Les différents travaux de recherche en analyse du et des discours basés sur des corpus multimodaux ne limitent plus le langage à des formes et des règles, aussi évitent-ils de le réduire à l’utilisation de structures, de mots, ou de signes à deux facettes signifiant et signifié. D’emblée, dans un énoncé ou une énonciation voire dans un discours, chaque mot / acte de langage trouve sa légitimité d’utilisation dans le rapport qu’il entretient avec les unités linguistiques et les unités de (...) sens qui le précèdent et celles qui le suivent, aussi bien à l’écrit qu’à l’oral. En effet, la valeur et le rôle de tout praxème s’appréhendent dans sa place au sein de l’unité minimale qu’est l’énonciation et dans la prise en considération des paramètres linguistiques et extralinguistiques œuvrant à son actualisation dans le discours, donc de la prise en compte de la discursivisation. Il en ressort que, la forme et la règle déterminent, certes, la fonction de l’observable langagier mais ne mettent pas en évidence sa valeur discursive. Pour illustrer ce fait, nous aborderons la question de la fonction énoncive et de la valeur énonciative du syntagme nominal détaché représenté par les formes d’adresse dans le genre de discours Questions au gouvernement. Nous procèderons en relevant les syntagmes nominaux détachés et en les analysant hors et dans leur cotexte de production pour aboutir à la conclusion que le syntagme nominal détaché est très important dans ce genre du discours. Pour ce faire, nous présenterons un extrait d’une séance de QG. (shrink)

Logics that do not have a deduction-detachment theorem (briefly, a DDT) may still possess a contextual DDT —a syntactic notion introduced here for arbitrary deductive systems, along with a local variant. Substructural logics without sentential constants are natural witnesses to these phenomena. In the presence of a contextual DDT, we can still upgrade many weak completeness results to strong ones, e.g., the finite model property implies the strong finite model property. It turns out that a finitary system has (...) a contextual DDT iff it is protoalgebraic and gives rise to a dually Brouwerian semilattice of compact deductive filters in every finitely generated algebra of the corresponding type. Any such system is filter distributive, although it may lack the filter extension property. More generally, filter distributivity and modularity are characterized for all finitary systems with a local contextual DDT, and several examples are discussed. For algebraizable logics, the well-known correspondence between the DDT and the equational definability of principal congruences is adapted to the contextual case. (shrink)

As is well known, Husserl develops his early phenomenological concept of “species” by elaboratinga novel form of abstraction, whichhe calls “ideating” abstraction. This paper traces systematic parallels between the works of Lotze, Bolzano and Husserl in order to gain a better understanding of Husserl’s theory of abstraction and his early conception of species. Two lines of interpretation are central to this paper. The first concerns a critique of the Kantian understanding of “concept” (and thus also of the Kantian understanding of (...) analyticity). The second line of interpretation relates to abstraction itself. In contrast to the British empiricists, all three thinkers understand abstraction as a positive, logical and non-psychological process of bringing about an abstract attribute. Furthermore, we will recognize the importance of Bolzano’s syntactic structure of representations (Vorstellungen) for Husserl’s understanding of abstraction in the 2nd Logical Investigation. We will see that Husserl’s “ideating abstraction” depends on syncategorematic forms and cannot be understood detached from a correctly formulated proposition. (shrink)

Expressive adjectives or expressive expletives have been argued to voice the speaker’s attitude towards the referent of the noun with which they co-occur, even though the attitude may be felt to be expressed about the referent of another sentential constituent or the state of affairs alluded to in the sentence where they are inserted. A previous pragmatic approach suggests that this is possible because these expletives perform an individual speech act, while a syntactic approach posits a feature whose (...) class='Hi'>detachment from a particular constituent enables the speaker’s attitude to target the referent of another sentential constituent or even on the entire proposition expressed. This paper proposes an alternative relevance-theoretic account of the interpretation of utterances containing expressive expletives, which considers pragmatic factors and the cognitive processes in comprehension. It is grounded in contributions on the output of lexical pragmatic processes and the role of paralinguistic clues in utterance comprehension. (shrink)

