I really didn't say everything I said

Here's a nice article by linguist Ben Zimmer about Yogi-isms.

This page intentionally left blank

One of the most common and obvious contradictions in the world of printing is the page which is intentionally left blank... but contains a printed message to that effect.

Cute self-reference

My daughter is in her first year of secondary school, where Latin is on the curriculum. On her daily vocab test today, she was asked what the first person singular present tense form is of the verb errare. The answer should have been erro, but she wrote... error. Which is exactly what it was.

Some sort of solution to the Liar paradox coming up

I've been working on an informal treatment of the Liar paradox (The sentence is not true. If it's true, it's not true, and if it's not true, it is true). I've probed some of the vast literature about it, but since most of the proposed solutions require heavy advanced logic machinery which I don't master (and do not want to master, for that matter), I've finally decided it's best to deal with the paradox more or less my own way.

In a nutshell, my solution involves a realization that the Liar sentence is not both false and true at the same time, that it's just a tantalizing bit of fun and shouldn't be taken too seriously, and that real-life situations of (milder) contradiction suggest a pragmatic treatment may work best. Pragmatic is used here in the everyday sense of 'taking a sensible, not too principled approach' and in the linguistic sense, referring to the work of Paul Grice, whose main claim is that in normal speech, we adhere to what he calls the Cooperative Principle; since the Liar sentence clearly doesn't comply to his conversational Maxims (like being unambiguous, being informative), the only reasonable conclusion is that the speaker addressing us with a silly question like Will your answer to my question be "no"? probably just invites us to have a bit of a laugh -- or to say "Oh, shut up!".

So, stay tuned for a long post, in which I will also highlight some of the sensible and less sensible ideas that have previously been formulated by people attacking the paradox.

If I had more time...

... I would invite linguists to present or update their view on the liar paradox ("This sentence is false"), in the form of succinct contributions to a collective volume titled What Linguists Have to Say to the Liar, or something a little snappier. People to be invited would be Paul Saka, Rennie Gonsalves, Gilles Fauconnier, Leonard Talmy and others.

Paul Saka: to hell with the theory of truth

In his outstandingly clear and convincingly argued paper "Beyond truth", Paul Saka ends with a passage that attempts to give the final stab to truth-conditional semantics:

"It is unlikely for any expert semanticist in either linguistics or philosophy not to have heard of the liar paradox, and not to know that it seems to prove that the theory of truth is illegitimate; most use the theory of truth in the foundations of their research, and yet practically none at all even acknowledge the inconsistency of their position. It is nothing less than scandalous."

Paul Saka: fierce theory of truth buster

Our established practice of science (and by extension, the teaching programs that help propagate it) does not come out unscathed either:

"It also proves, in case an object lesson were needed, that research programs do not rise and fall according to intellectual merit alone. When a theory is logically refutable, and everyone knows it, yet the theory enjoys orthodoxy nonetheless, then obviously non-rational forces are at work, be they sociological or psychological."

I'll definitely read more of Paul Saka.

Update: maybe I should have used quotation marks in the title of this post, as it now seems as though I want to say something to Paul Saka, namely: "To hell with [your] theory of truth". That's most definitely not what I meant, as it's Saka himself who is highly dismissive of this theory. I didn't use quote marks for the simple reason that he didn't use these actual words. Incidentally, Paul Saka has written extensively on quotation, e.g. this paper.

Worth watching

Over at Carneades.org, a YouTube channel, October last year was The Month of Paradox. Its presentation of paradoxes, one a day, is framed in terms of Quine's general classification of paradoxes into veridical ones, falsidical ones and antinomies, which the creator of the Carneades videos calls "the most fiendish of all paradoxes". Check it out!

Visual illusion

I've had a bit of fun today being totally puzzled by the vanishing leprechaun visual illusion, dating from the 1960s. If you cut the top half of the picture below into three pieces and swap the two upper parts, such that you get the lower half of the picture, you'll find that one leprechaun appears to have disappeared.

An explanation of the illusion is provided, with some building of suspense, on this website.
The Guardian recently had a piece on a variations of this puzzle, including one with sixties pin-up girls.

I've actually also been looking at more serious stuff today, namely MIT professor Agustín Rayo's plea for localism, which I hope I'll be able to come back to soon in a separate post, since it provides an original account of the Liar paradox. I have a hunch that what connects the pictorial illusion and Rayo's ideas is that context is everything.

