Research Patrick Dendale

Abstract

This project is about evidentiality, the linguistic means by which a speaker marks the source of information for what s/he communicates in an utterance. It has a triple focus: [A] the question of the existence of 'intuition evidentiality', yet unrecognized and un-studied in this field of research; [B] the properties of the inference underlying inferential evidentiality, and [C] The competing key notions in definitions of evidentiality and the role of these notions in determining identification criteria of evidentials and the boundaries between evidentials and 'non-evidentials'. Regarding intuition evidentiality [A], I will study how intuition markers relate to two other categories of evidentials, namely inference markers and perception markers; my main concern will be the place of intui-tion markers within classifications of evidentials and their typical properties. For inferential evidentiality [B], I will study (1) the non-monotonic properties of 'evidential inference', i.e. the operation of inference to which the inferential markers refer: plausibility, defeasibility, (2) how these properties relate to the properties used in epistemico-modal evaluation (probability, uncertainty) and (3) how both sets of properties relate to each other in the semantics of inferential evidentials. I will situ-ate, for example, the Peircean notion of abduction within the broader perspective of evidential inference. I will also study the distinction commonly made between the inferential categories Inferred versus Assumed and their respective perceptual and conceptual bases and assess these dichotomies in the light of insights from the theory of argumentation. I will also write a long overview article on evidentiality and its markers for a French encyclopedia. As for the definition of evidentiality [C], we will study the way three families of key notions are used in definitions of evidentiality and how these help shape identification criteria of evidentials; we will also look at some problems with the frontiers between evidentials and non-evidentials.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Dendale Patrick

Research team(s)

• Grammar and Pragmatics

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

This project is about evidentiality, the linguistic means by which a speaker marks the source of information for what s/he communicates in an utterance. It has a triple focus: [A] the question of the existence of 'intuition evidentiality', yet unrecognized and un-studied in this field of research; [B] the nature and properties of the type of inference underlying inferential evidentiality, and [C] The efficiency of the competing key notions in definitions of evidentiality, the role of these notions in determining identification criteria of evidentials and the boundaries between evidentials and 'non-evidentials'. The planned output are 10 publications (four empirical studies, five theoretical ones and a collective volume), the participation with a talk in four or five international conferences and five short research-stays (1 or 2 weeks) abroad (France, Spain, Switzerland).

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Dendale Patrick

Research team(s)

• Grammar and Pragmatics

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

This project represents a research contract awarded by the University of Antwerp. The supervisor provides the Antwerp University research mentioned in the title of the project under the conditions stipulated by the university. The general topic of this research mission is "evidentiality" or "evidential marking" in French. Within the project there is a subtopic on the epistemic (reportative) 'conditional' ('Il y aurait une quinzaine de victims'). During this research mission, on an empirical level, I want to provide an overview and detailed description of the semantics of known, as well as of newly identified French expressions with possible evidential function (reportative, inferential or perceptual). On the theoretical level, the challenge of this project is to characterize the notion of evidentiality in more precise way than has been done so far, in order to establish operational identification criteria to identify expressions with a fundamentally evidential function from expressions with a merely or mainly epistemico-modal function, so that a uniform analysis can be proposed for all the expressions with evidential function in the empirical part of the study of our set. The results of this empirical and theoretical research will be published in a monograph and in a series of acompanying articles, including first of all an overview article of French expressions with evidential function (in fact a short version of the coming book); further a number of detailed studies about expressions with an interesting evidential function (including the epistemic conditional, "visiblement" and others, to be determined during the project ) and one or two articles on the notion of evidentiality and its "auxiliary notions". During this research project I will also finish a small UA KP BOF project with the publication of one or two articles on the awareness and analysis by French grammarians through the centuries, of the reportative conditional. Finally, during this research project I supervise a PhD project on the origins and original meaning of the epistemic conditional and I will start a new project application about adverbial markers of inferential evidentiality in French.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Dendale Patrick

Research team(s)