The subject matter of this work covers the issues or problems listed below: * The problem of the ontological status of language signs and a more general philosophical problem connected with it: * What is language as a system of signs, which – on the one hand – serves to: 1) represent our knowledge about the reality which is being recognized, and, on the other one to: 2) a. explore and better cognize or discover it, b. describe it in an (...) adequate manner, and c. enable users to make interpersonal communication? All the pragmatic functions of language require carrying out its logical-philosophical analysis, and this means both regarding its syntax and semantics. Such an analysis is not possible without determining the following: How are signs perceived and what is their ontological nature in the so-called functional approach towards logical semiotics of natural language, founded on two ways of their usage: either as signs which we use in concrete situational or situational-language contexts or as isolated signs detached from such contexts? In the first case, they are language tokens (concretes), existing material objects perceived through the senses, with a fixed temporal-spatial location, in the other one – they are non-concretes and as such (as the majority of researchers in the field of philosophy and linguistics accept) – abstract objects, language types. The type-token distinction (differentiation between abstract and concrete) has already acquired a certain status in contemporary philosophy and is of considerable importance to metaphysics and epistemology in particular. Indeed, it is most often illustrated with reference to language signs (words, expressions) as the distinction type/token of a sign, introduced into semiotics by Ch. S. Peirce. In the semiotic analysis, and also in the linguistic one, there are used both types and tokens of signs, however, often without paying due attention to when it is said about types and when about tokens. This is related to the problems which are still considered by the philosophy of language: What is the type? What is the token (specimen)? What are the mutual relations between the type and the token? Disputes concerning providing answers to these questions are related to existential issues dealing with the ontological status of these language signs and two currents within the ontology of language, remaining under the influence of two fundamental concepts formed in the debate: nominalism and realism. The author presents in brief different stances on the above-mentioned issues or problems, as well as argues that from the logical point of view: 1) working out any theoretical conception of language must take into account its bi-aspectual characteristics: as a language of expression-tokens and as a language of expression-types; 2) advocating either of the standpoints: (a) types exist independent of their tokens, or (b) it is not so, can be omitted in syntactic considerations on language; 3) mutual relations between sign-tokens differ from the mutual relations between sign-types, yet; 4) determination of the mutual relation between sign-types and sign-tokens depends on accepting either of the standpoints: (a) or (b); 5) semantic or semantic-pragmatic concepts of language, such as meaning, denotation, interpretation should be defined exclusively for types of tokens, but their definitions require certain reference to the functions which sign-tokens perform in the language (words, expressions), or to relations between them; 6) The concept of an act of language communication differs from general language communication: the first one is defined by means of sign-tokens, whereas the other one – with the use of sign-types. (shrink)

The notion of an ℐ -matrix as a model of a given π -institution ℐ is introduced. The main difference from the approach followed so far in CategoricalAlgebraic Logic and the one adopted here is that an ℐ -matrix is considered modulo the entire class of morphisms from the underlying N -algebraic system of ℐ into its own underlying algebraic system, rather than modulo a single fixed -logical morphism. The motivation for introducing ℐ -matrices comes from a desire to formulate (...) a correspondence property for N -protoalgebraic π -institutions closer in spirit to the one for sentential logics than that considered in CAAL before. As a result, in the previously established hierarchy of syntactically protoalgebraic π -institutions, i. e., those with an implication system, and of protoalgebraic π -institutions, i. e., those with a monotone Leibniz operator, the present paper interjects the class of those π -institutions with the correspondence property, as applied to ℐ -matrices. Moreover, this work on ℐ -matrices enables us to prove many results pertaining to the local deduction-detachment theorems, paralleling classical results in Abstract Algebraic Logic formulated, first, by Czelakowski and Blok and Pigozzi. Those results will appear in a sequel to this paper. (shrink)

"What one cannot compute, one must poetize." So concludes this remarkable sequence of propositions on the centrality of poetry for what we call cognition. Developed through brief, lucid, and eloquent logical elaborations that are punctuated by incisive readings of a range of poems--Western and non-Western, low culture and high--Poetry and Mind offers to theorists and practitioners of literature, together with logicians and cognitive scientists, a more sophisticated account of the extraordinary regimes of human mental experience. Poetry grants us the ability (...) to move "beyond the limits of thought" and to explore the beyond of cognition. It teaches us to think differently. An elliptic response to Wittgenstein's point of arrival in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, this book is first and foremost an interdisciplinary study of poetry, drawing on literary, philosophical, and scientific traditions. The work conducted on minds and brains over the last decades in psychology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience cannot be ignored if, as humanists, we are interested in the way we think. Dubreuil thus calls for a constant dialogue with the positive examination of cognition to better situate the normal regimes of thought, as well as to underline the other mental possibilities that literature opens up. Poetry and Mind shows that poetry--a widespread and perhaps universal phenomenon among humans--arises through syntactic structures, cognitive binding, and mental regulations, but that, in going through them, it also exceeds them. The best poems, then, are not only thought experiments but actual thinking experiments for the unthinkable. They expand the usual semantics of natural languages, and singularly deploy the rhetorical armature of speech. Made of iterations and linguistic reorganizations, they exceed their own algorithms and, often, they become reflexive, strange, and cognitively dissonant. They provide detachable, movable, and livable significations to our selves. The literary scope of this book is more than "global": it is uniquely broad and comparative, encompassing dozens of different traditions, oral or written, from all continents, from Ancient times to the contemporary era, with some thirty specific readings of texts, ranging from Sophocles to Gertrude Stein, from Wang Wei to Aimé Césaire, and from cuneiform tablet to rap music. Together, Dubreuil's readings and elaborations offer a major reappraisal of the relations between creation, language and our embodied brains."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Syntactic complexity effects have been investigated extensively with respect to comprehension . According to one prominent class of accounts , certain structures cause comprehension difficulty due to their scarcity in the language. But why are some structures less frequent than others? In two elicited-production experiments we investigated syntactic complexity effects in relative clauses and wh-questions varying in whether or not they contained non-local dependencies. In both experiments, we found reliable durational differences between subject-extracted structures and object-extracted structures : (...) Participants took longer to begin and produce object-extractions. Furthermore, participants were more likely to be disfluent in the object-extracted constructions. These results suggest that there is a cost associated with planning and uttering the more syntactically complex, object-extracted structures, and that this cost manifests in the form of longer durations and disfluencies. Although the precise nature of this cost remains to be determined, these effects provide one plausible explanation for the relative rarity of object-extractions: They are more costly to produce. (shrink)