Praeteritio at Prattenburg

In an episode of Zo heurt het eigenlijk, a Dutch TV programme on high society lifestyle, one can hear Lady Vicky van Asch van Wijck née Freifrau von Papen utter the following praeteritio to let us know that the grounds of her nice country estate Prattenburg do not belong just to her husband and herself but are open to visitors, so to all of us:

"ik wil niet zo ver gaan om te zeggen "Het is van ons allemaal", maar in feite is het toch van ons allemaal."

'I don't want to go as far as to say "It belongs to all of us", but in fact is does belong to all of us.'

Maybe unbeknownst to her, this is a contradiction, as she clearly does go so far as to say what she's saying. Perhaps she meant the first part of the sentence as a hedge: 'I normally wouldn't want to declare this so openly (because it might sound as if we're bragging about our services to the public), but since you're asking me...'.

There's no shame in being a pariah

Just heard in an episode from The Simpsons

Lisa: I guess we better get used to being pariahs.
Marge: There's no shame in being a pariah.

Marge had better look up the meaning of pariah again.

Strange loop in Google circles

I just noticed that I seem to have included myself in my own Google circle, thereby boosting the number of my followers with, oh, a whopping 34%, to round the percentage a bit in my favour. (There were 3, and now there are 4, me included.)
What's strange about this is that, apparently, you can also not be in your own circle.
Even stranger is that, now that I'm in my circle, my page profile includes a thumbnail of itself. When I click it, I think the page just refreshes itself.
Being your own follower is certainly a paradoxical concept. Try doing it physically! Only some dogs manage to do so, chasing their own tail.

"I have said about that what I have said about that"

Belgian federal State Secretary for Asylum Policy and Migration Theo Francken reacted today curtly to suggestions that our country might accept more than 250 (mainly Syrian) asylum seekers a day:

Ik heb daarover gezegd wat ik daarover heb gezegd.

'I have said about that what I have said about that' 

This is a clear tautology, unlike Wooster's "When we Wooster's are adamant, we are -- well, adamant". We interpret tautologies not just as trivial truisms. As they are so obviously true and hence provide nothing in terms of information that we could not already have known by ourselves, our task as listeners is to find out why they are uttered at all. In this case, it is: 'I stand by what I said' -- precisely the tautological interpretation of Wooster's utterance (which, let me repeat, I don't think was initially intended to come out as such a tautology).

Tautologies are not paradoxes but they are linked to them in a straightforward way: we only have to negate them to end up with a paradox, or definitely a contradiction (I still don't know whether I should make a distinction between paradox and contradiction):

Ik heb daarover niet gezegd wat ik daarover gezegd heb.

'I haven't said about that what I have said about that' 

This is why Wooster's utterance is not a tautology. We can negate it without the result being a paradox:

When we Woosters are adamant, we are not adamant.

With a small amount of effort, we can make sense of this as conveying the following:

'When we Woosters are adamant, it is possible for us to change our mind about being adamant'

This is not pure nonsense. You can be adamant about things and know that you'll never change your mind, but you can also be adamant about things temporarily -- say for a week or so -- and then evaluate your comportment to see whether you can relax your being adamant about them.

Awkward adamance

What ho! Have you ever read anything by P.G. Wodehouse? You haven't? By Jove, you should! It's immensely funny. Here's a typical exchange between Bertie Wooster, one of London's idle rich, and his intellectually superior manservant Jeeves, who tends to disapprove of Wooster's vestimentary taste:

‘… Soft silk shirts with evening costume are not worn, sir.’

‘Jeeves,’ I said, looking the blighter diametrically in the centre of the eyeball, ‘they’re dashed well going to be. I may as well tell you now that I have ordered a dozen of those shirtings from Peabody and Simms, and it’s no good looking like that, because I am jolly well adamant.’
‘If I might-’
‘No, Jeeves,’ I said, raising my hand, ‘argument is useless. Nobody has a greater respect than I have for your judgement in socks, in ties, and – I will go farther – in spats; but when it comes to evening shirts your nerve seems to fail you. You have no vision. You are prejudiced and reactionary. Hidebound is the word that suggests itself. It may interest you to learn that when I was at Le Touquet the Prince of Wales buzzed into the Casino one night with soft silk shirt complete.’
‘His Royal Highness, sir, may permit himself a certain licence which in your own case-’
‘No, Jeeves,’ I said firmly, ‘it’s no use. When we Woosters are adamant, we are – well, adamant, if you know what I mean.’
‘Very good, sir.’

