The founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure inaugurated semiology, structuralism, and deconstruction and made possible the work of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, thus enabling the development of French feminism, gender studies, New Historicism, and postcolonialism. Based on Saussure's lectures, _Course in General Linguistics_ (1916) traces the rise and fall of the historical linguistics in which Saussure was trained, the synchronic or structural linguistics with which he replaced it, and the new look (...) of diachronic linguistics that followed this change. Most important, Saussure presents the principles of a new linguistic science that includes the invention of semiology, or the theory of the "signifier," the "signified," and the "sign" that they combine to produce. This is the first critical edition of _Course in General Linguistics_ to appear in English and restores Wade Baskin's original translation of 1959, in which the terms "signifier" and "signified" are introduced into English in this precise way. Baskin renders Saussure clearly and accessibly, allowing readers to experience his shift of the theory of reference from mimesis to performance and his expansion of poetics to include all media, including the life sciences and environmentalism. An introduction situates Saussure within the history of ideas and describes the history of scholarship that made _Course in General Linguistics_ legendary. New endnotes enlarge Saussure's contexts to include literary criticism, cultural studies, and philosophy. (shrink)

Given many meanings that the school has adopted for each person, we have found the need to provide some reflections on the subject, supported in a philosophical perspective, in order to enlarge the debate on the values of the school for teachers and students, especially. This brief paper aims to make a cut about the value that the figure of the object "school" has adopted for teachers and students. We refer to the school, involving only the institutions of the levels (...) from elementary to secondary school, not including the institutes or other levels. The work has as scientific foundations philosophical contributions of authors like Herbart, Wittgenstein, MacIntyre, Deleuze, Aristotle, Dewey, Foucault, and orientations coming from the linguistics of Saussure, which supports us in the understanding and management of language. (shrink)

The term discourse is generally used either as a technical equivalent for 'verbal communication' or as referring to a particular scientific notion, where discourses are spans of texts or of utterances obeying specific principles of organisation. The aim of this paper is to suggest that an account of discourse is possible, in both cases, only through a theory of utterance-meaning construction. If discourse stands for verbal communication, then it can be explained only with regard to speaker's intended meaning. If discourse (...) stands for organised spans of texts or utterances, then they must be meaningful spans of texts or meaningful utterances. Yet it is argued that a pragmatic explanation of meaning provides all the elements that discourse analysis describes. In the end, the paper claims that a theory of context combined with a theory on the semantic-pragmatic interface should prove sufficient to explain discourse, in whichever sense, along the idea that discourse should be viewed as a process, not as a whole, following the claims of a number of scholars in the field. A possible way to tackle this process is proposed in terms of procedures through the approach of procedural pragmatics. (shrink)

This paper aims at showing how pragmatics, today a discipline developing in close connection with cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, provides new ways to envisage Discourse Analysis. In this article, we first discuss the relationship between pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, focusing on the links between the process of utterance understanding, which is in the scope of pragmatic theories, and consenting to beliefs, which is in the scope of Discourse Analysis. Next, we introduce an extended notion of presuppositions which we name (...) discursive presuppositions, which are unexpressed contents but nonetheless propositions that need to be incorporated in the background and thus consented to in order to provide not meaning proper but relevance to the utterance. Last section is dedicated to the examination of two examples where discursive presuppositions are exploited in persuasiveness. (shrink)

This article echoes concerns recently formulated regarding CDA’s lack of attention to cognitive science. From a cognitive pragmatic viewpoint, I argue that discourse analysis should undergo an epistemological change in order to seriously take into account what cognitive approaches have to offer, in particular as regards the automatic processing of utterances and the subsequent non-conscious evaluation of contents vis-a-vis previously held beliefs. I regard the epistemological tension in CDA as stemming from a wider tension of the same sort affecting social (...) science in general. Considering discourse as a process of interpretation and evaluation, I address briefly the influence of evidentiality as a pragmatic category in persuasive discourse and conclude that the uptake of new beliefs on the basis of discourse is oriented towards the maximization of relevance in the sense of Sperber and Wilson. (shrink)

This article addresses, experimentally, the question of how presuppositions are cognitively processed and retrieved in discourse. In the proposed research, we have administered tweets produced by Italian politicians to native speakers so as to assess how easily they could retrieve the presupposed content of two presupposition triggers (definite descriptions and change of state verbs), as opposed to their explicit paraphrase, by answering verification questions. Results showed that content presupposed by change of state verbs was likely to receive more attention than (...) content conveyed by definite descriptions; this could possibly be due to the greater effort involved in mentally representing the event taken for granted by the predicates. Definite descriptions, on the contrary, seem to instruct to a shallower processing modality, which means that their content is processed less attentively or in a ‘good-enough’ way. (shrink)