In this paper the PA-completeness of modal logic is studied by syntactical and constructive methods. The main results are theorems on the structure of the PA-proofs of suitable arithmetical interpretationsS of a modal sequentS, which allow the transformation of PA-proofs ofS into proof-trees similar to modal proof-trees. As an application of such theorems, a proof of Solovay's theorem on arithmetical completeness of the modal system G is presented for the class of modal sequents of Boolean combinations of formulas of the (...) form p i,m i=0, 1, 2, ... The paper is the preliminary step for a forthcoming global syntactical resolution of the PA-completeness problem for modal logic. (shrink)

Detachment, Involvement, and Rationality: are we Essentially Rational Animals? Philosophers have long thought that what differentiates humans from mere animals is that humans are essentially rational. The rational nature of human beings lies in their ability to detach themselves from ongoing involvement and to ask for as well as give reasons for activity. According to the philosophical tradition, human action and perception generally should be understood in light of this ability. This essay examines a contemporary version of this conviction, (...) one promulgated by John McDowell. McDowell follows the tradition in suggesting that people are always able to step back and to ask as well as answer why questions about what they are doing, i.e., they always have reasons for their actions. This essay shows that people have no reasons for many of the things they do. They often, instead, simply respond to shifting situational fields of attraction and repulsion. These attractions and repulsions cannot be captured in propositional form—any attempt to describe, or even just name, them turns them into objects and robs them of their motivational force. The demands of the situation are not available as reasons, but exist only as embodied in actions. McDowell, consequently, errs in claiming that conceptual capacities are inextricably implicated in human activity. Nor is the detached, rational way of being any more essential to human life than is involved coping. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky's book on syntactic structures is a serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction ...

This paper investigates some aspects of the semantics of deontic should-conditionals. The main objective is to understand which actual world facts make deontic statements true. The starting point for the investigation is a famous puzzle known as Chisholm’s Paradox. It is important because making sense of the data in Chisholm-style examples involves arriving at some conclusion regarding the interaction between what we consider ideal and what is actually true. I give an account of how facts affect the evaluation of should (...) formulated in a way that does not predict that the divergence between ideals and facts leads to contradictions. The proposed semantics for should and should-conditionals allows for factual detachment without giving rise to paradoxes. The proposal has several parts: a situation-based semantics for the modal should, a view of the propositions embedded under should that allows aspect to play a crucial role in anchoring propositions to the context set, and a proposal for if-clauses that distinguishes between epistemic if-clauses and if-clauses in the scope of should, treating the latter as restrictors on the quantificational domain of the modal. (shrink)

Previous correlational studies have shown that both psychological detachment from work and positively thinking about work during non-work time are associated with favorable affective states. In our research we integrate these contradictory findings and add more rigor to detachment research by using an experimental design. In two experimental studies conducted in the laboratory, we manipulated two different kinds of detachment from work (thinking about a hobby; explicit detachment instruction) and three different kinds of thinking about work (...) (thinking negatively, thinking positively, thinking in an unspecific way) by short written instructions. Results show that both detachment strategies lead to a reduction in negative affect (in both studies) and to an increase in positive affect (in one study). The effect of detachment was particularly strong when it was contrasted with thinking negatively about work and when end-of-workday negative affect was high. In some of the comparisons, the affective benefits of positively thinking about work were stronger than those of psychological detachment from work. Taken together, our studies demonstrate that detachment from work as well as positive thinking improves subsequent affect, highlighting the causality underlying the association between psychological detachment from work – as a core recovery experience – and subsequent affective states. (shrink)

In Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture, the well-formed expressions of a language are licensed by correspondences between phonology, syntax, and conceptual structure. I show how this architecture can be used to make sense of the existence of parasitic gap constructions. A parasitic gap is one that is rendered acceptable because of the presence of another gap in the same sentence. Compare *a person whoi everyone who talks to ti likes Chris, which shows an illicit extraction from a relative clause, and a person (...) whoi everyone who talks to pgi likes ti, which shows a parasitic gap in the relative clause. Languages differ in terms of the range of configurations in which they allow parasitic gaps; these configurations appear to form a hierarchy. These observations raise some fundamental questions: Why do parasitic gaps exist at all? Why are different syntactic configurations possible for P-gaps and why just these configurations? Why is there a parasitic gap hierarchy? The answers that I propose make crucial use of constructional overgeneralization of across-the-board extraction in coordinate constructions, formulated straightforwardly in the framework of Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture. (shrink)

We characterize Morita equivalence of theories in the sense of Johnstone in terms of a new syntactic notion of a common definitional extension developed by Barrett and Halvorson for cartesian, regular, coherent, geometric and first-order theories. This provides a purely syntactic characterization of the relation between two theories that have equivalent categories of models naturally in any Grothendieck topos.

Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West takes up the notion of artistic detachment, or psychic distance, as an intercultural motif for East-West comparative aesthetics. The work begins with an overview of aesthetic theory in the West from the eighteenth-century empiricists to contemporary aesthetics and concludes with a survey of various critiques of psychic distance. Throughout, the author takes a highly innovative approach by juxtaposing Western aesthetic theory against Eastern aesthetic theory. Weaving between cultures and time periods, the (...) author focuses on a remarkably wide range of theories: in the West, the Kantian notion of disinterested contemplation, Heidegger's Gelassenheit, semiotics, and pragmatism; in Japan, Zeami's notion of riken no ken, the Kyoto School's intepretation of nothingness, D. T. Suzuki's analysis of the function of no-mind, and the writings of Kuki Shuzo on Buddhist detachment. "Portrait of the artist" fiction by such writers as Henry James, James Joyce, Mori Ogai, and Natsume Soseki demonstrates how the main theme of detachment is expressed in literary traditions. The role of sympathy or pragmatism in relation to disinterest is examined, suggesting conflicts within or challenges to the notion of detachment. Researchers and students in Eastern and Western areas of study, including philosophers and religionists, as well as literary and cultural critics, will deem this work an invaluable contribution to cross-cultural philosophy and literary studies. (shrink)

This essay considers arguments for and against syntactical constraints on the proper formalization of definitions, originally owing to Alfred Tarski. It discusses and refutes an application of the constraints generalized to include a prohibition against not only object-place but also predicate-place variables in higher-order logic in a criticism of a recent effort to define the concept of heterologicality in a strengthened derivation of Grelling's paradox within type theory requirements. If the objections were correct, they would offer a more general moral (...) for the proper formal definition of terms in philosophical logic. The criticism nevertheless seems mistaken both in the substance and specific application with respect to legitimate synctactical constraints on definitions of key concepts in the case of Grelling's paradox. As such, the critique provides no justification for overturning previous conclusions concerning the possibility of resurrecting a type-observant version of Grelling's heterologicality paradox. (shrink)

Shun argues that the distinction between first and third person is ill-suited to explain the complexities of anger. In this commentary, I first argue that, while the distinction is not uniquely important in characterizing anger and its variations, it can be distinctively important in illuminating the nature and normative significance of different forms of anger. Indeed, Shun’s own characterizations of anger in the paper seem to presuppose this importance. Secondly, I show that there are two related but distinct ways in (...) which one’s anger is ‘personally involved’: the first concerns how the offence is registered (e.g., whether it is perceived as targeting oneself), and the second concerns one’s emotional uptake of the offence. Lastly, I propose an alternative interpretation of Zhu Xi’s distinction between anger that ‘resides in things’ and anger that ‘resides in the self’, where the emphasis is not on whether anger is an appropriate response to a situation but on whether anger is properly encapsulated. (shrink)

This paper contains a proof-theoretic account of unification in transitive reflexive modal logics, which means that the reasoning is syntactic and uses as little semantics as possible. New proofs of theorems on unification types are presented and these results are extended to negationless fragments. In particular, a syntactic proof of Ghilardi’s result that $\mathsf {S4}$ has finitary unification is provided. In this approach the relation between classical valuations, projective unifiers, and admissible rules is clarified.

