On Something Similar

Joan Busquets (1) , Christian Bassac (2)

1 CLLE-ERSS - Cognition, Langues, Langage, Ergonomie
2 CRTT - Centre de recherche en terminologie et traduction

The use of expressions something similar/something like that/and the like is a pervasive feature of spoken natural language, and thus must be accounted for if we hope to develop a semantic account of dialogue. These expressions exhibit an anaphoric type dependency, but at the semantic-pragmatic level rather than the syntactic level. The meaning of these utterances depends upon the context of utterance: if the meaning of the utterance is regardedas fixed, then utterances which intuitively are coherent receive incoherent interpretations. To model what happens with utterances containing these phrases, we require both a formal theory of discourse structure, and accessibility to the lexicon.

Mots clés: Discourse; parallelism; similarity; anaphora

Domaines: Linguistique

Joan Busquets, Christian Bassac. On Something Similar. Journal of Cognitive Science, 2016, 17 (2), pp.263-307. ⟨hal-01578825⟩