16.2755, Review: Semantics/Pragmatics: Molendijk & Vet (2005)

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Subject: 16.2755, Review: Semantics/Pragmatics: Molendijk & Vet (2005)

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1)
Date: 22-Sep-2005
From: Anca Gata < Anca.Gata at ugal.ro >
Subject: Temporalité et attitude 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 25 Sep 2005 16:28:43
From: Anca Gata < Anca.Gata at ugal.ro >
Subject: Temporalité et attitude 
 

EDITORS: Molendijk, Arie; Vet, Co 
TITLE: Temporalité et attitude 
SUBTITLE: Structuration du discours et expression de la modalité 
SERIES: Cahiers Chronos 12 
PUBLISHER: Rodopi 
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-29.html 

Anca Gata, Department of Applied Modern Languages, "Dunarea de 
Jos" University, Galati, Romania

INTRODUCTION

'Temporalité et attitude' brings together papers presented at the 5th 
Chronos Colloquium, hosted by the University of Groningen in June 
2002, collected in the 12th issue of the series "Cahiers Chronos". It 
offers valuable contributions on discourse structure, modality, 
temporality and aspect in French, English, Polish and Serbo-Croatian, 
mainly from a pragmatic perspective. It is due to the work of the 
research group "Modalities of Fiction" at l'Université du Littoral - Côte 
d'Opale, France, in collaboration with the University of Groningen, 
The Netherlands. This book consists of 15 papers preceded by the 
editors' introduction, which is a summary of the articles. The first 
seven articles are mainly concerned with modality, while the following 
eight contributions concentrate on the relationship between 
temporality and aspectuality. References follow each separate 
contribution. References having no year mentioned are made to the 
volume under review itself.

SYNOPSIS

Andrée Borillo deals with the role of temporal adverbs as 'discourse 
connectives' (see also Borillo 1998, 2002). Adverbs such as PUIS, 
AUSSITÔT and SOUDAIN -- connective temporal Adverbs -- display a 
temporal value and connect logically or argumentatively discourse 
structures, to be distinguished from other connectives, which discard 
their initial / original temporal meaning to acquire other properties. The 
author claims that there are temporal adverbs in French, which at the 
same time preserve their temporal meaning and acquire a completely 
new function, displayed at discourse level. According to the author, 
such devices are about 20 in French, yet they are not seen as a 
compact category. Nevertheless, their detached initial position in the 
sentence pleads in favour of their identification as members of such a 
compact class. Adverbs of successivity, of immediate successivity, of 
sudden initiation of a process have several discursive characteristics 
but they do not share them all in the same way, and can thus be 
distinguished on the basis of these differences. 

Anne LeDraoulec examines the behaviour of the French aspectual 
and temporal adverbs AUSSITÔT and SOUDAIN as discourse 
connectives. Both render the ideas of rapidity and / or immediateness 
of a process, yet they have different meanings. According to the 
author, their scope is different: AUSSITÔT points to the rapid 
succession of two eventualities E1 and E2, while the use of SOUDAIN 
does not necessarily rely on a temporal relationship between E1 and 
E2. At first sight, the use of AUSSITÔT relies on the existence of a 
relationship of temporal consecution, which seems to account for its 
ability to logically connect E1 and E2 as a cause to its effect. This 
appears impossible in the case of SOUDAIN, which seems to behave 
in a different way. Nevertheless, the analysis of discourse samples 
shows that their discourse connective features rely on the meaning of 
temporal successivity, which can be taken as a very simple form of 
consecution. Only when the context is favorable can AUSSITÔT work 
as a logical connective, by explicating the relationship between a 
cause and its presumed consequence. SOUDAIN explicates a logical 
relationship between E1 and E2 in cases where E2 can and should be 
interpreted as a simple consequence of or as a response to E1. 

