Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

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.

1. 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 between semantic and pragmatic meaning.

Why do we need S-P interface? 3. 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.