Louis de Saussure

A cognitive-pragmatic view of the French epistemic future

abstractIn this paper, we review the various types of epistemic usages of the (simple andanterior) future tenses in French with the assumption that what actually licensestheir occurrence is not a semantic feature such as aspect but pragmatic effects thatgive relevance to the utterance at the moment of speech. We review the mainhypotheses proposed in the relevant literature and conclude that epistemic futuresseem to fulfill the function of communicating – through a metarepresentationof a future verification – not only epistemic modality and evidentiality, butalso, and perhaps especially, the inference that a particular course of action hasto be undertaken from the perspective of a state of affairs that is true in thepresent.1. introduction 1 The aim of this paper is to investigate the manifestation of a (subjective) epistemic 2 attitude by means of morphemes that denote a future temporal quantification ofthe eventuality in French, as in Ce sera le facteur uttered just after the bell has rung.French scholars also refer to this usage of the future tense as the ‘putative future’(

Discourse analysis, cognition and evidentials

This article echoes concerns recently formulated regarding CDA’s lack of attention to cognitive science (or evolutionary psychology). From a cognitive pragmatic viewpoint, I argue that discourse analysis should undergo an epistemological change in order to seriously take into account what cognitive (thus naturalistic) approaches have to offer, in particular as regards the automatic processing of utterances and the subsequent non-conscious evaluation of contents vis-a-vis previously held beliefs. I regard the epistemological tension in CDA as stemming from a wider tension of the same sort affecting social science in general. Considering discourse as a process of interpretation and evaluation, I address briefly the influence of evidentiality as a pragmatic category in persuasive discourse and conclude that the uptake of new beliefs on the basis of discourse is oriented towards the maximization of relevance in the sense of Sperber and Wilson.

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.

Subjectivity out of irony

Abstract Subjectivity plays an important role in how meaning is created and construed. It concerns the expression of self and the representation of a speakers perspective or point of view in the interaction with somebody else. The subjectivity explored in this article concerns mainly one special form of self-awareness insofar as it is related to irony. The argument of this article will be carried out in three steps: We first will deal with the main linguistic theories regarding irony. This will lead us to the conclusion that irony — at least in some cases — involves a form of non-propositional knowledge that needs to be identified and captured for irony. In a second step, we will describe this type of non-propositional knowledge, in particular distinguishing it from propositional knowledge. The discussion of non-propositional knowledge as one marker of subjectivity will then lead us to discuss irony — beyond its semantic utterances — as a personal disposition. When we call utterances ironic we are referring to them as linguistic constructs and we deal with the respective content of their declarative statements, technically speaking, the proposition. In this contribution we are interested in showing how ironic utterances lead back to a personal disposition.

The Straw Man Fallacy as a Prestige-Gaining Device

In this paper, we consider the straw man fallacy from the perspective of pragmatic inference. Our main claim is that the straw man fallacy is a ‘pragmatic winner’ not primarily because of its persuasive power but rather because it targets the pragmatic cognitive-inferential skills of its victim while enhancing the prestige of its author. We consider that in the context of a straw man fallacy, the issue of the burden of proof, which is ‘reversed’, does not directly bear on the argumentation itself but has essentially to do with the difficulty for the targeted speaker of getting the attention of the audience back. It is difficult because countering this fallacy involves primarily a discussion of the reasons why the inference drawn (the meaning or the thought fallaciously attributed to the targeted speaker) was unduly derived, a process which is virtually destined to be a failure first of all because of the lack of relevance (in the sense of Sperber and Wilson in Relevance. Communication and cognition. Blackwell, Oxford, 1995) of justifications in comparison with that of actual points. Notions of retractability and the explicit-implicit divide are central to our approach.

Why French Modal Verbs Are not Polysemous, and Other Considerations on Conceptual and Procedural Meanings

This article aims at determining the type of ambiguity manifested by modal verbs, focusing on French. Modal verbs are often described as polysemous since they seem to encode a fixed number of possible meanings. Options of offer are the following: (i) that modal verbs are indeed polysemous according to a technical notion of polysemy, i.e. they encode a limited set of clear-cut modal meanings; (ii) that they are a mixture of polysemy and underspecification, that is, each meaning selected in the lexicon may undergo further adjustment; (iii) that modal verbs are not conceptual but rather procedural, i.e., they encode instructions based on their grammatical dimension (they take scope over propositions which they modify); (iv) they have a vague meaning; or (v) they are simply conceptual as any other full verb is and, as most conceptual expressions, they are underspecified and get a precise meaning in context through pragmatic enrichment. Our assumption is the latter, however with a nuance regarding epistemic necessity with devoir (must) following experimental results by Barbet (2013). We take the opportunity of this issue to go at large on conceptual and procedural meanings in the first part of the paper.

Adverbiaux temporels et sériels en usage discursif

Les expressions temporelles, c’est bien connu, peuvent donner lieu à des lectures qui ne réfèrent pas à la temporalité externe au discours, voire qui ne réfèrent à aucune temporalité particulière autre que celle induite de facto par l’énonciation elle-même. La littérature identifie une grande variété d’usages de ce genre, qui illustrent cette propriété de la plupart des expressions en principe dévolues au temps de pouvoir remplir d’autres fonctions que la référence temporelle stricto sensu. Ainsi en va-t-il d’abord d’un certain nombre d’usages – que la tradition de la théorie de la pertinence traite sous le terme d’usages interprétatifs – comme les temps verbaux produisant un effet d’acte de langage indirect (typiquement les imparfaits d’atténuation et forains) ou de contrefactualité (imparfaits de « conséquence non réalisée ») ou encore de modalité (par exemple la modalité épistémique exprimée par le futur putatif), etc. A cette classe d’effets non temporels – ou non strictement temporels – déclenchés par des morphèmes habituellement considérés par ailleurs comme temporels, appartiennent également des usages particuliers d’expressions adverbiales. C’est à ces cas de figure d’enrichissement pragmatique, ou, pour être prudents, de lecture non temporelle, que nous allons nous intéresser prioritairement ici : il s’agit des usages argumentatifs et discursifs des expressions adverbiales temporelles, qui constituent un phénomène relativement bien identifié et qui ont fait l’objet d’une littérature assez abondante pour le français. Ces usages ont une fonction d’organisation du