Author, as appears in the article.: Lobina, David J.; Demestre, Josep; Garcia-Albea, Jose E.; Guasch, Marc;
Department: Psicologia
URV's Author/s: Demestre Viladevall, Josep / GARCÍA-ALBEA RISTOL, JOSÉ EUGENIO / Guasch Moix, Marc / LOBINA BONA, DAVID JAMES
Keywords: Semantics Reasoning Negation Logical connectives Implicatures Disjunctions Disjunction Conjunction Comprehension Children Acquisition
Abstract: Language employs various coordinators to connect propositions, a subset of which are "logical" in nature and thus analogous to the truth operators of formal logic. We here focus on two linguistic connectives and their negations: conjunction and and (inclusive) disjunction or. Linguistic connectives exhibit a truth-conditional component as part of their meaning (their semantics), but their use in context can give rise to various implicatures and presuppositions (the domain of pragmatics) as well as to inferences that go beyond semantic/pragmatic properties (the result of reasoning processes). We provide a comprehensive review of the role of the logical connectives in language and argue that three sets of factors-semantic, pragmatic, and those related to reasoning-are separate and separable, though some details may differ cross-linguistically. As a way to showcase the argument, we present two experiments in language comprehension in Spanish wherein pragmatic content was minimised and reasoning processes neutered, thus potentially highlighting what might be the default meanings of the connectives under study. In Experiment 1 we show that the conjunctive reading of inclusive disjunction is available in positive contexts other than in syntactically intricate cases such as downward entailing and free choice contexts, contrary to what has been claimed in the literature. In Experiment 2 we show that negated conjunctions and disjunctions in Spanish can easily receive the same interpretation when contrasted against the same context and, moreover, that these interpretations match those available in English, despite claims from the literature that linguistic connectives and local negation interact differently in English and Romance languages.
Thematic Areas: Philosophy Linguistics and language Linguistics Language and linguistics Language & linguistics Filosofía Filologia, lingüística i sociolingüística Ciencias sociales Ciencias humanas
licence for use: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/
Author's mail: marc.guasch@urv.cat josep.demestre@urv.cat
Author identifier: 0000-0002-6898-120X 0000-0001-9221-066X
Record's date: 2023-02-23
Papper version: info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Link to the original source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10988-022-09359-w
Licence document URL: http://repositori.urv.cat/ca/proteccio-de-dades/
Papper original source: Linguistics And Philosophy. 46 (1): 135-168
APA: Lobina, David J.; Demestre, Josep; Garcia-Albea, Jose E.; Guasch, Marc; (2023). Default meanings: language's logical connectives between comprehension and reasoning. Linguistics And Philosophy, 46(1), 135-168. DOI: 10.1007/s10988-022-09359-w
Article's DOI: 10.1007/s10988-022-09359-w
Entity: Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Journal publication year: 2023
Publication Type: Journal Publications
Repositori URV