Le projet de recherche LogPrag
Site du projet de recherche Fonds national suisse de la recherche scientifique n°
Direction: Jacques Moeschler, professeur ordinaire
Postdoc: Joanna Blochowiak
PhD student: Karoliina Lohiniva
Description of the project
The research project LogPrag aims at investigating the logical words (LWs) in French. By LWs, we refer to words that have their counterparts in logic, in particular, connectives and words expressing negation and quantifiers. LogPrag will focus on negation and logical connectives.
More precisely, the goal of this project is to build the theoretical framework for an appropriate description and explanation of mechanisms behind the use of LWs in natural languages and in French in particular. As it is well known, the meaning of LWs such as and, or, not, if is defined in classical propositional logic in terms of 2-valued truth-functional semantics (truth-tables). However, the interpretation of LWs in natural languages differs from the logical one due to pragmatic reasons. In the same time, LWs in natural language keep subtle relationships with their logical homologues (see for a general presentation Allwood, Dahl & Andersson 1977; Moeschler & Reboul 1994, chapter 6; Reboul & Moeschler 1998, chapter 5). The hypothesis adopted by LogPrag is that the logical meanings of LWs are primary and their pragmatic interpretation is the result of a restriction on their logical meaning (‘restriction domain hypothesis’ (RDH)). A counterhypothesis would claim that pragmatic meanings are primary in natural language and that logical meanings are abstracted later in development, for instance in an educational context.
Contributions
Events - participation
Intercultural Pragmatics Malte 2014
Events - organisation
Workshop 'Les méthodes empiriques', 29-30 janvier 2015 et 25-26 mars 2015
Workshop LogPrag, 17-19 juin 2015, Les Diablerets, Suisse
Workshop SLE, 2 – 5 Septembre 2015, Leiden
9th Days of Swiss Linguistics / 9e Journées de Linguistique Suisse