Louis de Saussure

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Full) at University of Neuchâtel

Le masculin générique, selon plusieurs études de psycholinguistique expérimentale, induisent un biais masculin dans les représentations des sujets parlants. Cet article passe en revue les principaux résultats obtenus par ces études et examine leurs protocoles expérimentaux et leur méthodologie en en montrant les limites.

This article attempts to provide a general overview of the role that, particularly for a speaker in the context of a second language, we propose to call “linguistic experience”. By this term, we mean the repeated and intimate experimentation with the use of language. This linguistic experience results in a set of effects primarily embedded in the d...

It has long been received wisdom in semantics and pragmatics that 'the head' and 'the heart' are two opposing forces, a view that has led scholars, until now, to explore the mental processes behind cognition, and the mental processes behind emotion, as two separate entities. This bold, innovative book challenges this view, and provides an original...

This article addresses, experimentally, the question of how presuppositions are cognitively processed and retrieved in discourse. In the proposed research, we have administered tweets produced by Italian politicians to native speakers so as to assess how easily they could retrieve the presupposed content of two presupposition triggers (definite des...

Contributors to this volume address questions about time on the micro-level of physical reality, as well as time in language and discourse on the macro: How do human feelings and sensations of time passing relate to metaphysical time of tenseless reality? What do different natural languages tell us about the nature of human time? What exactly is th...

Contributors to this volume address questions about time on the micro-level of physical reality, as well as time in language and discourse on the macro: How do human feelings and sensations of time passing relate to metaphysical time of tenseless reality? What do different natural languages tell us about the nature of human time? What exactly is th...

No programa da relevância, Wilson (2012; 2018; 2019) tem conduzido o estudo literário expondo duas conflitantes concepções. A primeira é a concepção dos teóricos relevantistas de que a relevância contribui para o estudo da literatura. A segunda concepção é um contraponto da teoria da literatura, especificada no nome do crítico literário Keith Green...

Dans cet article, nous tentons d’éclairer les différences entre la conjonction de coordination en grec moderne et en français à travers une approche pragmatique cognitive inspirée de la théorie de la pertinence de Sperber et Wilson (1995 [1986]). À la suite d’une littérature bien établie dans cette tradition, nous admettons deux types d’expressions...

This chapter synthesizes an account of emotions and emotion-reading that fits with work on emotions in cognitive science (Cosmides and Tooby 2000; Deonna and Teroni 2012) and cognitive models of pragmatics (Blakemore 2002; Carston 2001; Sperber and Wilson [1986] 1995, 2015; Wilson 2015). From cognitive science, we adopt two ideas: firstly, that an...

This paper proposes a pragmatic solution to utterances where the various indicators of time and aspect (tenses, lexical-conceptual features of Aktionsart, adverb phrases and contextual cues) seem to have divergent temporal reference and aspectual properties. This type of cases is usually treated at the semantic level as ‘mismatches’ and resolved co...

In this paper, we argue that the successful integration of expressive acts of communication into an inferential theory of pragmatics faces a major challenge. Most post-Gricean pragmatic theories have worked to develop accounts of the interpretive processes at work in the communication of propositions; the challenge, therefore, is how expressive act...

Implicit communication is an effective way to achieve manipulation. Strategies such as presupposition, implicature, metaphor, vagueness, etc., often allow achieving manipulative communicative moves reducing the receiver’s conscious awareness on the truth of some content. People’s understanding of implicitly conveyed meanings is the object of much s...

Since the communication of information about emotional states clearly plays a central role in human interaction, it might be presumed that pragmatic accounts of linguistic communication would include well developed views on how these states are communicated. However, for a range of reasons, aspects of linguistic communication which feel as if they...

Il est difficile d’identifier des concepts plus fondamentaux en philosophie du langage et en linguistique que ceux de deixis et anaphore. La deixis concerne les marqueurs linguistiques contextuels qui atteignent leur référent par le biais de la situation énonciative, comme « je », « tu », « celui-ci », « maintenant », « ici », etc. Les expressions...

This volume presents two works elaborating a general theory of words and their structure written by René de Saussure, younger brother of Ferdinand de Saussure. Although originating in René de Saussure's concerns for the structure of Esperanto, these essays are clearly intended to articulate a general account of word formation in natural language. T...

Dans cet article, nous proposons de réfléchir aux formes que prennent les émotions et aux modalités de leur expression dans la littérature dans le contexte de l’intérêt des sciences humaines et sociales pour les émotions, qui s’est récemment traduit par un emotional turn ou un affective turn. Partant d’une définition récente des émotions comme atti...

In this paper, we consider the straw man fallacy from the perspective of pragmatic inference. Our main claim is that the straw man fallacy is a ‘pragmatic winner’ not primarily because of its persuasive power but rather because it targets the pragmatic cognitive-inferential skills of its victim while enhancing the prestige of its author. We conside...

