scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1292573
The paper investigates the linguistic description and formal representation of inferential pragmatic connectives (PCs) in French. In general, there are three categories of PCs: (1) inferential PCs (like however) that exploit an inferential relation between propositions; (2) type-based PCs (like even, also, for inference etc.) that point to various typing relations between sentences and/or discourse fragments, and (3) temporal PCs (like then etc.) that connect eventualities. The authors claim that PCs are predicates or relations bearing on intensional arguments of various types. The difficulty is to substantiate the constraints that license such relations. The paper proposes to analyze inferential PCs as generalized quantifiers on sets of intensional entities, such as propositions or modal formulas. These sets are linked by the existence of certain proots, which capture some aspects of the inferential properties exhibited by inferential PCs. Section 2 explains intuitively the difference between inferential PCs and the two other classes. Section 3: (a) describes first the essential properties of inferential classes, (b) studies the consequence, opposite, and reevaluation PCs, and (c) examines the semantic typing of arguments (or semantic scope). Section 4 analyzes the linking relation and points out the distinction between abductive and deductive constraints. Some more sophisticated examples of generalized quantification behaviour for some consequence and reevaluation PCs are also considered. In sum, two main points are emphasized: (1) PCs impose constraints on the construction and management of their arguments. They behave as complex relations on complex semantic entities. In some cases, their behaviour can be seen as a generalized quantification on a proof space. (2) The observed constraints are essentially hybrid. Features and type systems are not enough to account for the behaviour of PCs, and it is necessary to formulate the constraints at a level where inferential (global) and local parameters, specific to each class of PCs, interact. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0912.00026].
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