(Quotation quoted from https://pechorinsjournal.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/, where incidentally I also spotted another instance of that 'complete denial' use of except that I discussed earlier:

And that’s it, with that template and the odd minor variation you could in theory write most of the Jeeves and Wooster stories, except you couldn’t at all because none of that matters in the slightest.)

Just like when I just wrote that I quoted a quotation, in the above dialogue Wooster makes use of this wonderful mechanism known as recursion to say that he's adamant about being adamant. Only, in Wooster's case, it's not clear whether there's any usefulness in adding a meta-level of adamance. What does it mean for someone to be unshakable in their determination to be unshakable in their determination? Wooster seems to be aware of how little his utterance makes sense, or least of how awkward his formulation is, witness his addition of "if you know what I mean". Perhaps, he intends it as a tautology, that is, a truism like "War is war" or "Boys will be boys" (about which the linguist Wierzbicka has written extensively). What he means to say then is this: "If we Woosters say no, we say no" or simply "No is no". I doubt that this is the interpretation Wooster had in mind when he started the sentence. I think the humorous effect lies in the reader seeing how Wooster probably wanted to utter a sentence of the following general structure:

When we Woosters [verb phrase], we are adamant. (Meaning: 'When we Woosters [verb phrase], we are determined not to change our mind about it')

e.g. When we Woosters have decided to take a course of action, we are adamant. ('When we Woosters have decided to take a course of action, we will carry it through')

e.g. When we Woosters have principles, we are adamant. ('When we Woosters have principles, we are unyielding and faithful to them')

The structure above, with adamant at the end, could have functioned as an effective rhetorical means to say, 'I won't change my mind about [my opinion or course of action mentioned in the preceding discourse], so that's the end of the discussion.' Note how Wooster, earlier in the dialogue, said "it's no good looking like that, because I am jolly well adamant", again with the word adamant at the end. Wooster ruins the potential firmness of the above structure by using are adamant too early in the sentence, making the second occurrence of it sound silly and superfluous.

By the way, have you noticed how adamant is one of those adjectives that necessarily takes a complement? Even when it's not used with about X, we know that it applies to some opinion, principle or purpose that we have to retrieve from the context. It's one of those words that requires contextual 'saturation', to use a term by the French philosopher Fançois Recanati. So, you can't just say, out of the blue, I'm adamant, without expanding on it, while it's perfectly okay to say I'm hungry.

Afterthought: So, what's the point of this post? How is it relevant to paradox? There's nothing paradoxical about Wooster's sentence, is there? No, there isn't, but it's undeniably the case that many paradoxes in the family of Liar Paradoxes involve the use of a meta-level -- or perhaps, more precisely, the failure to use one. If someone says, "This sentence is a lie," there is no stable ground, no external level from which you can judge the truth of something else. Understanding paradox is understanding how meta-levels work and why some sentences lead to strange loops (e.g., This statement is false) and others don't (e.g., This sentence contains five words).

Except it's not

I just read this sentence in a Slate article on Wittgenstein:

"So, language is quicksand—except it’s not."

On the face of it, this doesn't make much sense. To use except, one should normally use a list first, and a single statement hardly qualifies as a list. The use of except can be made acceptable if we see the preceding statement instead as a kind of container of truth. The quoted sentence then says: 'So, that language is quicksand is completely true -- except...' The first part is then scalar and this also allows for an exception, in the same way that we can say "I liked everything about the show, except the finale".

