Philippe Schlenker
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 950497 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Philippe Schlenker |
| PRENOMES | Philippe |
| SOBRENOME | Schlenker |
| ASSINATURA | SCHLENKER P |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Institut Jean Nicod |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9489-9325 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 71 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 128 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 71 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1998 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
The Meaning and Grammar of Pure Gestures
While studies of gestures generally focus on their cospeech use, gestures can sometimes be produced on their own, with a dedicated time slot. Such “pure gestures” have yielded three key findings. First, their iconic content can be divided “on the fly” among traditional slots of the inferential typology of language. This finding extends to novel gestures, visual animations, and (iconically modulated) sign language classifiers, which suggests that …
Ancestral Meanings
Janus sentences
A key breakthrough in research on the semantics/pragmatics interface was the discovery of ‘locally computed’ scalar implicatures. While initial accounts modified the interpretive procedure to account for them (Chierchia 2004), the dominant view within the grammatical tradition to scalar implicatures is now that local implicatures are computed by an invisible but syntactically real version of only, the exhaustivity operator Exh (Chierchia et al. 2…
Anti‐Babel
While recent “animal linguistics” treats call form as arbitrary, various results suggest that some animals use a biological code to understand the calls of unrelated/unfamiliar species. To clarify matters, we distinguish among three degrees of interspecies comprehension. In the first (“Understand thy neighbor”), a species understands the calls of a neighboring species through exposure. In the second (“call convergence”), it understands the calls …
The inferential typology of language
Traveling Shots in Language
In sign language, classifier predicates have a highly iconic semantics, which has motivated the development of a formal framework ('Iconological Semantics') with a pictorial component evaluated relative to viewpoint variables. But in this framework, viewpoints are static. We argue that this analysis fails to capture a well-documented phenomenon in several sign languages: sometimes classifier movement (e.g. of a tree-denoting classifier) is used t…
Iconological Semantics
Female Diana Monkeys Have Complex Calls
We argue that female Diana monkeys (Cercopithecus diana) can form complex calls by combining an A call with other elementary calls. We reject (on both empirical and conceptual grounds) a combination-free analysis based on accidental homophony, and we consider two main analyses: the Acoustic Theory takes the combination to be merely acoustic, whereas the Affixal Theory takes A to function as a suffix. We provide limited arguments for the Affixal T…
Word learning tasks as a window into the triggering problem for presuppositions
In this paper, we show that native speakers spontaneously divide the complex meaning of a new word into a presuppositional component and an assertive component. These results argue for the existence of a productive triggering algorithm for presuppositions, one that is not based on alternative lexical items nor on contextual salience. On a methodological level, the proposed learning paradigm can be used to test further theories concerned with the …
On the typology of iconic contributions
Iconic Syntax
Super Linguistics
We argue that formal linguistic theory, properly extended, can provide a unifying framework for diverse phenomena beyond traditional linguistic objects. We display applications to pictorial meanings, visual narratives, music, dance, animal communication, and, more abstractly, to logical and non-logical concepts in the ‘language of thought’ and reasoning. In many of these cases, a careful analysis reveals that classic linguistic notions are pervas…
Supplements without Bidimensionalism
In seminal work, Potts (2005) claimed that the behavior of "supplements"-appositive relative clauses (ARCs) and nominals-offers a powerful argument in favor of a multidimensional semantics, one in which certain expressions fail to interact scopally with various operators because their meaning is located in a new semantic dimension. Focusing on ARCs, with data from English, French, and German (Poschmann 2018), I explore an alternative to Potts's b…
Triggering Presuppositions
While presuppositions are often thought to be lexically encoded, researchers have repeatedly argued for ‘triggering algorithms’ that productively classify certain entailments as presuppositions. We provide new evidence for this position and sketch a novel triggering rule. On the empirical side, we show that presuppositions are productively generated from iconic expressions (such as gestures) that one may not have seen before, which suggests that …
Focus and Intensification in the Semantics of Brow Raise
We argue that in American Sign Language (ASL), Brow Raise has two sorts of functions that can be distinguished by timing: it may serve well-known information-theoretic functions that can, among others, realize focus; but it may also intensify gradable constructions – a far less well-known observation. While Brow Raise on an expression can fulfill both functions, Brow Raise right before an expression preferentially has an information-theoretic fun…
Boundaries in space and time
Stereotyped Vocalizations
Timelines and Temporal Pointing in Chinese Sign Language
We argue that Chinese Sign Language (CSL) provides new insights into temporal anaphora, as well as new puzzles. Partee (1973) showed that temporal talk in English involves abstract anaphoric mechanisms akin to pronouns, although with a very different form. Schlenker (2013) argued that in American Sign Language (ASL), one and the same overt pronominal form, the pointing sign, can have individual and temporal uses, but his data involved the same lo…
Referential and general calls in primate semantics
Musical meaning within Super Semantics
Meaningful Blurs
Non-local attachment of clauses
Iconic presuppositions
Inside out
Some sentences are globally informative but still deviant because they contain an expression that is redundant relative in its local environment, as in: #Ann is staying in Paris and she in France. In this case, the second conjunct seems to be evaluated after the first. In several frameworks, order of evaluation follows from linear order. Focusing on nominal modification in Japanese and Korean, Ingason (2016) argued that the correct notion of orde…