Jacques Moeschler's contribution 'Pragmatic connectives, directional 
inferences and mental representations' starts from the idea that 
pragmatic connectives should be dealt with as procedural devices. 
Temporal and causal inferences are often verbalized by means of 
such devices as French ET and PARCE QUE which act as 
connectives. Their meaning is supposed to be instructional, or 
computational, rather than descriptive or truth-conditional. The main 
question addressed by the author is: which operations, or inferences, 
on mental representations of eventualities do such connectives 
contribute to? The conclusions derived from the analysis of ET as a 
connective are the following: ET imposes grouping of mental 
representations (MR), except for MRs of states; temporal order is a 
characteristic of MRs of events only. PARCE QUE may have in its 
scope MRs of events, states, and speech acts. These conclusions are 
combined with the Directional Inferences Model (Moeschler 1998, 
1999, 2000a, 2000b), the three main principles of which are the 
following: A. Contextual information is stronger than linguistic 
information; B. Procedural information is stronger than conceptual 
information; C. Propositional procedural information is stronger than 
morphological procedural information. The conclusion of the analysis 
is that connectives encode both procedural and conceptual 
information. The latter type allows discourse interpretation when the 
conceptual relationship between events is not obvious. A connective is 
strong if it has its own conceptual meaning. A strong connective has a 
specific conceptual meaning, while a weak connective shares part of 
its conceptual meaning with other connectives.

Patrick Caudal and Laurent Roussarie's article 'Semantics and 
pragmatics of clauses introduced by Fr. SI' deals with the possible 
interpretation of such clauses in close connection with the semantics 
of the French conjunction SI combined with the semantics of the 
structure in which SI is used and that of the contextual factors which 
are characteristic of the semantics / pragmatics interface. The study is 
in the framework of the Segmented Discourse Representation Theory 
(Asher 1993), which allows a formal approach. Sentences of the 
type 'SI p, q' allow a wide range of discourse relationships between 'SI 
p' and 'q' which can be of the conditional or hypothetical type, but also 
of the type represented by 'S'il est vrai que p, q'. The authors find that 
in such structures, the clause introduced by SI is used to state a highly 
probable world, providing a very plausible alternative to the co(n)text. 
The conclusions of the study show that unified semantics of SI should 
allow a pragmatic interpretation on several distinct levels, depending 
on the semantics of the syntactic structure SI introduces or is 
governed by. While the monosemantic interpretation of a grammatical 
device is maintained, this approach allows a plurisemantic 
interpretation on the pragmatic level, in which contextual effects are 
aimed at: "the semantic value stays the same, while the interpretation 
is different" (Caudal & Roussarie: 65).

'LE FAIT QUE ... and the Subjunctive problem: directionality of 
grammaticalization' by Alexander Loengarov provides an analysis of 
the use of moods after LE FAIT QUE introducing a subject clause in 
French. The speaker chooses between the indicative and the 
subjunctive in order to trigger different interpretations. In French, the 
opposition between indicative and subjunctive in similar syntactic 
contexts is used to make a distinction between a particular entity (the 
Indicative has an individualising role) and any other entity belonging to 
a set (the subjunctive has a generalizing function). The indicative 
allows the speaker to state her certainty about the contents of the 
clause. The corpus analysis referred to in the article shows that: 1. 
clauses introduced by LE FAIT QUE + subjunctive usually state 
information the speaker and the hearer are already aware of; the 
indicative is used when the speaker finds it important to stress upon 
the truth value of the subordinate clause or upon the objective nature 
of the process referred to by the verb, that is when the informative 
value of the subordinate clause is very important; 2. the frequency of 
the subjunctive is quite high after 1960, when the subordinate clause 
has thematic position, while the indicative is given preference when 
the clause has rhematic position; 3. speakers tend to avoid the use of 
the subjunctive on account of its 'markedness' compared to the 
indicative.

