Jacques Moeschler
Jacques Moeschler is emeritus professor at the Department of Linguistics, University of Geneva, specialised in semantics and pragmatics, including topics like implicature and presupposition, and fields like Gricean pragmatics and Relevance Theory. His works is on discourse and logical connectives, negation, as well as the semantics and pragmatic of tenses and causality. He is one of the co-authors, with Sandrine Zufferey and Anne Reboul, of Implicatures (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and the author of Non-lexical pragmatics: Time, causality and logical words (Mouton de Gruyter, 2019) and Why Language? What pragmatics tells us about language and communication (Mouton de Gruyter, 2021).
Phone: +41 22 379 7276
Address: Departement of linguistics
University of Geneva
5 rue de Candolle
1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland
Phone: +41 22 379 7276
Address: Departement of linguistics
University of Geneva
5 rue de Candolle
1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland
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Papers by Jacques Moeschler
One the most convincing contribution of Relevance Theory on the scope issue (Carston 1999, 2002) is to define the semantics of negation as having wide scope and pragmatic conditions for scope narrowing. However, Carston’s proposal is very general, and does not explain how such a process occurs and why it occurs.
The argument of this paper is based on a comparison between ordinary uses of negation in scalar context with metalinguistic uses implying presuppositions and scalar implicatures cancellation. The linguistic context, presence or absence of previous assertions, and of corrective clauses, will be taken into account, as well as the set of entailments triggered by descriptive and metalinguistic uses. One main difference between descriptive uses and metalinguistic uses is linked to the down-tailing (1) and up-tailing (2) entailments:
(1) Anne does not have three children (she has two of them).
(2) Anne does not have three children; she has for of them.
The hypothesis is the following: since the set of entailments is the same as the scope of negation with descriptive negation, no corrective clause is required for information reasons. However, this process is not a default one: it must be checked pragmatically so that the wide scope reading (not [Anne has 3 children]) be compatible with its semantic entailment Anne has less than 3 children.
Furthermore, in its metalinguistic uses, the corrective clause is necessary, since it defines which propositions are entailed and which negation scopes over. Here, the two sets (entailments and propositions under the scope of negation) are not identical, which explains why a corrective clause is necessary.
The way the semantics and the pragmatics of negation interfaces will be explicitly defined, through a general hypothesis, namely the restriction domain hypothesis.
References
Carston R. (1996), Metalinguistic negation and echoic use, Journal of Pragmatics 25: 309-330.
Carston R. (1999), Negation, 'presupposition' and metarepresentation: A response to Noel Burton-Roberts, Journal of Linguistics 35: 365-389.
Carston R. (2002), Thoughts and Utterances, Oxford, Blackwell.
Horn L.R. (1985), Metalinguistic negation and pragmatic ambiguity, Language 61(1), 121-174.
Dans cet article, nous aimerions déplacer la frontière entre sémantique et pragmatique et utiliser une approche pragmatique vériconditionnelle, localisant la détermination des conditions de vérité d’un énoncé au niveau des processus d’enrichissement pragmatique des énoncés (leur contenu explicite). Nous aimerions aussi échapper au paradoxe bien décrit par A. Reboul (1992a) selon lequel le mensonge ne peut être un acte illocutionnaire, mais uniquement un acte perlocutionnaire, et localiser les propriétés du mensonge dans les différents niveaux de sens d’un énoncé.
Nous commencerons par un exemple de fiction, qui pose très clairement la relation entre fiction et vérité. Nous développerons ensuite les bases théoriques d’une pragmatique vériconditionnelle, pour montrer le rôle de notions comme celles de vérité et de fausseté dans l’interprétation des énoncés. Nous montrerons ensuite quel rôle la vérité joue dans les énoncés de type mensonge, et quelles sont les inférences sémantiques et pragmatiques qui lui sont associées. Enfin, nous terminerons sur une hypothèse concernant la relation entre mensonge et fiction.
The main-stream approaches in cognitive pragmatics (Amenos-Pons 2011, Saussure 2011 among others) make two main claims: (a) pragmatic procedural meaning is robust while conceptual meaning is flexible; (b) tenses trigger procedural instructions for the ascription of temporal reference. My proposal goes in the opposite direction and claims that (a) tense semantics is robust and based on Reichenbach’s temporal coordinates (S, R, E); (b) flexible pragmatic features ([± narrative], [±subjective] and [±explicit]) complete the robust semantics. The combination of the two types of contents results in six possible uses of tenses:
The case of French HP is crucial for the semantics and pragmatics of tenses. First, its semantics rules out traditional Reichenbachian semantics, as S is temporally disconnected from E and R. Second, in spite of this discrepancy, any model for HP should be able to explain how to trigger narration and subjectivity. In our model, the interpretation of HP results from the combination of the simultaneity between E and R [E=R] and the selection of pragmatic features. Hence, HP is not linguistically encoded, but is inferred as an explicature.