Various laws and theories in the natural and social sciences are presented with a view to discerning the syntactic and semantic characteristics of many idealizations in science. Three different kinds of idealizations are discussed: ideal conditions, ideal cases, and idealized theories. An ideal condition is a formula in which state variables occur, whose existential closure is false, and for which there is another formula that can be constructed out of the original formula such that the existential closure of the (...) new formula is true. An ideal case is a statement which is logically equivalent to a universal conditional which has an ideal condition as its antecedent. And an idealized theory is a set of false universal conditional statements. Alternative syntactic and semantic analyses are viewed and criticized. (shrink)

Condensed detachment is usually regarded as a notation, and defined by example. In this paper it is regarded as a rule of inference, and rigorously defined with the help of the Unification Theorem of J. A. Robinson. Historically, however, the invention of condensed detachment by C. A. Meredith preceded Robinson's studies of unification. It is argued that Meredith's ideas deserve recognition in the history of unification, and the possibility that Meredith was influenced, through ukasiewicz, by ideas of Tarski (...) going back at least to 1939, and possibly to 1930 or earlier, is discussed. It is proved that a term is derivable by substitution and ordinary detachment from given axioms if and only if it is a substitution instance of a term which is derivable from these axioms by condensed detachment, and it is shown how this theorem enables the ideas of ukasiewicz and Tarski mentioned above to be formalized and extended. Finally, it is shown how condensed detachment may be subsumed within the resolution principle of J. A. Robinson, and several computer studies of particular Hilbert-type propositional calculi using programs based on condensed detachment or on resolution are briefly discussed. (shrink)

In the paper, tracing the traditional Hilbert-style syntactic account of logics, a syntactic characteristic of a closure operation defined on a complete lattice follows. The approach is based on observation that the role of rule of inference for a given consequence operation may be played by an ordinary binary relation on the complete lattice on which the closure operation is defined.

The implementation of skills labs in Danish nursing education can, in itself, be viewed as a complexity. The students are expected to eventually carry out their work in a situated hospital practice, but they learn their professional skills in a different space altogether, detached and removed from the hospitals and practising on plastic dummies. Despite the apparent artificiality of the skills lab, this article will show that it is possible to analyse some of the fundamental aspects of care in nursing (...) by ethnographically following this phenomenon of simulation‐based training. These particular aspects of care are not explicated in the curriculum or textbooks; however, they surfaced once this crooked approach to studying care in a simulated practice was applied. The article start from the assertion that detached engagements are not recognized within the field of nursing education as an equal component to attachments. Yet empirical cases from the skills lab and hospitals illustrate how students sometimes felt emotionally attached to plastic dummies and how experienced nurses sometimes practised a degree of detachment in relation to human patients. Detached engagements will therefore be presented as part of care practices of nurses – rendering the ability to detach in engagement with patients a professional skill that students also need to learn. In the analysis to follow, attached and detached engagements are located on an equal plane by integrating both into the same conceptual framework, rather than imposing a priori notions about their dialectic relation. The analysis shows that it is the particular intertwinement of attachment and detachment that gives care its fundamental meaning. In conclusion, the need for a conceptual shift from a strong emphasis on attached engagement to a more balanced analytical approach to care work, as involving both attached and detached engagement within Danish nursing education, is advocated. (shrink)

Previous work has reported that children creatively make syntactic errors that are ungrammatical in their target language, but are grammatical in another language. One of the most well‐known examples is medial wh‐question errors in English‐speaking children's wh‐questions (e.g., What do you think who the cat chased? from Thornton, 1990). The evidence for this non‐target‐like structure in both production and comprehension has been taken to support the existence of innate, syntactic parameters that define all possible grammatical variation, which serve (...) as a top‐down constraint guiding children's language acquisition process. The present study reports new story‐based production and comprehension experiments that challenge this interpretation. While we replicated previous observations of medial wh‐question errors in children's sentence production (Experiment 1), we saw a reduction in evidence indicating that English‐speaking children assign interpretations that conform to the medial wh‐question pattern (Experiment 2). Crucially, we found no correlation between production and comprehension errors (Experiment 3). We suggest that these errors are the result of children's immature sentence production mechanisms rather than immature grammatical knowledge. (shrink)

There has been much interest in the possibility of connectionist models whose representations can be endowed with compositional structure, and a variety of such models have been proposed. These models typically use distributed representations that arise from the functional composition of constituent parts. Functional composition and decomposition alone, however, yield only an implementation of classical symbolic theories. This paper explores the possibility of moving beyond implementation by exploiting holistic structure-sensitive operations on distributed representations. An experiment is performed using Pollack’s Recursive (...) Auto-Associative Memory. RAAM is used to construct distributed representations of syntactically structured sentences. A feed-forward network is then trained to operate directly on these representations, modeling syn- tactic transformations of the represented sentences. Successful training and generalization is obtained, demonstrating that the implicit structure present in these representations can be used for a kind of structure-sensitive processing unique to the connectionist domain. (shrink)