This paper proposes a pragmatic solution to utterances where the various indicators of time and aspect (tenses, lexical-conceptual features of Aktionsart, adverb phrases and contextual cues) seem to have divergent temporal reference and aspectual properties. This type of cases is usually treated at the semantic level as ‘mismatches’ and resolved compositionally through logical operations of ‘aspectual coercion’. We suggest on the contrary that no such effect of ‘mismatch resolution’ or ‘coercion’ is at work: these utterances are worked out inferentially according (...) to the various pieces of evidence they provide for their relevance, in line of Deirdre Wilson’s and Dan Sperber’s (1995) relevance theory. Such utterances give rise to cognitive effects that are hardly attainable by apparently more literal formulations, while being cost-effective. Our analysis follows the work ofEscandell-Vidal and Leonetti (2011)about the rigidity and thus prevalence of computational linguistic expressions, called ‘procedural expressions’ byBlakemore (1987)withinSperber and Wilson’s (1995[1986])framework, relevance theory. (shrink)

No prefácio das _Investigações filosóficas_, Ludwig Wittgenstein revela que ao “estímulo” do economista Piero Sraffa devia “as ideias mais fecundas” da obra. Curiosamente, porém, segundo Amartya Sen, Sraffa considerava seu ponto de vista – que enfatiza a relação entre a linguagem e o meio sociocultural em que ela é empregada – “um tanto óbvio”, achava tedioso conversar com Wittgenstein e nunca se entusiasmou por ter influenciado decisivamente sua filosofia tardia. Para justificar o comportamento de Sraffa, Sen argumenta que (...) seu ex-professor julgava trivial a sua abordagem social da linguagem – que se opõe à abordagem lógica do _Tractatus logico-philosophicus_ – basicamente devido à sua formação marxista. Em divergência a essa explicação de Sen, sustenta-se neste artigo que o ponto de vista de Sraffa é realmente “um tanto óbvio”, tendo uma longa lista de precursores que remonta à Grécia Antiga. A fim de comprovar essa afirmação, são retomadas aqui tanto as obras de filósofos com os quais Wittgenstein dialoga em seus textos, como Platão, Aristóteles e Santo Agostinho, quanto autores prestigiados que ele aparentemente desconhecia, entre os quais os linguistas _William D. Whitney, Hermann Paul e Ferdinand de Saussure._. (shrink)

Linguists and philosophers examine the representation of temporal reference; the interaction of the temporal information from tense, aspect, modality, and context; and the representation of the temporal relations between facts, events, states, propositions, and utterances. They link this to current research in psychology and anthropology.

[1] Biographie, Philosophie, Praxis -- [2] Het spel van het naamloze / naar een concept van Joseph Kosuth.

The so-called "Big Typescript" is Wittgenstein's first attempt to publish in a book his collected thoughts since his return to Cambridge and to philosophical writing, thus correcting the "serious errors" (Wittgenstein) of his early work. Among the texts in Wittgenstein's estate, the "Big Typescript" is the one that, next to the "Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung" (the "Tractatus") of 1918, appears to be the most "finished", with a table of contents structured in chapters and sections. It is, however, a fragment, (...) without either title, motto or conclusion. To Wittgenstein, it was important "that the thoughts in [the book] should progress from one subject to another in well-ordered consecutiveness." It is precisely this structure of the "Big Typescript", though ultimately rejected by Wittgenstein, which constitutes the immeasurable value of the text for the study of and as an introduction to Wittgenstein's thinking. (shrink)

Vorwort -- Vortrag über Ethik -- Bemerkungen über logische Form -- Bemerkungen über Frazers Golden Bough -- Aufzeichnungen für Vorlesungen über "privates Erlebnis" und "Sinnesdaten" -- Ursache und Wirkung ; Intuitives Erfassen -- Textnachweise.

Der zweisprachige Band führt in die "Wiener Ausgabe" der Werke Ludwig Wittgensteins (1889-1951) ein, in der erstmals dessen Manuskripte vollständig und in getreuer Wiedergabe erscheinen werden. In jahrzehntelanger Arbeit wurde der Nachlaß mithilfe einer Editionsmethode ediert, die für dieses ungewöhnliche Werk speziell entwickelt wurde. Der Einführungsband erklärt diese Methode wie die editorische Situation des Nachlasses und stellt darüber hinaus Arbeitsunterlagen für das Studium von Wittgensteins Texten zur Verfügung: Eine biographische Skizze zeigt die Verbindung von Leben und Werk, eine schematische Chronologie (...) erleichert die Zuordnung der jeweiligen Manuskriptseiten und Typoskripte. Die Gegenüberstellung von Faksimileabdrucken einzelner Manuskriptseiten und der edierten Seiten läßt die einzelnen Schritte der Textedition transparent werden. (shrink)

If a god creates a world in which certain propositions are true, then by that very act he also creates a world in which all the propositions that follow from them come true. And similarly he could not create a world in which the proposition 'p' was true without creating all its objects.