| old_uid | 10760 |
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| title | Enablement and possibility |
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| start_date | 2012/01/27 |
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| schedule | 14h-17h |
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| online | no |
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| details | Thème de la séance : Linguistique anglaise |
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| summary | Recent theoretical work on modality such as Depraetere & Verhulst (2008) and Van der Linden & Verstraete (2011) has widened the focus from Germanic modal auxiliaries to other expressions, and has reconceptualised the nature of modality in the process. Another feature in recent work has been a tendency to assign modal expressions a minimal semantics and to shift the explanatory burden onto pragmatics: Papafragou (2000) and Bach (2011) are notable examples. This paper proposes a further step in both these developments.
Consider the different language versions of this extract from an EU document :
1. A sufficiently ambitious “industry driven” long term R& D work programme, involving universities and users will have the ability to fill these gaps.
2. Un programme suffisamment ambitieux de recherche et de développement à long terme, “conduit par l'industrie”, comprenant les universités et les utilisateurs, permettra de combler ces lacunes.
3. Ein ehrgeiziges, von Industrieseite vorwärtsgetriebenes, langfristiges FuE-Arbeitsprogramm, an dem sich Hochschulen und Benutzer beteiligen, wird es ermöglichen, diese Lücken zu schliessen.
Following Delin et al. (1994), we propose that, despite their obvious surface differences, these three sentences can be analysed as identical at the level of ‘procedural relations’, familiar in the philosophy of action from Goldman (1970) and subsequent work. The relevant relation here is enablement: Action A enables Action B if A brings about a set of conditions which are necessary but not necessarily sufficient for the subsequent performance of B.
Suppose we extend the notion of enablement so that it holds not just between two actions but between a causal factor X (an agent, any type of event, the state of the world, etc) and the actualisation of a proposition p. We can now apply enablement to other modal expressions. We suggest, for example, that the English modals can and may have the following underlying semantics:
can: X enables p
may: ◊ p
where ◊ is the standard possibility operator.
This has interesting empirical consequences, including (a) an account of the uses and translations of French permettre and German ermöglichen; and (b) a neat characterisation of the difference between:
It can be cold in Stockholm
It may be cold in Stockholm
Here we focus on the theoretical consequences. Firstly, enablement is not inherently modal: it does not involve possible worlds, evidentiality, or the expression of stance, although enablement and modal possibility are surely related. Secondly, expressions of enablement appear to be far more common in corpora than expressions of modal possibility. Thirdly, languages seem to vary radically in how they express enablement, and in how they relate it to modal possibility. Finally, and most importantly, the claim that an item such as can expresses enablement suggests that its interpretation crucially involves pragmatics, since the causal factor X is often left unexpressed and has to be inferred from the context. The pragmatic processes used in the interpretation of can are fundamentally different, however, from those used for modal possibility. The nature of these processes is the central concern of this paper.
References
Bach, K. 2011. Perspectives on possibilities: contextualism, relativism or what? In A. Egan & B. Weatherson (eds.), Epistemic modality (Oxford, OUP), 19-59. Available on the web: http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~kbach/Bach.PerspPoss.pdf. Accessed December 2011.
Delin, J., A. Hartley, C. Paris, D. Scott, & K. Vander Linden. 1994. Expressing procedural relationships in multilingual instructions. Proceedings of the seventh international generation workshop (June 1994, Kennebunkport, ME), 61-70. Available on the web: www.mt-archive.info/NLG-1994-Delin.pdf. Accessed December 2011.
Depraetere, I. & A. Verhulst. 2008. Source of modality: a reassessment. English Language and Linguistics 12.1: 1–25.
Goldman, A. 1970. A theory of human action. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Papafragou, A. 2000. Modality: issues in the semantics-pragmatics interface (Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface 6). Amsterdam, Elsevier.
Van Linden, A. & J.-C. Verstraete. 2011. Revisiting deontic modality and related categories: a conceptual map based on the study of English modal adjectives. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 150-163. |
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| responsibles | Carlier |
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