Jean Claude Souesme analyses intonation phenomena characteristic 
of questions comprising a modal verb in English. The analysis follows 
Antoine Culioli's theory of utterance operations. Utterances taken into 
discussion comprise one of the following modal verbs: MAY / CAN 
(first person, for asking permission); WILL (second and third persons, 
with 'radical value', for making an offer or an invitation, and first 
person, especially for asking information or inquiring about some 
possible or probable event); SHALL / SHOULD (first person, for 
offering help or assistance -- usually to the hearer -- and for inquiring 
about the chances of existence of some hypothesized action or state); 
MUST (first person, with its 'radical value', for inquiring about the 
necessity of an action to be performed by the speaker). Intonation of 
such questions is different, being determined by the preconceived 
idea ('le préconstruit') the speaker has of the situation represented in 
the utterance. The concepts of utterance quantitative delimitation 
(spatio-temporal context) and qualitative delimitation (the speaker's 
subjective representation) are used throughout the analysis. The 
author claims that the level of adequacy between the two is the main 
factor determining falling or rising intonation of questions introduced 
by a modal verb in English. The opposition between falling and rising 
intonation generally conforms to the dichotomy established between 
(almost) certainty of question validation by the hearer and doubt about 
question validation on the part of the hearer. 

Merete Birkelund's study on 'Negation and Modality' in French 
focuses on expressions of deontic modality. One objective is to 
interpret choices made by authors of texts of the type of contracts. 
The second aim is to identify reasons for which such authors show 
less preference for DEVOIR than for the French present and simple 
future tenses, as well as for POUVOIR. According to the author, texts 
of the contractual type are performative; the main types of speech 
acts which characterize them are directives and commissives. 
Therefore, the modal value that can be assigned to them is deontic 
and centered upon the existence of some eventuality in the future. 
Some of the important findings for the study of "contractual texts" in 
French are: 
1. the main linguistic devices used to render contractual obligations 
are DEVOIR (in the affirmative or negative) and POUVOIR (in the 
negative), and the present and the simple future tenses; 
2. these do not yield synonymous meanings and interpretations; 
3. the present tense states an obvious general rule; 
4. the simple future states a rule to be obeyed to in the contractual 
world; 
5. POUVOIR in the negative blocks a particular action from being 
performed in the contractual world; 
6. POUVOIR in the negative is given preference compared to DEVOIR 
either in the negative or in the affirmative. 

For Patrick Caudal and Carl Vetters, tenses are speech act functions; 
this explains the possibility of a tense to yield multiple meanings and 
interpretations at the level of discourse. This idea allows a unified 
treatment of verbal forms such as the French conditional, future 
and 'imperfect'. The illocutionary meaning of the 'imperfect' is 
underspecified and is not associated in itself with an assertive since it 
does not always imply commitment to the truthfulness of the 
propositional content. It is undetermined with respect to transitionality, 
it has a non-actual character and it is used as a background tense. 
The future is of a 'transparent' nature from the aspectual point of view; 
it gives no indication on transitionality and shows that an event, seen 
as a speech act referent, is subsequent to another speech act 
referent, which is contextually determined. In this light, the French 
conditional brings together a consecution operator (of both temporal 
and modal nature) and an internal-neutral aspectual viewpoint 
operator. The 'imperfect' semantics is associated to it since the idea of 
non-actuality is revealed in its interpretations either as a morpheme of 
the past (a 'future in the past') or as a morpheme of fictitious (unreal) 
modality.

In her article, 'ÊTRE + past participle with a Resultative Meaning in the 
French Verbal System', Véronique Lagae discusses the two different 
problematic perspectives usually adopted in research on this structure 
which can stand either for a passive or for a 'passé composé': 1. the 
aspectual interpretation; 2. the resultative interpretation, in which 
ÊTRE is not considered an auxiliary but a copula and the past 
participle is seen as an adjective (a unified treatment of such 
structures is provided by Evrard 2002, in which ÊTRE is treated as a 
copula). Analysis of examples illustrative of various interpretations 
reveals that the behaviour of the structure under discussion is 
complex and has to be carefully examined in strict connexion with 
telicity, (internal) argument structure and by comparison with other 
structures.

Greta Komur considers the issue of the 'Transfer of verbal aspect to 
noun in Polish' by focusing on a nominal category made up of 
deverbals concurrencing <<derived from??>> the Infinitive. They have 
nominal functions and are marked for case. One of their main features 
dealt with in the article is that they can be also marked for the 
imperfective and perfective values transferred on them from the verb 
they are derived from. The analysis shows that only abstract nouns 
maintain the opposition perfective / imperfective in a similar way to 
verbs. Moreover, some verbal forms cannot carry both aspectual 
values. The author introduces the following distinctions in the category 
of deverbal nouns, which may have: 
1. perfective value and concrete meaning; 
2. imperfective value and concrete meaning; 
3. perfective or imperfective value and abstract meaning. 
These aspectual features also have a role in the use of prepositions, 
which may select differently a perfective, an imperfective or both the 
perfective and the imperfective values of a verbal noun.

