rappel: apr ès-midi de la causalité : 11 déc

[Bridget Copley]

Le projet « La causalité dans le langage et la cognition » de la Fédération « Typologie et Universaux Linguistiques » a le plaisir d'annoncer deux exposés qui auront lieu mardi le 11 décembre 2012, 14:30 - 17:00, au Centre Pouchet du CNRS, salle 108 :


Syntax and Intentionality: An automatic link between language and theory-of-mind
Brent Strickland (Yale University)

How to cause a passive state: The role of by-phrases in adjectival passives 
Berit Gehrke (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)



résumés : 

Syntax and Intentionality: An automatic link between language and theory-of-mind
Brent Strickland (Yale University) 
Certain aspects of theory-of-mind appear to be automatic, arising in ways that people cannot control and that may even conflict with the judgments they make after careful reflection (e.g. Heider & Simmel, 1947). Here I show that linguistic cues trigger automatic attributions of mental states via a link between the grammatical subject position and a core notion of agency.

An initial series of experiments shows that automatic syntactic biases contrast sharply with more reflective judgments concerning intentionality. Consider a logically reversible sentence like “John exchanged books with Steven”. Under time pressure people have an overwhelming tendency to perceive John as having acted more intentionally than Steven. However this bias disappears when people are given the opportunity to think deeply about the action in question. A second study shows that biases for grammatical subjects result from an association with a central concept of agency that is capable of influencing not only intentionality but also moral judgments regarding punishment and blame. A third and final study exploits the automatic attribution of intentionality to grammatical subjects to provide experimental support for the “unaccusativity hypothesis” (Perlmutter, 1978). Thus in speeded relative to unspeeded conditions, there exists an intentionality bias for unergative but not unaccusative verbs. This is exactly the pattern of results that one would expect if unaccusative (but not unergative) verbs involved the covert movement of a grammatical object to the grammatical subject position.

As a whole, the results presented here suggest a privileged relationship between language and central theory-of-mind representations (like that of an intentional agent). More specifically, they indicate that there are at least two distinct modes of generating intentionality judgments: (1) an automatic verbal bias heavily influenced by linguistic structure (2) a deeper, more careful consideration of a given event.



How to cause a passive state: The role of by-phrases in adjectival passives 
Berit Gehrke (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

The received view for languages like English and German is that in adjectival passives – as opposed to verbal passives – the external argument of the underlying verb is truly absent. This view, combined with the common assumption that by-phrases syntactically and semantically express external arguments, leads to the prediction that by-phrases should only be possible with verbal passives. The puzzling fact is that the literature reports many instances of German adjectival passives combining with phrases headed by von ‘by’. In this paper, I will maintain, as standardly assumed, that these constructions are adjectival in nature, and I will show that (eventive) by-phrases with them are crucially different from those with verbal passives. Based on the general restrictions on event-related modification with adjectival passives, I propose that adjectival passives refer to the instantiation of a consequent state kind of an event kind. Overall, then, I will be concerned with the question what it means to have verbal structure within adjectives and what the consequences are for the nature of the underlying event. My answer to this question is that, as a consequence of the adjectival categorization of verbal material the event associated with the verbal predicate does not get instantiated but instead remains in the kind domain. I propose that it follows from this that event participants also remain in the kind domain and do not get instantiated.

résumé complet ci-joint
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