So far so good, but what follows except in the quote above is not really an exception to the totality of truth of what preceded. It's a complete denial of what preceded. It may seem somewhat pointless to state something and then deny it right after, but the [Statement -- except pronoun + {contracted verb + negator / verb + contracted negator}] pattern is very common. Here are ten examples retrieved from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA):

1. I mean reaching back to what EJ was just saying and people think he's a Columbia Harvard guy for whom everything's always been sort of easy... GEORGE-STEPHANOPOU# (Off-camera) And Hyde Park. EJ-DIONNE-1 " THE-W# Hyde Park.DEE-DEE-MYERS-1 " V# Yeah. GEORGE-WILL-1-ABC# (Off-camera) Because he is. DEE-DEE-MYERS-1 " V# Well, except that he's not.
2. Dj vu all over again. Except that it wasn't.
3. It was almost funny. Except that it wasn't.
4. Well maybe the whole crime decline was a myth. Except that it wasn't.
5. Neuroscientists told Schmorrow that it was impossible. Except that it wasn't.
6. Finally, it seemed everything was going to be great. Except that it wasn't.
7. Until he found himself on a winning streak, with a small crowd cheering him on, and the only thing to do was keep betting. Except that he didn't.
8. ... and she knew he would turn at once to watch and make sure she didn't brush the moisture off her eyelashes except that he didn't.
9. You can't keep going like this, Jon, you'll burn out. He heard it so many times that he almost believed it. He must be exhausted. Except that he wasn't.
10. He cruised through his workouts for NBA scouts and believed he had a good chance of being taken No. 1 in the draft by the Chicago Bulls. Except that he wasn't.

There's something of a conventionalized ironic understatement in this cliché: 'yes, everything you (or they, or even I) have been saying makes perfect sense -- apart from the small tiny problem that it's just not true'.

Update: I just realize that I searched for the pattern with that after except. Removing it from my search query shows the that-less version is rather more frequent than the that-containing version. Here's just one bonus example from COCA of this more succinct form:

There was no appeal, and that was that. Except it wasn't.

Paradox is not ambiguity

In an attempt at spelling out what paradox really is, all I can safely say at this early stage is that it is not a matter of ambiguity. Let me illustrate the distinction with two examples from The Simpsons.

In one episode, Homer asks Ned Flanders a question which is a parody of a well-known version of the omnipotence paradox, known as the stone paradox ("Could an omnipotent being create a stone so heavy that even he could not lift it?"):

The paradox is about a contradiction. To quote from Wikipedia: "If a being can perform any action, then it should be able to create a task that it is unable to perform. Hence, this being cannot perform all actions. On the other hand, if this being cannot create a task that it is unable to perform, then there is something it cannot do." The part before the "On the other hand" is already sufficient to see the contradiction and the paradox that ensues: a being is omnipotent if and only if it/he/she is not omnipotent. Or to put this differently still, if you can do anything you want, it means you can also not do anything you want. An all-powerful being must by necessity have restricted powers.

In another episode of The Simpsons, in which Homer takes part in a prison rodeo (don't ask), gets severely injured by a bull and is then taken care of in prison so that he can go home soon, we have the following exchange between Homer, his wife Marge and a prison warden:

Marge: How's your back, Homey?
Homer: I can't complain. [indicates a sign which reads, "No Complaining"]
Warden: Ah, that's for the prisoners. You can complain all you want.
Homer: Oh, God, my back! It hurts so much! And my job is so unfulfilling!
(cited from http://www.simpsonsarchive.com/episodes/CABF05.txt)

There is no true paradox here in Homer's "I can't complain" and his pointing at the "No Complaining" sign, but it nevertheless come close. If there's such a sign, the person this sign applies to cannot complain. But if you cannot complain, in the sense of not being allowed to, you have every reason to complain, being deprived of a basic right to vent your pain, emotions and, on top of that, your frustration at not being allowed to complain about this lack of permission, if you can still follow. So, if you can't complain, it's definitely not the case that you can't complain. This has a whiff of paradox, and it would be undeniably paradoxical if it weren't for the fact that can('t) is not used with the same basic meaning. If you can't complain, as per a fictitious "No Complaining" sign, there is a lack of permission. If you say that you can't complain, as we do in common usage to convey the idea that everything is reasonably okay, we use this modal verb in a rather different (though not wildly different) sense, namely that there's nothing about your situation that licenses you to complain with any justification.

My colleague Ilse Depraetere calls this latter kind of meaning "situation permissibility". Lack of permission ("I'm not allowed to complain") is not quite the same as absence of situation permissibility ("The circumstances are such that my complaining cannot be allowed to happen"). This can be described as a difference between small scope and wide scope modality:

I (not-possible(complain)) vs. not-possible(I complain)

For there to be a real paradox, there has to be no ambiguity in the predicates that make up the contradiction of the general form "if X does Y, then X doesn't Y". It should be about the same kind of (not) doing Y.