Maria Antoniou examines the behaviour of the French 'passé 
composé' by unifying all its interpretations under the aoristic 
representation. In the author's view, its function is not to situate 
processes in the past, but to seize the process as a whole from the 
outside, the tense being thus able to refer equally to past, present and 
future. According to the author, the 'passé composé' is an aspectual 
marker of achievement ('accompli'), being similar to the 'passé simple', 
if one takes into account the way in which the process is represented 
by the speaker.

In 'Resultative Present Perfect: aspectual markers', Bissera Iankova-
Gorgatchev deals with utterances where the English Present Perfect 
tense is used with a resultative value. In intransitive structures in 
which a state of the sentence subject is referred to, utterance 
interpretation is mainly determined by the verb meaning, which can 
also reinforce aspectual information (process achievement), as is the 
case with telic verbs (GO ON, OPEN UP). In transitive structures with 
a direct object quantified by A / AN or THE, the situation referred to by 
the utterance is the result of an achieved process. One of the main 
findings is that with atelic verbs (e.g. LEAVE) the only aspectual 
marker is such an article, which yields the resultative interpretation of 
the sentence.

'Recomposition of the aspectual-temporal system in Serbo-Croatian', 
by Paul-Louis Thomas, approaches past tenses used in four different 
translations of the New Testament into Bosnian, Croatian, 
Montenegrin and Serbian. The comparative study reveals an evolution 
of the verbal system with a relative decline of the 'imperfect' tense, 
largely replaced in today's language by the perfect and the present, 
which can both have an imperfective value. The 'imperfect' seems to 
have slowly extinguished because of its different forms in various 
dialects, while speakers coming from different regions and aiming at 
understanding used common language and gave preference to the 
less particular forms (koineisation, cf. Trudgill 1986). On the other 
hand, the variable morphology of the 'imperfect', built for some verbs 
on an infinitival root and for others on the present root, may be 
assumed to have had a certain impact on its progressive decline.

Emmanuelle Labeau gives a counterargument to Robison's (1990) 
and Andersen's (1986, 1991) theories on the primacy of aspect in 
second language acquisition interlanguage, which state that verbal 
morphemes of a target language are first used in learners' 
interlanguage to indicate aspect, no matter of their function and 
meaning in mother tongue. The author's experiment shows that in the 
case of the French Indicative the hypothesis is confirmed, the present 
tense being used instead of the 'imparfait'. But in most cases, as 
revealed by the experiment, the acquisition of past tenses is 
determined by the learners' ability to combine verbal aspect and 
lexical aspect as the latter is rendered by various contextual elements, 
such as direct and / or indirect object, aspectual lexical adverbials. At 
the same time, it is not enough to consider that only aspect acquisition 
is of use in learning past tenses in French. In the author's view, larger 
corpora and various levels of acquisition should be studied in order to 
give a sounder explanation of the issue.

Dany Amiot, Walter de Mulder and Nelly Flaux are concerned with the 
particular behaviour of the structure of the type NOUS SOMMES 
DIMANCHE. The French first person plural pronoun NOUS is allowed 
while no other definite pronoun can be used in the same way. One 
explanation could be the semantics of NOUS, since its reference is in 
this case quite similar to that of the indefinite pronoun ON, which also 
allowed in the structure. The verb cannot be used in the 'passé 
simple', 'passé antérieur', 'futur antérieur', 'passé récent', 'futur 
périphrastique', 'présent progressif', the imperative, the only possible 
verbal forms being those which provide the "inner" representation of 
the situation. The only possible answer is the correct interpretation, on 
the basis of syntactic and semantic observations, of the variable 'week 
day', since DIMANCHE can be replaced by any other noun naming 
one of the weekdays. The variable does not behave here as a 
predicative element, its meaning being more easily associated 
with 'situation in time', as if the variable were the expression of a place 
(in time).