In this article I defend the view that many central aspects of the semantics of tense are determined by independently-motivated principles of syntactic theory. I begin by decomposing tenses syntactically into a temporal ordering predicate (the true tense, on this approach) and two time-denoting arguments corresponding to covert a reference time (RT) argument and an eventuality time (ET) argument containing the verb phrase. Control theory accounts for the denotation of the RT argument, deriving the distinction between main clause and (...) subordinate clause tenses. The theory of covert movement is used to account for the independent/indexical interpretation of relative clause tenses, and for the correlation between independent tense interpretation and a de re construal of the relative clause. A theory of “past polarity”, based on traditional negative polarity theory, accounts both for the simultaneous “sequence of tense” construal of past tenses in subordinate clauses embedded within past tense contexts, and for the obligatory indexical/independent interpretation of present tense in a relative clause embedded within a past tense context. Combined with the copy theory of movement, the polarity theory also provides an account of the semantics of double access sentences, treating them as involving a special kind of reconstruction effect. (shrink)

Le détachement, avec ses quelque 2,8 millions de salariés déclarés détachés en Europe en 2018, apparaît aujourd’hui comme une modalité centrale de l’organisation de la mobilité transnationale du travail. Celle-ci se fait notamment au travers de la structuration d’un vaste marché de l’intermédiation qui permet aux donneurs d’ordre des pays utilisateurs d’externaliser un certain nombre de risques, tout en assurant une mise au travail intensive des travailleurs détachés et un contrôle étroit de leur mobilité. Le présent article se propose d’analyser (...) les « régimes de temporalités » spécifiques que produit cette forme d’emploi. D’un côté, le détachement, de par le caractère totalisant du travail et l’étroitesse du hors travail dans le temps de la mission, semble construire les conditions d’une hégémonie des temporalités productives sur le travail. De l’autre, les temporalités biographiques révèlent de multiples manières de s’accommoder de cette intensité du travail, de son caractère pendulaire et d’une vie « à distance ». In fine, le détachement semble produire des subjectivités particulières qui rappellent les traits caractéristiques de l’expérience migratoire. (shrink)

A syntactic derivation of Cornish identity from the axioms of HBCK is presented which amounts to a syntactic proof of Wronski's conjecture that naturally ordered BCK-algebras form a variety.

In this paper I will give an analysis of what I call ‘generalizing detached self-reference’ within a general account of reference to the first person. With generalizing detached self-reference an agent attributes properties to a range of individuals by putting himself into their shoes, or simulating them. I will show that generalizing detached self-reference plays an important role in the semantics of natural language, in particular in the English generic one and in what syntacticians call arbitrary PRO.

We first look at an existing infinitary sequent system for common knowledge for which there is no known syntactic cut-elimination procedure and also no known non-trivial bound on the proof-depth. We then present another infinitary sequent system based on nested sequents that are essentially trees and with inference rules that apply deeply inside these trees. Thus we call this system “deep” while we call the former system “shallow”. In contrast to the shallow system, the deep system allows one to (...) give a straightforward syntactic cut-elimination procedure. Since both systems can be embedded into each other, this also yields a syntactic cut-elimination procedure for the shallow system. For both systems we thus obtain an upper bound of φ20 on the depth of proofs, where φ is the Veblen function. (shrink)

Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West takes up the notion of artistic detachment, or psychic distance, as an intercultural motif for East-West comparative aesthetics. The work begins with an overview of aesthetic theory in the West from the eighteenth-century empiricists to contemporary aesthetics and concludes with a survey of various critiques of psychic distance. Throughout, the author takes a highly innovative approach by juxtaposing Western aesthetic theory against Eastern aesthetic theory. Weaving between cultures and time periods, the (...) author focuses on a remarkably wide range of theories: in the West, the Kantian notion of disinterested contemplation, Heidegger's Gelassenheit, semiotics, and pragmatism; in Japan, Zeami's notion of riken no ken, the Kyoto School's intepretation of nothingness, D. T. Suzuki's analysis of the function of no-mind, and the writings of Kuki Shuzo on Buddhist detachment. "Portrait of the artist" fiction by such writers as Henry James, James Joyce, Mori Ogai, and Natsume Soseki demonstrates how the main theme of detachment is expressed in literary traditions. The role of sympathy or pragmatism in relation to disinterest is examined, suggesting conflicts within or challenges to the notion of detachment. Researchers and students in Eastern and Western areas of study, including philosophers and religionists, as well as literary and cultural critics, will deem this work an invaluable contribution to cross-cultural philosophy and literary studies. (shrink)

«Se détacher des sens». Sur la fonction des sensations dans l'épistémologie cartésienne.

