Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Relevance theorists have for quite some time pursued the argument that discourse markers encode procedures, i.e. instructions which guide pragmatic inference by creating cognitive "shortcuts" that the hearer takes advantage of during utterance interpretation. This type of meaning is clearly different in nature from the conceptual (denotational) one that open-class words are generally taken to encode within the framework. In this talk, I wish to reconsider the standard relevance-theoretic view that logical connectives are to be treated as conceptual encodings by approaching the relevant terms along procedural lines. My argumentation will be based on the idea that, from a cognitive perspective, there is no particular reason to differentiate between logical and discourse connectives, since both types of expressions can be taken to have evolved for argumentation rather than reasoning purposes (e.g. Sperber 2001). What is more, the analysis of logical operators in truth-functional terms may have been pivotal for the philosophical investigation of their semantic content, but there is again hardly any reason to assume that the meaning of their natural-language counterparts is directly inherited from them when cognitive considerations enter the picture; hence the fact that in some languages the meaning of a single logical operator is carried by more than one words, which are nevertheless used to mark semantic distinctions that are unidentifiable from a logical point of view (e.g. Mauri 2008).