In the second example from The Simpsons, the scope difference is subtle, perhaps so subtle that we fail to appreciate the difference. After all, if I don't have the permission to complain, the net result is the same as when the situation of me complaining is not permissible: most likely, I will refrain from complaining in either case. For language users who fail to see this difference, the second example from The Simpsons should contain a paradox as well. The fact that we do perceive a strong comical contrast between something at first sight positive (the everyday sense of I can't complain) and then something negative (complaining is not allowed) without getting a sense of paradox is proof that the pragmatic meaning of I can't complain ('I'm fine'), as a kind of idiom, prevails over its literal meaning ('me complaining is a situation which is not in order here'), which may be too close to the meaning of the "No complaining" sign to prevent paradox from flooding in.

Of course, Homer only has the "No complaining" meaning in mind, so there can be no paradox in his utterance and what he's simultaneously pointing at. My point is that there could have be a potential paradox between the oddly prohibitive "No Complaining" sign and the way Marge first understood Homer's utterance, I can't complain. But there isn't really.

The project proposal

Université de Lille 3

Okay, the kids and my wife are off to school for the new school year and the first of September is also the first day of my sabbatical. It's going to be a somewhat messy start, as I'm expecting a master's student to submit his MA thesis any time now and because there are a few articles not related to the project that are in various stages of completion (euphemism for: I still have to start writing some of them). Nevertheless, befitting this grand first day, I'm pasting below the project proposal which earned me 6 months off teaching duty. The text is in French, what with me working in France. I thank my great colleague Fayssal Tayalati for the excellent clean-up job he did.

Des paradoxes qui n’en sont pas 

Au-delà de quelques énigmes en langue et linguistique

Présentation du projet pour lequel le congé est demandé

Bert Cappelle

Résumé

Ce projet s’articule autour de six paradoxes en linguistique générale et en Anglais qui n’ont presque jamais été discutés sérieusement – et qui par conséquent ne sont pas résolus – dans la littérature sur les théories des langues et du langage. Cependant, ces paradoxes, une fois que nous les avons mis en lumière, sont en fait peut-être seulement des paradoxes apparents. Il s’agit des problèmes potentiels suivants :

1. Si « red ball » renvoie à un ballon qui est rouge, est-ce que les combinaisons comme « fake gun », « false teeth », « likely candidate », « alleged criminal », « potential winner », voire « apparent paradox », constituent des cas d’un vrai paradoxe ou d’un paradoxe apparent ? (Question qui est donc elle-même, je me rends compte, potentiellement problématique.)
2. Le problème des existentielles négatives : si on doit affirmer de quelque chose qu’elle n’existe pas, est-ce qu’on n’est pas obligé en même temps de presupposer son existence ? 
3. Comment peut-on expliquer que parfois on dit des choses en disant qu’on ne les dira pas ? C’est-à-dire, pourquoi les cas de praeteritio (p.ex. « … I won’t even mention that he is underage ») ne semblent-ils pas vraiment contradictoires quand nous les rencontrons dans les conversations ?
4. Si la pragmatique traite de la modulation du sens d’une expression selon le contexte, lequel est toujours variable, est-ce que la notion de pragmatique conventionnelle (comme dans « Can you pass me the salt ? » pour faire une demande) n’est pas une contradiction dans les termes ?
5. Phrasal verbs : le paradoxe apparent des verbes à particule est qu’ils sont à la fois des mots et des syntagmes ; ces deux statuts ne sont pas conciliables, sauf si on adhère à l’hypothèse des allostructions – des réalisations multiples d’une seule constructions schématique.
6. La notion de la « productivité partielle » bien connue dans la morphologie (et plus récemment introduite dans la syntaxe) nous force à accepter les règles irrégulières. Comme il faut évidemment mémoriser les cas auxquels une règle improductive s’applique, comment peut-on éviter que ces règles soient expulsées de la grammaire ou qu’elles soient traités comme purement redondantes ?