Dans cet article, nous nous interrogeons sur les raisons pour lesquelles le verbe devoir au conditionnel passé suscite une lecture contrefactuelle, alors que ni devoir ni le conditionnel, passé ou non, n’y conduisent à eux seuls. Notre tentative de solution sera pragmatique et s’attache à la concurrence que se livrent ces deux expressions au niveau...

Prenant le vocabulaire des couleurs comme fil rouge et parfois comme prétexte, cet essai à l’écriture libérée du jargon habituel des spécialistes invite à une réflexion contemporaine sur un ensemble de thèmes relatifs au langage, à la catégorisation du monde et aux ressorts complexes de la communication langagière. Laissant une place significative...

Dans cet article, nous nous intéressons aux usages des temps verbaux qui n'entrent pas dans les cadres habituels. Plus précisément, nous nous penchons sur des effets 'perspectivaux' de l'imparfait-qui surviennent en donnant lieu à de la pensée représentée ou du point de vue-, du passé composé-qui reposent sur un conflit avec un adverbe à dénotation...

The study presented in this paper attempts to reconfirm the assumption that there is a divergence between what Gricean (and successive) theories predict about the explicitness / implicitness divide and how people actually consider what is explicit and what is implicit in a particular utterance. Doing so, the paper also suggests a notion of strength...

This paper examines a puzzling property of utterances with sporadic aspect, i.e. indicating the occasional reoccurrence of a given state of affairs: these utterances are incompatible with negation, hence sporadic aspect seems to activate a context of positive polarity. We investigate this issue on three markers of sporadicity in French: sporadic po...

This article aims at determining the type of ambiguity manifested by modal verbs, focusing on French. Modal verbs are often described as polysemous since they seem to encode a fixed number of possible meanings. Options of offer are the following: (i) that modal verbs are indeed polysemous according to a technical notion of polysemy, i.e. they encod...

Cet article envisage les verbes modaux pouvoir et devoir comme conceptuels et non procéduraux-grammaticaux d’une part, mais surtout comme sous-déterminés sémantiquement et comme non polysémiques d’autre part, dans le sens de polysémique qui suppose une conventionnalisation des significations. Nous tentons de montrer que les effets de sens de ces ve...

Cet article investigue la question de savoir quel est exactement le type d"ambiguïté sémantique manifestée par les verbes modaux, souvent décrits comme « polysémiques » dans une acception non technique de cette notion. Les options en présence sont i) la polysémie strico-sensu ; ii) la polysémie complétée par une sous-détermination ; iii) la procédu...

Commençons par l'anecdote : Cyril, 9 ans, et Zacharie, 10 ans, échangent de verts arguments, sous le regard d'Alice, 11 ans. Il est question de la nature de la phrase, et les avis divergent. Pour Cyril, une phrase n'est une phrase que si elle a un sens. Pour Zacharie, au contraire : une phrase n'a pas besoin d'avoir un sens pour être une phrase ; e...

This article addresses one of the criteria provided by Berlin & Kay (1969) when they distinguish between what they call basic and non basic colour terms. They suggest that these terms – which bear the property of denoting abstractly a chromatic span – present an identical morphological distribution. They take the example, in English, of the contras...

This paper extends the notion of presupposition to inferences providing grounds for relevance or meaningfulness; it is claimed that such presuppositions get accommodated quite in the same way as presuppositions proper, and that they have a particular efficiency in persuasive situations. It is argued that they bypass controls of relevance and that t...

Structure and meanings of the surcomposé tense: diatopic variants of a specific semantics In this paper, we propose a pragmatic solution to the French surcomposé (double composed) past tense (SPT) puzzle, after we first draw a global contrastive picture of double composed pasts. The puzzle raised by French SPT is that it presents a particularly str...

This paper aims at showing how pragmatics, today a discipline developing in close connection with cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, provides new ways to envisage Discourse Analysis. In this article, we first discuss the relationship between pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, focusing on the links between the process of utterance unders...

In this paper, we review the various types of epistemic usages of the (simple and anterior) future tenses in French with the assumption that what actually licenses their occurrence is not a semantic feature such as aspect but pragmatic effects that give relevance to the utterance at the moment of speech. We review the main hypotheses proposed in th...

RÉSUMÉ Cet article étudie les effets de sens du passé composé (PC) sous la portée d'un adverbe situeur futur en français. Nous partons de l'hypothèse de Sthioul (1998) selon laquelle cet usage du PC impose une représentation conçue comme passée depuis une projection allocentrique du moment de la parole située dans le futur. Cet article considère qu...

Epistemic modality, evidentiality and contextual dependency This paper takes a pragmatic view on epistemic and evidential meanings of modal verbs and epistemic futures, which are traditionally debated in this respect. Our approach allows for a pragmatic construction of the truth conditions and attempts at escaping the problem of polysemic meanings...

