Jacques Moeschler

Sandrine Zufferey

Initiation à la linguistique française présente de manière accessible mais complète les domaines de la linguistique : langage et communication, phonétique et phonologie, syntaxe, morphologie, sémantique, pragmatique.
Cette synthèse offre aussi un état actuel des connaissances en philosophie du langage et de l’esprit, psychologie cognitive, neurosciences et pragmatique cognitive.
Conçu à partir d’un cours universitaire accompagné de travaux pratiques, cet ouvrage est le fruit d’une longue expérience d’enseignement auprès d’étudiants de littérature, de linguistique et de psychologie en première année de licence.

3e édition

Initiation à la linguistique française

Initiation à la linguistique française présente de manière accessible mais complète les domaines de la linguistique : langage et communication, phonétique et phonologie, syntaxe, morphologie, sémantique, pragmatique. Cette synthèse offre aussi un état actuel des connaissances en philosophie du langage et de l’esprit, psychologie cognitive, neurosciences et pragmatique cognitive. Conçu à partir d’un cours universitaire accompagné de travaux pratiques, cet ouvrage est le fruit d’une longue expérience d’enseignement auprès d’étudiants de littérature, de linguistique et de psychologie en première année de licence.

Initiation à la linguistique française - 3e éd.

Genoveva Puskás

Louis de Saussure

This book is an up-to-date milestone for the studies of temporality and language, in particular regarding syntax and semantics. Tenses, aspectand modality are investigated both at the theoretical and at the descriptive levels, involving many differe

Recent Advances in the Syntax and Semantics of Tense, Aspect and Modality

This book presents both general issues in pragmatic theories and specific arguments for an inferential approach to pragmatics. At the present time, pragmatics is generally approached from the neo- and post-Gricean perspectives. These perspectives, which stem from philosophical theories of meaning, can be viewed as paradigms, that is, sets of concepts, procedures and results which structure scientific investigations. The main purpose of the book is to defend a new post-Gricean approach to the substantial lexicon and to the functional lexicon (tenses, connectives), and more specifically to explore lexical and non-lexical pragmatics. A precise approach to lexical and non-lexical pragmatic contents will be developed, with special emphasis on non-lexical temporal and causal information. A model for inferring temporal relations in discourse (the directional inferences model based on French data) is developed. This approach to temporal representations and inferences will be completed by a discussion on how causal inferences are triggered in discourse interpretation. The role of conceptual causal relations, as well as causal procedural information encoded in discourse connectives (mainly parce que ‘because’, donc ‘therefore’, et ‘and’), is empirically and theoretically supported. Pragmatic theory can be described as a very powerful interface system which gives access to lexical and functional information, and which contains rich pragmatic enrichment processes, for non-lexical information (quantifier, tenses, connectives) as well as for lexical information (event predicates). The book’s originality stems from its demonstration that pragmatic enrichment is structurally constrained, and occurs at the level of explicature.

Time, Causality and Logical Words

Non-Lexical Pragmatics

Anne Reboul

Offers an accessible and thorough introduction to implicatures in pragmatics, and its interfaces with language and cognition.

Implicatures

It is a fact that tense, aspect and modality together form one of the most recurring and active areas of research in contemporary syntax and semantics, as well as in other disciplines of linguistics. A large number of syntactic and semantic phenomena are concerned by the temporal-aspectual-modal level of representation: information about time, aspect and modality is part of virtually all sentences; inflexion is quite widely considered as the core of syntactic projections. Because of this very crucial situation and role in the sentence structure, temporal-aspectual and modal information concerns virtually any part of the sentence and this information has scope over the whole characterization of the eventuality denoted by the sentence. This book is an up-to-date milestone for the studies of temporality and language, in particular regarding syntax and semantics, but with incidental hints to pragmatics and theories of human natural language understanding. Through this very tight selection of 15 papers (originally delivered during the 6th Chronos colloquium), tenses, aspect and modality are investigated both at the descriptive and theoretical levels, involving many different Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. The volume sheds light on a wide array of phenomena that remained too little explored until now. These include the following: modal subordination in Japanese, epistemic modals in Dutch and English in Free Indirect Speech contexts, aspectual readings of idioms, adverb-licensing with the German perfect, French imperfective past compared with English progressive past, infinitival perfect in English, Adult Root Infinitives, economy constraints on temporal subordinations, future modality, past interpretation of present tense in embedded clauses, and time without tenses in Mandarin and Navajo. The book is of interest to scholars and advanced students in the fields of linguistics (general linguistics, semantics, syntax) as well as philosophy and logic.

There is, at present, no book introducing the general issue of why language is specific to human beings, how it works, why language is not communication and communication is not language, why languages vary and how they evolved. Based on the most recent works in linguistics and pragmatics, Why Language? addresses many questions that everyone has about language. Starting from false claims about language and languages, showing that language is not communication and communication is not language, the first part (Language and Communication) ends by proposing a difference between linguistic rules and communicative principles. The second part (Language, Society, Discourse) includes domains of language and language uses which are generally taken as extrinsic to language, such as language variety, discourse and non-ordinary (literary) usages. Special attention is given to figures of discourse (metaphor, metonymy, irony) and literary usages such as narration and free indirect style. The reader, either specialist or amateur in language science, will find a first and unique synthesis about what we know today about language and what we have yet to learn, sketching what could be the future of linguistics in the next decades.

What Pragmatics Tells Us About Language And Communication

Why Language?

This book is a collection of articles dealing with theoretical issues in the study of tense, mood and aspect, as well as with specific semantic and syntactic problems raised by linguistic expressions dedicated to these domains across a variety of languages. Through these papers, strong variations are explored, but also crosslinguistic convergences are investigated. Numerous phenomena so far often left aside in linguistics are described and enlightened by different scientific standpoints, which they serve to illustrate. The languages investigated in this volume include Germanic languages (Dutch, English, German), Romance (French, Catalan, Italian), Slavic (Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Russian), Greek, and non-indoeuropean languages such as Thai, Digo and Kikuyu. Related topics such as grammaticalization, presuppositions, questions in dialogue, illocutionary acts and acquisition are incidentally called upon in order to shed light from the outside onto tense, mood (and modality) and aspect. This volume is of great interest for all scholars engaged in contemporary research on the linguistic expression of tense, mood and aspect. The papers gathered in this volume are a tight selection of the ones that were presented at the 6th Chronoscolloquium.

Theoretical and Descriptive Issues

Tense, Mood and Aspect

Genoveva Puskas

Ce volume rassemble une série d'articles qui accordent une attention particulière à des phénomènes qui mettent spécifiquement en relation le niveau sémantique et pragmatique de l'interprétation. Les textes ici présentés font directement appel à des notions comme la représentation d'événements, la prise en charge, le contexte narratif, la sémantique historique, la structure informationnelle, qui sont toutes, dans leur diversité, des notions à la fois sémantiques et pragmatiques. Rassemblant des contributions de chercheurs de grand renom (Georges Kleiber, Carl Vetters, Liliane Tasmowski, Bertrand Vérine) et de chercheurs plus jeunes, ce volume se structure en fonction de thématiques. Il s'ouvre ainsi par des réflexions sur le futur, puis traite des emplois modaux du conditionnel et du verbe pouvoir, puis de l'imparfait narratif à l'oral, puis le gérondif. Deux articles sont ensuite consacrés au subordonnées introduites parquando (en italien) et cuando (en espagnol). Enfin, la position du passé simple en français est revisitée à la lumière de l'interlangue d'apprenants anglophones.

Jacques Moeschler

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