In our article, “Syntactic complexity effects in sentence production”, we reported two elicited production experiments and argued that there is a cost associated with planning and uttering syntactically complex, object-extracted structures that contain a non-local syntactic dependency. MacDonald et al. () have argued that the results of our investigation provide little new information on the topic. We disagree. Examining the production of subject versus object extractions in two constructions across two experimental paradigms—relative clauses in Experiment 1 and wh-questions (...) in Experiment 2—we found a strikingly similar pattern: reliable differences in latency and word durations, as well as in rates of disfluencies, signaling a greater cost associated with planning and uttering the syntactically more complex object extractions. MacDonald et al. reject that interpretation, namely that the differences we observed in the production of subject versus object extractions demonstrate asymmetric production difficulties. Here we address the concerns they raise by clarifying confusion and presenting novel experimental evidence in support of our original claims. (shrink)

We provide a direct method for proving Craig interpolation for a range of modal and intuitionistic logics, including those containing a "converse" modality. We demonstrate this method for classical tense logic, its extensions with path axioms, and for bi-intuitionistic logic. These logics do not have straightforward formalisations in the traditional Gentzen-style sequent calculus, but have all been shown to have cut-free nested sequent calculi. The proof of the interpolation theorem uses these calculi and is purely syntactic, without resorting to (...) embeddings, semantic arguments, or interpreted connectives external to the underlying logical language. A novel feature of our proof includes an orthogonality condition for defining duality between interpolants. (shrink)

We callsyntactic coding a technique which converts syntactic principles or constraints on representations into grammatical rules which can be implemented in any given rule grammar. In this paper we show that any principle or constraint on output trees formalizable in a certain fragment of dynamic logic over trees can be coded in this sense. This allows to reduce in a mechanical fashion most of the current theories of government and binding into GPSG-style grammars. This will be exemplified with Rizzi'sRelativized (...) Minimality. (shrink)

Our first aim in this paper is to respond to four novel objections in Jason Stanley's 'Context and Logical Form'. Taken together, those objections attempt to debunk our prior claims that one can perform a genuine speech act by using a subsentential expression—where by 'subsentential expression' we mean an ordinary word or phrase, not embedded in any larger syntactic structure. Our second aim is to make it plausible that, pace Stanley, there really are pragmatic determinants of the literal truthconditional (...) content of speech acts. We hope to achieve this second aim precisely by defending the genuineness of subsentential speech acts. Given our two aims, it is necessary to highlight briefly their connection—which we do in the first part of the Introduction. Following that, we introduce Stanley's novel objections. This is the role of the second part of the Introduction. We offer our rebuttals in Section 2 (against 'shorthand') and Section 3 (against syntactic ellipsis, among other things). (shrink)

This paper investigates the effects of 10 factors on the choice between alternative ba sentences and SVO sentences in Mandarin Chinese. These factors are givenness, definiteness, animacy and pronominality of NP2s, NP2 length, VP length, verb sense, syntactic parallelism, dependency distance, and surprisal. Using corpus data and mixed-effects logistic regression modeling, we find that on the one hand, givenness, syntactic parallelism, and the log-transformed ratio of NP2 length and VP length are significant predictors of the choice between ba (...) sentences and SVO sentences. A new NP2, a large length ratio and a parallel construction predict an SVO sentence rather than a ba sentence. On the other hand, dependency distance and surprisal estimated by the trigram model are effective in predicting the choice between naturally occurring ba/svo sentences and their alternatives. Naturally occurring sentences are more likely to have shorter dependency distances and smaller surprisal values than the converted sentences. The effects of these five factors on syntactic choice are congruent with results of previous studies, which suggests that some determinants of syntactic choice are shared among languages. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary volume questions one of the most fundamental tenets of social theory by focusing on detachment, an important but neglected aspect of social life. Going against the grain of recent theoretical celebrations of engagement, this book challenges us to re-think the relational basis of social theory. In so, doing it brings to light the productive aspects of disconnection, distance and detachment. Rather than treating detachment simply as the moral inversion of compassion and engagement, the volume brings (...) together empirical studies and theoretical comments by leading anthropologists, sociologists and science studies scholars. Taken together, these illustrate the range of contexts within which distance and disconnection can offer meaningful frameworks for action. Positioned at the cutting edge of social theory, this landmark volume will be of great interest to students and academics across the social sciences and humanities. (shrink)

The paper traces the development and the role of syntactic reduction in Edmund Husserl’s early writings on mathematics and logic, especially on arithmetic. The notion has its origin in Hermann Hankel’s principle of permanence that Husserl set out to clarify. In Husserl’s early texts the emphasis of the reductions was meant to guarantee the consistency of the extended algorithm. Around the turn of the century Husserl uses the same idea in his conception of definiteness of what he calls “mathematical (...) manifolds.” The paper argues that the notion anticipates the notion of reduction in term rewrite theory in computer science. The role of the reduction for Husserl is, however, primarily epistemological: its purpose is to impart clarity to formal mathematics. (shrink)

