La classification de Vendler revue et corrigée

17 pages, initialement paru comme rapport n°9718 du CREA, Polytechnique, Paris, en Oct 97International audienceDans cet article, nous commentons la classification des verbes de Vendler, l'amendons quelque peu, et tentons d'établir sa légitimité en isolant les principes qui la fondent

The structure of verbal sequences analyzed with unsupervised learning techniques

Data mining allows the exploration of sequences of phenomena, whereas one usually tends to focus on isolated phenomena or on the relation between two phenomena. It offers invaluable tools for theoretical analyses and exploration of the structure of sentences, texts, dialogues, and speech. We report here the results of an attempt at using it for inspecting sequences of verbs from French accounts of road accidents. This analysis comes from an original approach of unsupervised training allowing the discovery of the structure of sequential data. The entries of the analyzer were only made of the verbs appearing in the sentences. It provided a classification of the links between two successive verbs into four distinct clusters, allowing thus text segmentation. We give here an interpretation of these clusters by applying a statistical analysis to independent semantic annotations

La conjecture de Ducrot, vingt ans après

Réponse aux objections soulevées par Oswald Ducrot à l'encontre de mon approche "gricéenne" de la performativité

Indexicality, context, and pretense: a speech-act theoretic account

In this paper, I argue that the notion of ‘context' that has to be used in the study of indexicals is far from univocal. A first distinction has to be made between the real context of speech and the context in which the speech act is supposed to take place — only the latter notion being relevant when it comes to determining the semantic values of indexicals. Second, we need to draw a distinction between the context of the locutionary act and the context of the illocutionary act : contrary to a standard assumption of speech act theory, they can diverge, and their possible divergence explains a number of puzzling phenomena involving indexicals

Cognitive Dynamics: A New Look at an Old Problem

To appear in K. Korta and M. Ponte (eds.) Reference and Representation in Language and Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.In this paper in defense of the mental-file approach to singular thought, I argue that we need to distinguish static, fine-grained files based on specific acquaintance relations, and the dynamic, coarser-grained files resulting from operations on them : conversion, fusion, fission etc

Immunity to Error Through Misidentification : What It Is and Where It Comes From

I argue that immunity to error through misidentification primarily characterizes thoughts that are 'implicitly' de se, as opposed to thoughts that involve an explicit self-identification. Thoughts that are implicitly de se involve no reference to the self at the level of content: what makes them de se is simply the fact that the content of the thought is evaluated with respect to the thinking subject. Or, to put it in familiar terms : the content of the thought is a property which the thinking subject self-ascribes (as in the Loar/Lewis/Chisholm analysis). After answering an objection (to the effect that immunity can affect explicit de se thoughts), I extend the analysis to demonstrative thoughts, which also exhibit the property of immunity to error through misidentification

De re and de se [FINAL VERSION -- DISREGARD THE PREVIOUS VERSION]

For Perry and many authors, de se thoughts are a species of de re thought. In this paper, I argue that de se thoughts come in two varieties : explicit and implicit. While explicit de se thoughts can be construed as a variety of de re thought, implicit de se thoughts cannot : their content is thetic, while the content of de re thoughts is categoric. The notion of an implicit de se thought is claimed to play a central role in accounting for the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. Lewis has attempted to unify de re and de se in the opposite direction : by reducing de re to de se. This, however, works only if we internalize the acquaintance relations. I criticize Lewis's internalization strategy on the grounds that it rests on Egocentrism (the view that every occurrent thought is ultimately about the thinker at the time of thinking). In the conclusion, I suggest another way of unifying de re and de se, by extending the implicit/explicit distinction to de re thoughts themselves

Open Quotation Revisited

This paper — a sequel to my 'Open Quotation' (Mind 2001) — is my reaction to the articles discussing open quotation in the special issue of the Belgian Journal of Linguistics edited by P. De Brabanter in 2005