• Grammar and Pragmatics

Project website

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

In French newspapers, conditional verb forms such as aurait/aurait été (conditionnels) often appear in sentences like Le rédacteur en chef de Charlie Hebdo aurait été tué / Il y aurait une dizaine de morts. They illustrate a kind of use of the conditional that we will label Reportative (henceforth ReportCondit). When using ReportCondits, journalists let their readers know: (a) that they are not themselves the source of the information in the utterance, (b) that they consider the information as not completely certain and (c) that they do not want to commit themselves to its truth. Whereas there has been intensive research on the semantics and pragmatics of the contemporary ReportCondit (including by the promoter), its origin and semantic development has not attracted much attention from scholars, apart from some small-scale research initiated recently by both the promoter and the co-promoter, about: (a) the earliest occurrences of the ReportCondit (e.g. Bourova & Dendale 2006), (b) the identification of the Reportative use by early grammarians (e.g. Dendale & Coltier 2012) and (c) the semantic evolution of the conditional in general (Patard & De Mulder 2012). Currently, manuals on the history of French (e.g. Picoche & Marchello-Nizia 1998) and grammars of old and classical French (e.g. Buridant 2000, Fournier 2002) give no detailed information about the origin, the original meaning and the semantic evolution of the ReportCondit. Therefore, there is an urgent need to supplement the information lacking in the above-mentioned works and to understand how, why and when the ReportCondit acquired the meaning components described in (a), (b) and (c) above, which led linguists (starting with Dendale 1991) to consider it to be an evidential marker, the first to be identified as such in French. Research conducted at the UAntwerp by the promoter and the co-promoter largely contributed to those insights. The aim of this project is thus to (1) identify the precise meaning of the ReportCondit in modern and older stages of French, (2) its co(n)texts of use, (3) its origin and age, (4) its semantic evolution, and (5) its status as an evidential marker. With the funding of this project and the commitment of a PhD student, we can be the first to survey the emergence and evolution of the ReportCondit and thus make an original contribution to a field on the crossroads of French descriptive linguistics and international research on evidentiality.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Dendale Patrick
• Co-promoter: De Mulder Walter
• Fellow: Van de Weerd Jessica

Research team(s)

• Grammar and Pragmatics

Project website

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

This project investigates when grammaticographers discovered the existence of the French reportative conditional and how they initially described it. It broadens and deepens previously published research by studying much more grammars from the 17th-19th century, after having located them in digital or paper form. It will offer new elements and insights in the study of the etymology and early meaning of the reportative conditional.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Dendale Patrick

Research team(s)

• Grammar and Pragmatics

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Linguistic analysis of the way in which meanings are generated and transformed in information flows in the context of globalization. The specific focus is on intertextual processes approached from the point of view of ethnographically supported pragmatics-based ideology research, concentrating on the variable use of implicitness and differences in reference to sources. The case to be investigated will be taken from the international printed media in English, the Flemish printed media, and the printed media in French in Belgium, France, Congo, and West Africa.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Verschueren Jef
• Co-promoter: De Mulder Walter
• Co-promoter: Dendale Patrick

Research team(s)

• Grammar and Pragmatics

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Gelieve aan te vullen a.u.b.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Dendale Patrick

Research team(s)

• Grammar and Pragmatics

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

This project aims at the characterisation of the fundamental notion of (non-)commitment / (non-)prise en charge, which is used in the description of a variety of phenomena in enunciative linguistics. Will be studied: the mechanisms and markers of (non- )commitment, the types and degrees of (non- )commitment, its scope andfrontiers, its "subjects" (enunciators) and precise object (truth, argumentative value, ...), the time- point of (non-)commitment and the different layers of responsability of enunciators in a polyfonous marker.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Dendale Patrick

Research team(s)

• Grammar and Pragmatics

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Dendale Patrick

Research team(s)

• Grammar and Pragmatics

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

The aim of this research project is to offer a corpus-based analysis of the meaning and use of Old- and "Middle"-French spatial prepositions and to study their evolution up to Modern French. It thus wants to look into the metaphorical processes that give rise to the new and frequently non-spatial meanings of these prepositions.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Venckeleer Theo
• Co-promoter: De Mulder Walter
• Co-promoter: Dendale Patrick

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

The aims of this project are (1) to establish the meaning of the terms 'vrai' and 'vÚritÚ' as used in French (2) to analyze a series of French expressions that signal when and to what extent a sentence is true (3) to compare the concepts 'vrai' and 'vÚritÚ' in natural language, as revealed by the analysis in (1) and (2) to the concept of truth as used in formal semantics.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: De Mulder Walter
• Co-promoter: Dendale Patrick
• Co-promoter: Tasmowski Liliane

Research team(s)

Project type(s)

• Research Project