Towards a new typology of connectives with special reference to conjunction in English and Korean (original) (raw)
Related papers
On the pragmatics of logical connectives
Aspects of Linguistic Variation, 2018
This paper discusses the issue of connectives in natural language, adopting a formalist approach in pragmatics. The outcome is that truth-conditional connectives are limited to conjunction, disjunction and conditional, and that negation, even in its metalinguistic and non-truth-conditional usages, has representational contextual effects, as suppressing a proposition and a presupposition or strengthening a proposition. As regards discourse connectives, they exhibits a strong pragmatic property, that is, they almost all exhibit factivity. Finally, quasi-synonym connectives, as causal ones, do not differ in meaning but in the way their conceptual and procedural meanings are distributed at different layers.
Semantics and Pragmatics: Acquisition of Logical Connectives and Focus
Until quite recently, it was taken for granted that human languages were logical. It seemed so obvious that no one even bothered to question it. After all, some of the greatest thinkers of their time spoke Indo-European languages, others spoke Asian languages, and still others spoke Greco-Roman languages. Yet the native tongues of these intellectual giants did not appear to leave any indelible marks on the arguments they presented. Carefully reasoned arguments that were spawned in one language were meticulously translated into other languages, without any apparent loss of either content or validity.
Motivating the procedural analysis of logical connectives
2015
With a view to addressing the non-truth-conditional meaning of discourse connectives from a cognitive perspective, relevance theorists have for long pursued the argument that the relevant expressions do not carry conceptual (≈denotational) meaning, but rather encode procedures, i.e. instructions which guide pragmatic inference by creating cognitive 'shortcuts' that the hearer takes advantage of during utterance interpretation. At the same time, they assume that logical connectives are conceptual, rather than procedural encodings. In this paper, I explore the extent to which an analysis of logical connectives along procedural lines is viable, by offering a number of arguments which suggest that logical connectives can and should be studied on a par with discourse ones.
Proceedings of the Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium 2013, 2014
On one prominent view, endorsed by several authors pursuing neo-Gricean approaches, scalar implicatures like "but not both" in the exclusive interpretation of the conjunction or "A or B but not both," are generated automatically by default in the absence of context. By contrast, the contextualist view holds that scalar implicatures arise only when licensed by the context. We addressed this dispute by performing a sentence-picture verification task experiment, comparing the processing of two connectives in Hungarian: és ("and") and vagy ("or"). Crucially, the verification task required only a shallow processing of the meaning of target sentences. The results suggest that in such a task, while the entailment of the connective and was computed automatically, the implicature of or was not activated. This finding speaks against defaultism, and favors contextualist approaches to generalized conversational implicatures.
The Pragmatics of Connectives in English and Igala
Journal, 2019
This paper examined the pragmatics of connectives in English and Igala. The article revealed that pragmatic connectives usually express relations between speech acts. That is, it essentially handles the issue of how connectives perform their linking functions contextually or pragmatically to encode meaning in a language. When two propositions are linked by a connective, whether uttered by an interlocutor or between an interlocutor and a listener, pragmatics plays a pivotal role in influencing their meanings to be something different from what they should be denotatively. Data collection for this research was generated exclusively from secondary sources, which was drawn mainly from the existing material on pragmatic connectives in both languages. Thus, the pragmatic implications of propositions linked by connectives were clearly presented and analysed concurrently. The data comprised five utterances of both English and Igala, which also contained five connectives, namely: àmâ 'but', todúlɛ́ 'so', ʧájí 'unless/until/till', àbɛkí 'or' and íʧɛun 'if' were selected, presented and analysed. The English data was labelled A while the one on Igala was marked B. The major result of the study indicated that connectives actually have pragmatic value, especially when linked with two propositions in both languages. Introduction Pragmatic connectives usually express relations between speech acts. Normally, speech acts do not come alone. They actually occur in ordered sequences as accomplished by one speaker or subsequent speakers, e.g. in the course of a conversation. In other words, a sound analysis of speech acts, which is a central task in pragmatics, to some extent, cannot be carried out without previous understanding of the notion of an act or action. As a matter of fact, a serious linguistic pragmatics should not only account for speech acts but also for relations between speech acts and the ways these relations are expressed in the sentences and texts used to perform such speech act sequences. Particularly then, our main concern in this research is to investigate how these relations are expressed by various connectives in both English and Igala languages.
CONJUNCTIONS IN ENGLISH: MEANING, TYPES AND USES
This paper contains an in-depth study of conjunctions, including their meaning, types as well as uses or functions in English. Conjunctions are words that link or connect two words, phrases, clauses or sentences together, either in speech or in writing. Conjunctions are one of the eight parts of speech in English, according to the traditional grammar. Apart from the coordinating, subordinating and correlative types, the author has also researched into other kinds of conjunctions that can be of great interest to the reader. The author deemed it necessary to carry out a study of this kind because over the years, this important area of language study has received less attention from language scholars and students of English/linguistics in comparison with other parts of speech like nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions. As this paper had unveiled, the author had not only conceived of conjunctions as one of the eight parts of speech in English, as upheld in traditional grammar, but also went beyond to examine the meaning and uses of conjunctions semantically and pragmatically as well as in propositional logic. This study is very significant, as it provides an impetus for those who hitherto have not thought of researching into this area of language study. Furthermore, the paper has presented before the reader a myriad of sentential examples for easy understanding or comprehension.
An Inquiry into Connectives and Their Use in Written Discourse
Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 2012
Problem Statement: To know a language means to be able to produce coherent verbal and written texts to convey one's message to the addressee. Texture is a matter of meaning relations and this is what distinguishes a text from something that is not. The text should function as a unity with respect to its environment. An important aspect of discourse understanding and generation involves the recognition and processing of discourse relations and as such connective devices, also known as connectors, play a significant role in the formation and interpretation of the relations present in a text. Method: In the present study connectives both in Turkish and English have been analyzed in terms of their structural properties through the written works of two groups of students studying at Hacettepe University in Ankara. The analysis is based on the same principles as Kamil Kurtul 111 the Penn Discourse TreeBank, which lists connective devices into three categories as coordinating, subordinating conjunctions and sentence adverbials. So as to analyze the reasons behind the mistakes of the participants, a Grammaticality Judgement Test has been designed and implemented. Conclusion: The results indicate that there occurs L1 effect on both groups' use of connectives in L2 regardless of their language backgrounds.
Conjunction and Causality: Pragmatics and the Lexicon
1993
Conjunctions (e.g., "if, and, so") appear in varied contexts and are associated with a wide range oi interpretations. The theoretical options concerning the lexical specifications of these items are: (1) multiplicity of senses; and (2) restricted senses augmented by conversational implicatures. It is proposed here that the latter position is more applicable. Attention is confined to one possible interpretation with which such conjunctions may be associated: causality. It is argued that causality is a major reasoning principle that interacts with some versions of inference maxims (following H. P. Grice's theory of implicature) to yield the desired interpretation. This account also provides an explanation for a range of additional instances where implicit causal relations hold and will shed light on the convergence, in a variety of languages, of readings inv,lving causality with those associated with addition, conditionality, and temporality, among others. Contains 28 references. (MSE)