Based on a corpus of French HP (Cendras, Rhum), I claim that among the six possible combinations of pragmatic features, only five occur in fictitious discourses. What is lacking in fiction is the [-narrative][-subjective] use, which is illustrated by newspapers titles: Drame dans les Alpes: un père tue sa femme et ses enfants (‘Tragedy in the Alps: a father kills his wife and children’).
In sum, our tense model combines semantic and pragmatic information. Semantic content is represented by conceptual information encoded in tenses, which is robust and constant. Being conceptual in nature, this information shares a basic property of conceptual information, i.e. it has an easy access to consciousness (Wilson 2011). On the other hand, pragmatic content, while combining semantic temporal coordinates and pragmatics features is more flexible and less accessible to consciousness, as Grisot & Moeschler (2014) show based on corpus and experimental data for the English preterit.
References
Amenós-Pons, José. 2011. Cross-linguistic Variation in Procedural Expressions: Semantics and Pragmatics. In Procedural Meaning: Problems and Perspectives, eds. Victoria Escandell-Vidal, Manuel Leonetti and Aoife Ahern, 235–266. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Banfield, Anne. 1982. Unspeakable Sentences. Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Grisot C. & Jacques Moeschler. 2014. How do empirical methods interact with theoretical pragmatics? The conceptual and procedural contents of the English Simple Past and its translation in French. In Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2, eds. Jesus Romero-Trillo, Dordrecht, Springer.
Reboul, Anne. 1992. Rhétorique et stylistique de la fiction. Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy.
Reichenbach, Hans. 1947. Symbolic Logic. Berkeley: University of California.
Saussure, Louis de. 2011. On Some Methodological Issues in the Conceptual/Procedural Distinction. In Procedural Meaning: Problems and Perspectives, eds. Victoria Escandell-Vidal, Manuel Leonetti and Aoife Ahern, 55–79. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Schlenker, Philippe. 2004. Context of thought and context of utterence : A note on free indirect discourse and the historical present. Mind & Language 19/3, 279-304.
Wilson, Deirdre. 2011. The Conceptual-Procedural Distinction: Past, Present and Future. In Procedural Meaning: Problems and Perspectives, eds. Victoria Escandell-Vidal, Manuel Leonetti and Aoife Ahern, 3–31. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
What is of strong relevant is that Grice, in the first pages of 'Logic and Conversation', has proposed to disentangle the a priori incompatibility in meaning and formal properties between the logical devices (quantifiers, connectives and negation) and their counterparts in natural meaning. In a nutshell, the pragmatic (Gricean) approach gives as a semantics for logical words their logical meaning and explain their pragmatic meaning by implicatures, that is, a process of non-demonstrative inference implying a general principle (the principle of cooperation) and the use of maxims of conversation (quantity, quality, relation and manner).
This approach has been strongly argued for in most of pragmatic frameworks, and more specifically in Relevance Theory (see Carston's 'Utterances and Thoughts'), as regards the description of negation for instance, and in Horn's description of negation and quantifiers.
However, if the description of the semantics and the pragmatics of logical words is sound on the neo-Gricean and post-Gricean approaches, few attention has been given to the reason why such a discrepancy is the case. In other words, the relation between the semantics and the pragmatics of logical words is stated, but not ex¬plained.
However, some linguistic observations could help: either pragmatic meaning is a restriction on the logical meaning (disjunction, conditional, negation) or it is an expansion, that is a more specific and non-truth-conditional meaning (coordination). In this communication, 1 will give a general cognitive interpretation of these more specific pragmatic meanings.
In other words, logical words have in their semantics logical properties allowing to insure valid inference; their pragmatics, on the contrary, deserves different pragmatic functions, which are not devoted to reasoning, but to argumentation and implicit meaning.
Negation, existential quantifiers, and conjunction will illustrate the way logic and language interact in mean¬mg.
The investigation of LWs is essential for the understanding of some fundamentals issues in linguistics and human cognition: (i) all natural languages have words for negation and logical connectives (conjunction, disjunction, conditional); (ii) all natural languages have pragmatic meanings for these LWs, which systematically differ from their logical meanings; (iii) the linguistic properties (mainly syntactic) of LWs are not universal but vary cross-linguistically; (v) human cognition seems to be firmly based on LWs, as supported by reasoning abilities and argumentation usages of LWs; (v) for reasons of communication, natural languages have developed specific pragmatic meaning diverging from logical ones in very systematic ways.
