Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique
Ce séminaire reçoit des conférenciers invités spécialisés dans différents domaines de la linguistique. Les membres du Département, les étudiants et les personnes externes intéressées sont tous cordialement invités. Description du séminaire 
| Titre | Forms and functions of logical connectives in natural languages: a typological perspective | |
| Conférencier | Caterina Mauri (U. de Pavie) | |
| Date | mardi 13 décembre 2011 | |
| Heure | 12h15 | |
| Salle | L208 (Bâtiment Candolle) | |
| Description |
Since Grice, many scholars belonging to the so-called Neo-Gricean (e.g. Levinson 1983) and Post-Gricean (e.g. Sperber and Wilson 1986) approaches have focused their attention on those connectives that look like the direct linguistic counterparts to Boolean operators ('and, 'or', if' connectives), aiming at unveiling the mechanisms that govern their interpretation and derive non-truth-functional values from truth-functional ones. Despite differences in the account of the steps through which logic connectives are interpreted in natural languages and in the identification of the principles at work (generalized and scalar implicatures, inferential enrichments, optimal relevance), all these approaches seem to start from the assumption that logical meaning has to be kept as a reference point of any analysis of connectives and address the semantics/pragmatics border in terms of what is/is not part of the logical meaning.
Yet, once cross-linguistic data are taken into account, there appear indeed to be a discrepancy between the semantic distinctions identified in Boolean logic and those actually coded by natural languages. First, it is not rare to find languages without any connective meaning ‘or’ (e.g. Wari’, a Chapacura Wanham language spoken in South America, Mauri 2008a: 167) and even without any connective meaning ‘and’ (e.g. Maricopa, a Hokan Yuman language spoken in Arizona, Gil 1991). Second, languages do not seem to encode distinctions that are identified as crucial in Boolean logic, such as the distinction between inclusive and exclusive disjunction at all: no dedicated connectives for the two types of disjunction are attested. By contrast, languages encode semantic distinctions which are not identified within logic, reserving dedicated connectives to e.g. sequential and non-sequential conjunction (cf. Serbo-Croatian pa ‘and then’, Tukang Besi kene ‘and at the same time’, Mauri 2008a: 90, 94), declarative and interrogative disjunction (cf. Albanian ose ‘or, listing equivalent alternatives’ and apo ‘or, asking for a choice between alternatives’; ‘simple’ and ‘choice-aimed’ disjunction according to Mauri 2008a: 157-161 and Mauri 2008b). In such cases, it would be difficult to maintain a semantic analysis in terms of truth-functional values.
Furthermore, connectives in natural languages, and specifically logical connectives in natural languages, may do more than linking and may encode further dimensions of meaning: they may encode specific illocutionary aims (cf. choice-aimed disjunctive connectives, encoding interrogative illocution), referential functions (cf. non-exhaustive connectives of Japanese, encoding the fact that the linked elements are only examples of a larger category, or set of elements, within which the hearer may pick and choose further irrealis nonspecific exemplars), and scalar values (see concessive conditionals).
The aim of the talk is twofold. First, I will discuss the cross-linguistic coding of logical connectives (with special focus on conjunctive and disjunctive connectives, their morphosyntactic properties and the specific values they may have), in the belief that cross-linguistic data are likely to raise new questions for semantic and pragmatic theories, and that a typological perspective may challenge the assumption that logical connectives are universal (and that logic has to be kept as a reference point in the exam of natural languages). Second, I will discuss the most recurrent non-connective functions of logical connectives in natural languages, focusing of illuctionary aim, scalarity and referential function, and I will explore the possible correlations between particular non-connective functions and particular logical relations.
References:
Gil, David. 1991. Aristotle goes to Arizona and finds a language without AND. In Dietmar Zaefferer, (ed.), Semantic Universals and Universal Semantic. Berlin: Foris, 96–130.
Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press.
Mauri, Caterina. 2008a. Coordination Relations in the Languages of Europe and Beyond. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Mauri, Caterina. 2008b. The irreality of alternatives: towards a typology of disjunction. Studies in Language 32/1: 22-55
Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Blackwell, Oxford and Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA. (Second edition 1995. Blackwell, Oxford.).
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