Le but de la recherche est de sensibiliser la communauté linguistique à certains phénomènes ordinaires dans le comportement langagier ainsi qu’à des termes et des concepts communs dans la théorie linguistique qui sont rarement remis en question comme étant (potentiellement) problématiques. Mon objectif n’est pas nécessairement de résoudre tous ces paradoxes, mais plutôt à réaliser qu'ils existent en tant que réalité linguistique, les donc mettre en évidence, et d’explorer les faits et concepts linguistiques qui leur sont liées, comme les espaces mentaux, la pragmatique des constructions et la productivité.

Alors que j’ai beaucoup étudié l'un de ces paradoxes dans le passé (à savoir, les verbes à particule, qui, apparemment, ont des propriétés des mots seuls et des unités syntaxiques), la recherche que je souhaite mener traitera des paradoxes linguistiques en général avec comme objectif de produire un ouvrage sur la question.

Etapes

Chaque thème sera développé dans un chapitre de l’ouvrage envisagé (« Paradoxes that aren’t : Beyond some Puzzles in Language and Linguistics »). L’idée serait de consacrer environ un mois à chaque chapitre. J’ai déjà effectué la plupart des recherches préalables (littérature, données empiriques).           

Première étape/chapitre : « ‘Apparent paradox’ is only an apparent paradox »

La thématique des paradoxes classiques sera abordée, avec comme exemple principale celui d’Épiménide le Crétois, qu’on appelle le paradoxe du menteur : « Cette phrase est fausse ». Bien que cette phrase pose bel et bien un paradoxe (Beal et Glanzberg 2014), nous pouvons probablement tous convenir qu’en réalité le problème d’une phrase qui est fausse si elle est vraie et vraie si elle est fausse ne se pose pas. Tout d’abord, ce type de paradoxe extrême ne se produit pas dans les conversations ordinaires. Deuxièmement, lorsqu’on détecte néanmoins une version du paradoxe du menteur (typiquement non-auto-référentiel) ‘dans la réalité’, comme dans le cas où un politicien proclame qu’on devrait suivre ce que dit la science « qui a toujours raison », tandis qu’une étude scientifique montre qu’on ne devrait pas faire confiance au politiciens quand ils réfèrent à la science, il est clair qu’on trouvera une solution en privilégiant un point de vue particulier (p.ex. celui des sciences dans ce cas) et/ou en traitant un énoncé comme plus ou moins correct ou correct en général.

Pour les adjectifs ‘privatifs’ comme fake (Kamp 1975) je montrerai que la théorie des espaces mentaux (Fauconnier 1994) et le mélange conceptuel (‘conceptual blending’ ; Coulson et Fauconnier 1999) donne une solution qu’on pourrait étendre vers un certain emploi de non- (p.ex. a non-event ; Dugas en préparation) et vers plusieurs cas à aborder dans les chapitres suivants.

Finalement, je tenterai de montrer que ce modèle d’interprétation, qui incorpore plusieurs points de vue, peut expliquer pourquoi la formulation du paradoxe du menteur classique est problématique : il paraît impossible pour un locuteur d’établir un espace mentale qui incorpore la réalité de ce même locuteur. Par comparaison, il n’y a pas un tel problème pour un énoncé comme « The ‘blonde’ is in fact a brunette »

 Deuxième étape/chapitre : « The problem of negative existentials doesn’t exist »

Les existentielles négatives pourraient aussi poser un paradoxe. Si par exemple nous disons que « les unicornes n’existent pas », nous devons d’abord présupposer qu’ils existent avant d’asserter leur non-existence. Une solution possible est d’accepter simplement les objets non-existants (Reicher 2014), mais on peut aussi avoir recours aux espaces mentaux : une entité peut exister dans un espace mentale sans avoir une existence dans un autre (plus proche de la réalité). Bien que le problème des existentielles négatives a été au centre des travaux philosophiques depuis longtemps, nous nous préoccuperons surtout des propriétés linguistiques des énoncés non-existentiels, en abordant les questions suivantes : (i) en quoi sont-ils différents des énoncés existentiels positifs (à part le fait évident qu’ils sont négatifs) ? ; (ii) possèdent-t-ils d’autres propriétés lexicales ou syntaxiques qui les distinguent des existentiels positifs? (cf. Cappelle, Carlier, Fagard et Meulleman 2015). 

