Additivity and probability

Jacques Jayez (1) , Grégoire Winterstein (2)

1 L2C2 - Institut des Sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod - Laboratoire sur le langage, le cerveau et la cognition
2 LLF UMR7110 - Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle

In this work, we give a new semantics to the notion of additivity as embodied by several discourse markers and particles in French: et, de plus and d'ailleurs. The common property of these di erent elements is the notion of independence of their arguments. We show that existing accounts of additive particles fail to do full justice to this notion of independence, and we propose a new semantics for and that captures this notion in a Bayesian fashion. We then evaluate the applicability of this analysis to de plus and d'ailleurs and show that, unlike et, these elements are strongly argumentative: they make an explicit reference to an external issue that is disputed in the current conversation.

Mots clés: Additivity; Probability; Argumentation; Dependence; Discourse markers

Domaines: Linguistique

Jacques Jayez, Grégoire Winterstein. Additivity and probability. Lingua, 2013, 132, pp.85-102. ⟨10.1016/j.lingua.2012.11.004⟩. ⟨hal-01069769⟩