DISCUSSION

This books presents valuable insights into the pragmatics, semantics 
and syntax of a variety of linguistic forms. The volume focuses on 
verbal forms and verbal determination, including issues on aspect, 
modality and tense. Accounting for these is one of the main goals of 
discourse theories. The studies represented in this collection of 
papers provide an excellent idea of the variety of approaches and 
research questions at issue in tense and aspect linguistics nowadays. 
Its merit is emphasized by the attention paid to several languages the 
analyses are concerned with. This issue of "Cahiers Chronos", like the 
previous ones, is of interest to anyone preoccupied with problems of 
aspect, mood, tense and 'attitude'; attitude is seen as speaker 
commitment to the propositional content of the utterance. The various 
articles may present unequal interest for one and the same 
researcher, yet the issue is extremely valuable for scholars who study 
tense and aspect, modality, discourse in general. It is also thought 
provoking by connecting all these concepts under the headings 
of 'temporality' and 'attitude' since verbal forms usually known 
as 'tenses' have multiple interpretations at discourse level. Of course 
one of its main purposes is to present work in progress, hypotheses 
and partial conclusions, this is why the issues dealt with still need 
refining and discussion. The rich bibliography that is provided under 
the references following each article is not to be neglected both by 
linguists in general and by discourse analysts in particular. 

One critical remark: I personally would have expected at least eleven 
articles or at least those specially concerned with issues of aspect, 
mood, tense or -- more generally -- one single article, to have taken 
into consideration a Guillaumian perspective, illustrated if not by an 
explanatory excerpt or a bibliographical reference, then by a critical 
discussion and questioning. Which unfortunately means that one of 
the greatest linguists and language philosophers still remains to be 
discovered in spite of the (almost?) 20 volumes published so far, 
consisting mainly of the conferences he used to give. I will not cite 
myself any volume since they may be of unequal quality, but a 
bibliography of Guillaume's work of interest on tense and modality can 
be found at http://www.fl.ulaval.ca/fgg/publications/index.htm. 

REFERENCES

Andersen, R. (1986). El desarollo de la morfología verbal en el 
español como segundo idioma, in J. Meisel (ed.), Acquisição da 
linguagem. Frankfurt: Klaus-Dieter Vervuert Verlag.

Andersen, R. (1991). Models, processes, principles and strategies: 
second language acquisition inside and outside the classroom, in B. 
van Patten & J. Lee (eds.), Second Language Acquisition Language 
Learning. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Asher, N. (1993). Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse. 
Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Borillo, A. (1998). Les adverbes de référence temporelle comme 
connecteurs temporels de discours, in S. Vogeleer et al., Temps et 
discours: 131-145. Louvain-La-Neuve: Peeters.

Borillo, A. (2002). Les connecteurs temporels et la structuration du 
discours, in H. L. Andersen et al., Macro-syntaxe et macro-
sémantique: 239-256. Berne: Peter Lang.

Évrard, I. (2002). Le temps, c'est de l'agent! ÊTRE + participe passé: 
structure prédicative et référence aspecto-temporelle, Revue de 
linguistique romane 66: 245-260.

Moeschler, J. (1998). Les relations entre événements et 
l'interprétation des énoncés, in J. Moeschler et al., Le temps des 
événements: Pragmatique de la référence temporelle: 293-321. Paris: 
Kimé.

Moeschler, J. (1999). Linguistique et pragmatique cognitive, Le Gré 
des Langues 15: 10-33.

Moeschler, J. (2000a). L'ordre temporel dans le discours: le modèle 
des inférences directionnelles, Cahiers Chronos 6: 1-11.

Moeschler, J. (2000b). Le modèle des inférences directionnelles, 
Cahiers de Linguistique Française 22: 57-100.

Robison, R. E. (1990). The primacy of aspect: Aspectual marking in 
English interlanguage, Studies in Second Language Acquisition 12: 
315-330.

Trudgill, P. (1986). Dialects in contact. Oxford: Blackwell. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

My research interests are in the fields of Discourse Analysis and 
Pragmatics of Tense. My main concerns are with futurity and 
prediction, and argumentation studies.





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