Troisième étape/chapitre : « Let’s not even mention praeteritio »

Mes recherches concernant les praeteritiones viseront à montrer que bien qu’elles soient contradictoires et donc paradoxales, ce type de phrase est motivée par les stratégies rhétoriques (Snoeck Henkemans 2009). En plus, il est possible d’argumenter que « Let’s not even mention X » n’est pas paradoxale si la phrase est traitée comme portant sur la suite du discours et que « X not to mention Y » n’est pas paradoxale non plus si cet ajout est interprété comme portant de manière métalinguistique sur la partie précédente (‘J’ai dit X pour ne pas mentionner Y’). Evidemment, plusieurs ajouts de ce type ont subi des changements sémantiques et ne sont plus analysés littéralement, ce qui est le cas d’ailleurs aussi pour encore moins en français (Cappelle et al. 2013).

Quatrième étape/chapitre « Conventional pragmatics is not a contradiction in terms »

Tout aussi paradoxale, en tout cas en apparence, est la notion de la pragmatique conventionnalisée (cf. Morgan 1977). Par exemple, la construction « Can you X? » peut être utilisée par convention pour demander une action. Le conformisme apparaît de la possibilité d’ajouter please (par exemple « Can you please pass me the salt ? »), ce qui est étrange avec les structures qui manquent cette fonction conventionnalisée (par exemple « ?Are you please able to pass me the salt ? »). Le statut pragmatique de cette interprétation, de son côté, ressort clairement de la possibilité d’utiliser toujours la structure « Can you X ? » comme une question directe (par exemple « Can you pass me the salt? », laquelle peut être formulée par un physiothérapeute à un patient pour vérifier la progression de la récupération motrice). Cependant, si la pragmatique traite de la façon dont l’interprétation d’un énoncé va au-delà de ce qu’il exprime littéralement, tandis que la conventionnalisation est le procédé dans lequel une expression devient fixe et ‘stockée’ dans le lexique mental des utilisateurs de la langue, comment peut-on distinguer le sens pragmatique du sens littéral? En d’autres termes, pouvons-nous parler de la pragmatique conventionnalisée sans que cela soit une contradiction dans les termes? Nous proposerons une solution en utilisant et modifiant la théorie de la Grammaire des Constructions.

Cinquième étape/chapitre : « Phrasal words : puzzling out the verb-particle paradox »

Comme un cinquième cas d’un paradoxe linguistique, considérez notre utilisation insouciante du terme « phrasal verb » pour désigner des combinaisons telles que find out ou move on. La facilité avec laquelle nous utilisons ce terme passe sous silence le fait qu'il manque de cohérence interne, puisqu’une phrase (en Anglais) ou un syntagme (en Français) est une unité syntaxique au-dessus du niveau des mots, tandis qu’un verbe est une catégorie de niveau des mots (Farrell 2005, Cappelle, Pulvermüller et Shtyrov 2010, McIntyre à paraître). Autrement dit, si quelque chose est une phrase (un groupe de mots), il ne peut pas être un verbe (un seul mot); et si quelque chose est un verbe (un seul mot), il ne peut pas être une phrase (un groupe de mots). Alors, comment pouvons-nous appeler quelque chose comme étant un 'verbe à particule'? Nous formulerons un ‘compromis’ en utilisant la notion de allostructions. 

Sixième étape/chapitre : « Partial productivity and the problem of irregular regularities »

Un sixième paradoxe apparent en linguistique est l'existence de règles partiellement productives, c’est-à-dire, des généralisations syntaxiques ou morphologiques qui ne parviennent pas à appliquer à tous les membres de la classe à laquelle la règle s’applique (Jackendoff 2008, Kay 2013). Par exemple, la règle qui nous permet de dire « We gave them money » ou « I told him a story » à côté de « We gave money to them » et « I told a story to him » ne permet pas de la même façon de dire « We donated them money » malgré la possibilité de dire « We gave money to them ». Donc, il y a ici une règle qui fonctionne pour certains verbes de transfert (par exemple, give, tell, ...) mais pas pour d’autres (par exemple, donate). Pour prendre un autre exemple, la règle qui ajoute -ity aux adjectifs pour former des noms s’applique aux adjectifs absurd, complex, rare et scarce mais pas à, disons, cool (*coolity). Nous disons habituellement d’une telle règle qu'elle a des «exceptions» ou, alternativement, que nous devons simplement mémoriser les items qui sont formés par la règle. Mais ce que cela revient à admettre est qu’il y a des régularités irrégulières en langue, un paradoxe avec lequel nous devrions nous préoccuper. La solution envisagée est d’abandonner une distinction stricte entre productivité complète et productivité partielle et d’étudier quelques cas spécifiques (p.ex. Adj as NP : cool as a cucumber, dead as a dodo, hot as hell mais aussi cold as hell, …) qui illustrent comment les locuteurs peuvent renforcer un schéma de ‘demi-niveau’ (p.ex. Adj as hell) sans pour autant renforcer le schéma le plus général (Cappelle 2015, Hilpert 2015)

Avantages éducatives

(...)

