts are puzzling on any current theory of tense, as they all predict that (in English) a present in the scope of past has to overlap t*, given the interpretation of sentences as in (2):

Recent advances in the syntax and semantics of tense, aspect and modality

This book is an up-to-date milestone for the studies of temporality and language, in particular regarding syntax and semantics. Tenses,aspectand modality are investigated both at the theoretical and at the descriptive levels, involving many different Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages.15 authors, among which an impressive number of very well-known scholars, through a variety of theoretical approaches and tools, shed light on a wide array of phenomena that remained unexplored until now.

Argumentation and Connectives

This chapter is about argumentation and connectives. It first gives a general definition of argumentation, as a relation between arguments and conclusions, such that arguments have as properties polarity, force, order, linguistic marking, and logical impairment. The function of an argument is to assign an argumentative orientation to an utterance and make acceptable conclusions that would be unacceptable without the presence of an argument.

How ‘Logical’ are Logical Words?

One way of tackling the pragmatics of negation is to address three questions relating to logic, semantics, and pragmatics. In a nutshell, logical issue refers to the entailment relation between COR and NEG; the semantic issue refers to the scope of negation, or the scope of the semantic domain of negation; and the pragmatic issue concerns the discourse relationship between COR and NEG. This chapter aims at that negation as a three-sided operator in which all three properties converge. It gives a coherent picture of negation from a logical, semantic, and pragmatic point of view. In ordinary negation, the corrective sentence (COR) entails the negative one (NEG), whereas with metalinguistic negation, two situations arise. With upward negation, mainly with scalar predicates, COR entails the corresponding positive sentence (POS), whereas with a presuppositional negation, COR entails NEG and other entailed propositions, as presuppositions (PP). Keywords: metalinguistic negation; pragmatics; presuppositions; semantics

What Is the Contribution of Connectives to Discourse Meaning? The With or Without Issue (WWI)

For more than thirty years, semantics and pragmatics have benefitted from descriptive studies on discourse connectives, the argumentative function of which has been recognized in different theoretical frameworks: theory of linguistic argumentation (Ducrot et al. in Les mots du discours. Minuit, Paris, 1980), Relevance Theory (Blakemore in Semantic constraints on relevance. Blackwell, Oxford, 1987; Carston in Thoughts and utterances: the pragmatics of explicit communication. Blackwell, Oxford, 2002), cognitive semantics (Sanders and Nordmann in Discourse Processes 29(1):37–60, 2000), Rhetorical Structure Theory (Taboada in Journal of Pragmatics 38(4):567–592, 2006). However, an issue has not been deeply investigated: What is the difference between discourses with and without connectives? In this chapter, I raise the issue of the function of connectives in discourse, the different ways of defining connectives, the paradox that cognitive approaches to connectives give rise to, the role of mais in argumentation, and the issue of the contribution of connectives to argumentation. In the analysis I show how the contrast between sequences with and without connectives can be thought in a more general framework: argumentation sequences with connectives are more efficient because they make argumentation relations explicit, and have as side effects the minimization of processing costs and the maximizing of relevance; moreover, they are stronger because connectives introduce new focal information, which has more contextual implications than a non-focal one.

The French tradition in pragmatics: From structuralism to cognitivism

Abstract The following paper provides an overview of the origins of the French tradition in pragmatics (FTP). This linguistic tradition originated in the French structuralist paradigm, mainly in the work of Saussure and Benveniste. This contribution presents a general survey of the work of one of the most famous French pragmaticists, Oswald Ducrot. Ducrots work on argumentative scale, presupposition, negation, and polyphony are all explored. According to Ducrot, the general comprehension procedure of an utterance is called Y-Theory, and belongs to what is known as “integrated pragmatics” (pragmatics integrated with semantics). His way of describing and explaining meaning is similar to Gricean pragmatics in terms of his usage of discourse rules, which are equivalent to Grices maxims of conversation. However, the design of the general comprehension procedure defines FTP as a framework belonging to a different scientific paradigm. The paper concludes with a section on the relationship between current work on pragmatic markers originating in FTP (connectives, referential expressions, prepositions, tenses) and the new lexical pragmatic framework developed by Deirdre Wilson and Robyn Carston within relevance theory.