One of the major arenas for debate within generative grammar is the nature of paradigmatic relations among words. Intervening in key debates at the interface between syntax and semantics, this book examines the relation between structure and meaning, and analyses how it affects the internal properties of words and corresponding syntactic manifestations. Adapting notions from the Evo-Devo project in biology (the idea of 'co-linearity' between structural units and behavioural manifestations) Juan Uriagereka addresses a major puzzle: how words can be (...) both decomposable so as to be acquired by children, and atomic, so that they do not manifest themselves as modular to adults. (shrink)

In the Bayesian framework, a language learner should seek a grammar that explains observed data well and is also a priori probable. This paper proposes such a measure of prior probability. Indeed it develops a full statistical framework for lexicalized syntax. The learner's job is to discover the system of probabilistic transformations (often called lexical redundancy rules) that underlies the patterns of regular and irregular syntactic constructions listed in the lexicon. Specifically, the learner discovers what transformations apply in the (...) language, how often they apply, and in what contexts. It considers simpler systems of transformations to be more probable a priori. Experiments show that the learned transformations are more effective than previous statistical models at predicting the probabilities of lexical entries, especially those for which the learner had no direct evidence. (shrink)

In the present study, using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated a group of participants on a grammaticality classification task after they had been exposed to well-formed consonant strings generated from an artificial regular grammar. We used an implicit acquisition paradigm in which the participants were exposed to positive examples. The objective of this studywas to investigate whether brain regions related to language processing overlap with the brain regions activated by the grammaticality classification task used in the present study. (...) Recent meta-analyses of functional neuroimaging studies indicate that syntactic processing is related to the left inferior frontal gyrus (Brodmann's areas 44 and 45) or Broca's region. In the present study, we observed that artificial grammaticality violations activated Broca's region in all participants. This observation lends some support to the suggestions that artificial grammar learning represents a model for investigating aspects of language learning in infants [TICS 4 (2000) 178] and adults [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of United States of America 99 (2002) 529]. (shrink)

The syntactic priority thesis (henceforth SP) asserts that the truth of appropriate sentential contexts containing what are, by syntactic criteria, singular terms, is sufficient to justify the attribution of objectual reference to such terms (Wright, 1983, 24). One consequence that the neo-Fregean draws from SP is that it is through an analysis of the syntactic structure of true statements that 'ontological questions are to be understood and settled' (Wright, 1983, 25). Despite the significant literature on SP, little (...) consideration has been given to this bold meta-ontological claim.1 My concern here is accordingly not with specific applications of SP to debates in the philosophy of mathematics, but rather with the .. (shrink)

Luciano Floridi’s informational structural realism takes a constructionist attitude towards the problems of epistemology and metaphysics, but the question of the nature of the semantical component of his view remains vexing. In this paper, I propose to dispense with the semantical component of ISR completely. I outline a Syntactical version of ISR. The unified entropy-based framework of information has been adopted as the groundwork of SISR. To establish its realist component, SISR should be able to dissolve the latching problem. We (...) have to be able to account for the informational structures–reality relationship in the absence of the standard semantical resources. The paper offers a pragmatic solution to the latching problem. I also take pains to account for the naturalistic plausibility of this solution by grounding it in the recent computational neuroscience of the predictive coding and the free energy principle. (shrink)

The paper focuses on tevelopmental relations between syntactical complexity, cohesion — especially conjuctional connection — and textual coherence in a sample of 150 argumentative texts written by school children (grades 4, 7, 10 and 12) and young adults (university students). In common sense and even in linguistics and psychology written text and especially written argument has been taken to be the prototype of syntactically complex, self-contained and explicit text over a long period of research on the topic. Thus it has (...) been argued that syntactic connectedness and explicit cohesion of propositions were the most valuable indicators for a well-done contextualization and abstraction of content space and rhetorical space in writing. Empirical data show this common-sense position to be questionable. The discussion emphazises the role of argumentative ‘implicitness’ as a necessary condition for getting the reader involved in the discourse and thus for the emergence of coherence in argumentative texts. (shrink)

Decidability of monadic first-order classical logic was established by Löwenheim in 1915. The proof made use of a semantic argument and a purely syntactic proof has never been provided. In the present paper we introduce a syntactic proof of decidability of monadic first-order logic in innex normal form which exploits G3-style sequent calculi. In particular, we introduce a cut- and contraction-free calculus having a (complexity-optimal) terminating proof-search procedure. We also show that this logic can be faithfully embedded in (...) the modal logic T. (shrink)