Louis de Saussure, Epistemic modality, evidentiality and contextual dependency This paper takes a pragmatic view on epistemic and evidential meanings of modal verbs and epistemic futures, which are traditionally debated in this respect. Our approach allows for a pragmatic construction of the truth conditions and attempts at escaping the problem of...

This paper proposes a pragmatic account of modal utterances triggering sporadic interpretations, such as Lions can be dangerous, which quantify over individuals (some lions are dangerous) or over times (lions are sometimes dangerous). English and French are compared in this respect. We suggest that sporadic interpretations stem from a pragmatic sch...

A number of languages offer a tense composed with a present auxiliary, a past participle auxiliary, and a past participle. French is known to offer such a double composed, or "surcomposé" past tense (SPT). This form bears morphological resemblances with the English (infrequent) SPT, or "double perfect," and with SPTs in other Germanic and Romance l...

This article echoes concerns recently formulated regarding CDA's lack of attention to cognitive science (or evolutionary psychology). From a cognitive pragmatic viewpoint, I argue that discourse analysis should undergo an epistemological change in order to seriously take into account what cognitive (thus naturalistic) approaches have to offer, in p...

The assumption developed in this chapter is that the available criteria for classifying an expression as conceptual or procedural are not specific enough, since they may lead one to think that some procedural expressions encode some relevant conceptual load of information (and vice versa). A methodological criterion is proposed: if all possible mea...

This paper focuses on criterion V by Berlin & Kay (1969), which states that basic colour terms have a stable morphological distribution. Their example is English suffix -ish, which is acceptable only with basic terms (grey, greyish). Here we examine how this criterion fits with French, in particular through the French suffix -âtre, but also as conc...

This paper attempts to identify the pragmatic constraints that license the use of the present perfect with a future time adverb in French, such as J'ai bientôt fini (lit. 'I have soon finished') or Dans une heure, le président est sorti de sa réunion (lit. 'In an hour, the president has exited from his meeting'). Previous studies have argued that o...

Subjectivity plays an important role in how meaning is created and construed. It concerns the expression of self and the representation of a speaker's perspective or point of view in the interaction with somebody else. The subjectivity explored in this article concerns mainly one special form of self-awareness insofar as it is related to irony. The...

Le présent article aborde la notion d'engagement d'un point de vue prag-matique et défend l'idée générale que les processus par lesquels les desti-nataires sont en mesure d'asserter l'engagement d'un locuteur vont de pair avec les processus présidant à la dérivation du sens. Tout en discu-tant l'utilité d'une approche classique qui associe très étr...

This paper proposes a cognitive-pragmatic alternative to the traditional, speech-acttheoretic, account of the notion of commitment. The perspective adopted here questions the relevance of addressing actual commitment as a speaker category and shifts the focus of the discussion from properties of speaker commitment to processes of commitment attribu...

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, aspe...

The term discourse is generally used either as a technical equivalent for 'verbal communication' or as referring to a particular scientific notion, where discourses are spans of texts or of utterances obeying specific principles of organisation. The aim of this paper is to suggest that an account of discourse is possible, in both cases, only throug...

Louis de Saussure, born in 1967, is assistant professor of general linguistics at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland), reader in Saussurean linguistics at the University of Geneva (Switzerland), and scientist at the University of Lugano (Switzerland). After having taught semantics and pragmatics at the University of Geneva, he lectured in phi...

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This paper focuses on non standard uses of the present indexical maintenant in French, typically free indirect speech usages, and argumentative usages. First, two approaches of indexicality are briefly compared. In the Continental tradition, indexicality is a notion traditionally associated with "subjectivity", with a regard to psychosocial theorie...

In this article we will take a look at a particular epistemic usage of the French future tense. Our approach is a radically pragmatic one, where we posit that what should be taken into account for the interpretation of such occurrences depends more upon pragmatic than semantic aspects. Building upon Sperber & Wilson’s distinction between descriptiv...

The paper suggests that the notion of metarepresentation , usual in cognitive pragmatics and philosophy of language, allows for a fine-grained analysis of specific interpretive effects in represented thought and speech in the specific context of written press. It is argued, on the theoretical side, that metarepresentation can significantly improve...

Parallelism and linearity of utterance interpretation : a case study with implicit causality. Within the framework of Relevance Theory, this paper addresses the distinction between explicatures and implicatures through a theoretical case study, where a causal implicature determines the temporal reference of the current utterance, which is generally...

This book is a collection of 12 papers dealing with manipulation and ideology in the 20th century, mostly with reference to political speeches by the leaders of major totalitarian regimes, but also addressing propaganda within contemporary right-wing populism and western ideological rhetoric. This book aims at bringing together researchers in the f...

Cet article revient sur le cas de la causalité inverse sans marqueur expli-cite, et pose l'hypothèse que la relation causale est alors implicite. Inver-sement, on y défend l'idée que la référence temporelle de l'énoncé relève de l'explicite, ce qui pose un problème pour la pragmatique radicale, qui a besoin d'explicatures comme prémisses pour tirer...

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