Références

• Beall, Jc et Michael Glanzberg. 2014. Liar Paradox. In Edward N. Zalta (dir.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition). Metaphysics Research Lab: Center for the Study of Language and Information. Stanford University. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/liar-paradox/.
• Cappelle, Bert. 2015. Conventional combinations in pockets of productivity: English resultatives and Dutch ditransitives expressing excess. In: Ronny Boogaart, Timothy Colleman et Gijsbert Rutten (dir.), Extending the scope of construction grammar. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 251-282.
• Cappelle, Bert, Dany Amiot, Edwige Dugas, Maarten Lemmens, Cédric Patin, Fayssal Tayatali et Kristel Van Goethem. 2013. Dutch laat staan and French encore moins: Constructional effects. Fifth International AFLiCo Conference “Empirical Approaches to Multi-modality and to Language Variation”, Université Lille 3, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France, 15-17 mai 2011. 
• Cappelle, Bert, Anne Carlier, Benjamin Fagard et Machteld Meulleman. 2015. No such things as distinct non-existential constructions in Western Europe? Counterevidence from Dutch, English and French. Colloque International “La predication existentielle dans les langues naturelles”, Inalco, Paris, 10-11 avril 2015.
• Cappelle, Bert, Yury Shtyrov and Friedemann Pulvermüller. 2010. Heating up or cooling up the brain? MEG evidence that phrasal verbs are lexical units. Brain and Language 115(3), 189-201. 
• Coulson, Seana et Gilles Fauconnier. 1999. Fake Guns and Stone Lions: Conceptual Blending and Privative Adjectives. In B. Fox, D. Jurafsky, & L. Michaelis (dir.) Cognition and Function in Language. Palo Alto, CA: CSLI.
• Dugas, Edwige. En préparation. "Non- dans le paradigme des préfixes de négation en français : étude synchronique et diachronique". Thèse de doctorat. Université Lille 3.
• Farrell, Patrick. 2005. English verb-preposition constructions: Constituency and order. Language 81(1), 96-137. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6nq8q46n#page-1 
• Fauconnier, Gilles. 1994. Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
• Hilpert, Martin. 2015. From hand-carved to computer-based: Noun-participle compounding and the upward-strengthening hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics 26(1), 1-36.
• Jackendoff, Ray. 2008. Construction after construction and its theoretical challenges. Language 84(1), 8-28. http://ase.tufts.edu/philosophy/documents/Jackendoff/Constructionafterconstruction.pdf
• Kamp, H. 1975. Two theories about adjectives. In E. L. Keenan (dir.), Formal Semantics of Natural Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 123-155.
• Kay, Paul. 2013. The limits of (Construction) Grammar. In Thomas Hoffmann et Graeme Trousdale (dir.), The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 32-48.
• McIntyre, Andrew. A paraître. Particle verb formation. In Susan Olsen et Peter Müller (dir.), Word-Formation: An International Handbook of the Languages of Europe. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter. http://www3.unine.ch/files/content/sites/andrew.mcintyre/files/shared/mcintyre/mcintyre..particle.HSK.ersteinreichung.vor.K%C3%BCrzung.pdf
• Morgan, Jerry L. 1977. Two types of convention in indirect speech-acts. Technical Report No. 52. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/17765/ctrstreadtechrepv01977i00052_opt.pdf?seque
• Reicher, Maria. 2014. Nonexistent objects. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In Edward N. Zalta (dir.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonexistent-objects/
• Snoeck Henkemans, A. Francisca. 2009. The contribution of praeteritio to arguers’ confrontational strategic manoeuvres. In: F. H. van Eemeren (dir.), Examining Argumentation in Context. Fifteen studies on strategic maneuvering. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 241-255.