The LogPrag main hypothesis is that the pragmatic meanings of LWs are restrictions on their logical meanings, which are assumed to be their basic semantics. These restrictions in meaning are not specific to a particular language, but they are widespread in natural languages. In French, the meaning of 'et' is not symmetrical (as ∧), and is expanded in temporal and causal meanings. The disjunction 'ou' is mainly exclusive and not inclusive in use (as v). The conditional 'si' is used as a biconditional, a concessive or a counterfactual connective, and seldom as with its material implication meaning (→). Negation is used descriptively as a constituent negation, and not as a propositional one (¬) or in metalinguistic uses with wide scope.
Hence, LogPrag is setup to address the following issues: (i) to describe how the logical properties of LWs can yield pragmatically more restricted meanings; (ii) to compare the pragmatic behaviors of various LWs in order to test the 'restriction domain hypothesis' (RDH); (iii) to design a series of experimental studiens to test RDH empirically.
More generally, LogPrag will examine three types of interface: (a) the code-inference interface, which has been, since the Gricean turn, a pervasive issue in pragmatic theory; (b) the semantics-pragmatics interface, which addresses the issue of how to account for the relationship between logical and pragmatic meanings, as well as the scope of negation and quantifiers; (c) the lexicon-context interface, which addresses the issue of the mutual contribution of lexical information and contextual import in pragmatic interpretation.
Parallèlement, depuis plus de 30 ans, les débats autour de la notion d’implicature conversationnelle sont engagés dans une opposition entre tenants d’approches contextuelles (les implicatures conversationnelles ne seraient que des implicatures circonstancielles) et les tenants d’approches par défaut, où les implicatures, tout au moins les implicatures conversationnelles généralisées, ne seraient que des inférences par défaut, indépendante des contexte, mais annulable pragmatiquement.
Si la première opposition (minimalisme sémantique vs. contextualisme radical) s’est davantage intéressée à des questions de référence, et la deuxième opposition à la frontière entre contenu explicite et implicite, vériconditionnel et non-vériconditionnel, ces deux courants de réflexion (respectivement sémantique (formelle) et pragmatique issue de Grice) posent la question des critères de démarcation entre sémantique et pragmatique d’une part et entre contenu explicite et implicite d’autre part.
Autour des questions de référence et d’implicature, nous chercherons à montrer quels sont les critères qui permettent, s’il en existe, d’établir une frontière claire entre processus sémantiques et pragmatiques dans la construction du sens. Nous montrerons notamment quel rôle jouent les processus sémantiques et pragmatiques dans le sens des énoncés, et quelles sont les heuristiques qui permettent de les dévoiler.
Even if the semantics-pragmatics interface is now in the agenda of formal semantics, mainly with the aim to increase the explanatory power of dynamic semantics in accounting for context, implicature, presupposition, etc., the benefit of pragmatic theory (mainly neo- and post-Gricean approaches) has not been seriously taken into account.
In this talk, I would like to offer some proposal to the following issue:
1. How the S-P interface is supposed to work? Broadly speaking, is pragmatics the output of semantics or is pragmatic meaning systematically intruded in semantics? I will show that both perspectives (pragmatics as outputs and pragmatic intrusion) do not give satisfactory answer to the S-P interface issue. My main argument will be based on the nature of semantic and pragmatic meanings, their conventional, truth-conditional and inferential aspects. I will show that the S-P border is porous, and that some inferred meaning are more semantic than pragmatic and vice versa. The first positive contribution of my proposal will be that there is a continuum between semantic and pragmatic meaning.
2. Why do we need S-P interface? The S-P interface has as a main function to allow quick and efficient information transfer, from non-linguistic source to linguistic one, and vice and versa. Contextual information is generally required to proposition enrichment, as well as to access contextual assumptions, in order to trigger implicit and explicit inferred meaning. On the other hand, linguistically encoded meaning is the starting point to enrichment processes in order to access reference, inferred conceptual representations, as well implicatures (at least conventional and generalized conversational ones).
3. Where is the S-P interface located? The S-P interface is mainly a linguistic issue: semantic meaning is the locus of pragmatic processes, which implies that its conceptual or procedural nature has some impacts on the way pragmatic meaning derivations are obtained. I will give some example about the S-P interface with discourse connectives, and more precisely causal connectives. Another example, related to scope of negation, will show how narrow and wide scope can be computed, and in which contexts.
The main purpose of my contribution is to explain why O meaning is complex. The argument is the following: what particulars trigger are not GCIs but explicatures, that is, truth-conditional contributions to meaning. The analysis points out that Horn’s account correctly describes particulars as sub-contraries, but their uses cannot be extended to cases where only one of them is true, the other being false.
The starting point is that negative and positive particulars (respectively some and some … not) have specific constraints on their semantics and their pragmatics. Their semantics is defined by their position on the logical square. They are semantically incompatible with their contradictories: some is incompatible with no, and some…not with all. On the other hand, their pragmatics is limited by their upper-bound correlates: some is pragmatically incompatible with all, some…not with no.
The two main consequences of this analysis are: first, the pragmatic incompatibility of particulars is the consequence of their truth-conditions, not of their GCIs; second, the complexity of negative particulars meaning is semantically expressed, within Boolean semantics. Negative particulars are not lexicalized because their meaning is compositionally the result of two Boolean operations: intersection of sets and complement of the intersection: some A are not B is thus formally represented as A – B (the difference of A and B), or as the complement of the intersection of A∩B (C A∩B).
References
Horn L.R. (2004), “Implicature”, in L.R. Horn & G. Ward (eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics, Oxford, Blackwell, 3-28.
Horn L.R. (2007), “Histoire d’*O: Lexical Pragmatics and the Geometry of Opposition”, Jean-Yves Béziau & Gilbert Payette (eds.), New Perspectives on the Square of Opposition, Bern, Peter Lang, 393-426, in press.
Wilson D. & Sperber D. (2004), “Relevance theory”, in Horn L.R. & Ward G. (eds), The Handbook of pragmatics, Oxford, Blackwell, 607-632.
The first part of the talk has as a main goal to make explicit the relation carried by the three types of content implied by a negative utterance: POS, NEG and COR. Logical, semantic and pragmatic criteria will support the claim that negation has mainly three types of uses: descriptive, metalinguistic#1 and metalinguistic#2. These two types of metalinguistic usages are respectively cases of negation of a scalar implicature and negation of a presupposition.
The second part of the paper will discuss the case of metalinguistic#1 negation, where a scalar implicature of POS is defeated. The issue that will be discussed and argued for is the reasons why negative utterances with a scalar operator do not trigger by themselves an implicature, whereas their corresponding POSs do. Similar cases with entailments, presuppositions as well as with explicatures will be examined too, which show the limit rational inferences with negative utterances: some inferences are safe under negation, other are not. Implicatures, and more specifically scalar implicatures, are such cases. A logical analysis of semantic and pragmatic contents will be given for supporting the view that inferences under negation are not safe from a truth-functional point of view.
Introduction de Jacques Moeschler et contributions de Giorgio Graffi, William Tecumseh Fitch, Karen Emmorey, Philippe Schlenker, Mark Johnson, Liliane Haegeman, Angelika Kratzer, Peter Auer, Frederick J. Newmeyer, Anne Reboul, Claire Bowern, Marc Van Oostendorp, Luigi Rizzi, Kai Von Fintel, David Beaver et Justin Cope, Laurence Horn et Ivan Kecskes, Ulrich Frauenfelder, Edgar Schneider, Eric Wehrli.
Cette troisième édition a été augmentée de trois chapitres concernant la sémantique des événements, la cohérence entre le discours et la structure du discours et de l’interaction.
Qu’est-ce que la pragmatique ? D’une manière très succincte, on dira qu’un problème est pragmatique s’il ne concerne pas la structure du langage (la linguistique), mais l’emploi qui en est fait. La linguistique a certes influencé la pragmatique et cette dernière a d’importantes répercussions en linguistique. Mais la pragmatique a aussi des applications et des implications dans les cognitives, en informatique, en psychologie. C’est que son domaine de recherche est extrêmement vaste, depuis les actes de langage jusqu’aux problèmes de la pertinence, de l’inférence, de l’argumentation, de la vérité des énoncés, de l’usage approximatif des termes, de la compréhension en contexte, des lois de discours, de la métaphore et de la fiction.
Ce dictionnaire encyclopédique comprend 18 chapitres autonomes, traitant de façon systématique et dans une progression cohérente les concepts méthodologiques et le contenu de la pragmatique. Un glossaire, un index, un système de renvois entre chapitres, de nombreux exemples permettent de retrouver et de comprendre aisément les définitions et un langage technique. Une lecture contenue ou une recherche alphabétique de thèmes et de notions sont donc également possibles et font de ce dictionnaire un outil de travail commode pour entre dans une science encore peu connue.
Outre de nombreux rappels historiques, ce livre offre une présentation systématique des recherches et des intérêts de la pragmatique, sciences de l'usage du langage: liens avec l'intelligence artificielle, avec le fonctionnement du cerveau humain, avec les problèmes de l'interprétation du langage dans les innombrables contextes possibles; similitudes et différences entre phrases et propositions; rapport entre langage et vérité, croyance et vérité, langage et concepts; problèmes liés à l'usage littéral et non littéral du langage.