Boundaries in space and time
The idea that the form of a word reflects information about its meaning has its roots in Platonic philosophy, and has been experimentally investigated for concrete, sensory-based properties since the early 20th century. Here, we provide evidence for an abstract property of ‘boundedness’ that introduces a systematic, iconic bias on the phonological expectations of a novel lexicon. We show that this abstract property is general across events and ob…
Maximize Presupposition and Gricean reasoning
Iconic features
Non-Redundancy
Visible Meaning
While it is now accepted that sign languages should inform and constrain theories of 'Universal Grammar', their role in 'Universal Semantics' has been under-studied. We argue that they have a crucial role to play in the foundations of semantics, for two reasons. First, in some cases sign languages provide overt evidence on crucial aspects of the Logical Form of sentences , ones that are only inferred indirectly in spoken language. For instance, s…
Clausal Equations (A Note on the Connectivity Problem)
Pyow-hack revisited
Supplements without Bidimensionalism
In seminal work, Potts (2005) claimed that the behavior of "supplements"-appositive relative clauses (ARCs) and nominals-offers a powerful argument in favor of a multidimensional semantics, one in which certain expressions fail to interact scopally with various operators because their meaning is located in a new semantic dimension. Focusing on ARCs, with data from English, French, and German (Poschmann 2018), I explore an alternative to Potts's b…
What is Super Semantics
International audience
Sign Language and the Foundations of Anaphora
Sign language anaphora is often realized very differently from its spoken language counterpart. In simple cases, an antecedent is associated with a position or “locus” in signing space, and an anaphoric link is obtained by pointing toward that locus to recover its semantic value. This mechanism may sometimes be an overt realization of coindexation in formal syntax and semantics. I discuss two kinds of insights that sign language research can brin…
Gestural semantics
Iconic pragmatics
Temporal and modal anaphora in sign language (ASL)
Iconic presuppositions
Gestural agreement
Iconic plurality
The Unity of Focus
International audience
DRT with local contexts
Non-local attachment of clauses
Titi semantics
Featural variables
The Proviso Problem
How to eliminate self-reference
Gestural grammar
Gestural Cosuppositions within the Transparency Theory
Following initial formal work on the semantic integration of gestures in discourse (e.g., Lascarides and Stone 2009) and on iconic aspects of gestural semantics (Giorgolo 2010), there has recently been a resurgence of interest in the formal and experimental semantics of co-speech gestures. It was motivated on three fronts: co-speech gestures have become crucial to understanding whether spoken language has means of iconic enrichment similar to tho…
Presupposition Projection
How do complex sentences inherit the presuppositions of their parts? This is the problem of presupposition projection . An old idea is that the presupposition of an elementary expression must be entailed by the context in which it is evaluated; the relevant notion of context is, as a first approximation, what is ‘common ground’ between the speech act participants. We survey two theories of presupposition projection which are crucially based on th…
La grammaire générative entre comparatisme et cognition
Rouveret Alain, Schlenker Philippe. La grammaire générative entre comparatisme et cognition. In: Langages, 32e année, n°129, 1998. Diversité de la (des) science(s) du langage aujourd'hui. pp. 9-23
Clausal Equations (A Note on the Connectivity Problem)
Context of Thought and Context of Utterance
Based on the analysis of narrations in Free Indirect Discourse and the Historical Present, I argue (building in particular on ( Banfield, 1982 ) and ( Doron, 1991 )) that the grammatical notion of context of speech should be ramified into a Context of Thought and a Context of Utterance . Tense and person depend on the Context of Utterance, while all other indexicals (including here, now and the demonstratives) are evaluated with respect to the Co…
Non-Redundancy
Scopal Independence
Hintikka claimed in the 1970s that indefinites and disjunctions give rise to ‘branching readings’ that can only be handled by a ‘game-theoretic’ semantics as expressive as a logic with (a limited form of) quantification over Skolem functions. Due to empirical and methodological difficulties, the issue was left unresolved in the linguistic literature. Independently, however, it was discovered in the 1980s that, contrary to other quantifiers, indef…
Expressive presuppositions
1. Two directions When new phenomena are discovered, the semanticist may account for them by enriching his formal framework, or by reducing them to the complex interaction of some of its existing components. The first option may be more exciting; but the second may be more explanatory. Potts provided some welcome excitement with his groundbreaking study of expressives (Potts, to appear). Can a more conservative account be adopted? In this note, w…
How to eliminate self-reference
Be Articulate
In the 1980's, the analysis of presupposition projection contributed to a ‘dynamic turn’ in semantics: the classical notion of meanings as truth conditions was replaced with a dynamic notion of meanings as Context Change Potentials (Heim 1983). We explore an alternative in which presupposition projection follows from the combination of a fully classical semantics with two pragmatic principles of manner, Be Articulate and Be Brief. Be Articulate i…
Presupposition projection
Local Contexts
The dynamic approach posits that a presupposition must be satisfied in its local context. But how is a local context derived from the global one? Extant dynamic analyses must specify in the lexical entry of any operator what its 'Context Change Potential' is, and for this very reason they fail to be sufficiently explanatory. To circumvent the problem, we revise two assumptions of the dynamic approach: we take the update process to be derivative f…
Indexicality and De Se reports
Indexicals are context-dependent expressions such as I, you, here and now, whose semantic value is determined by the context in which they are uttered (e.g. I denotes John if uttered by John, and Mary if uttered by Mary). In English, these expressions typically depend on the actual context of speech, i.e. the context in which they are in fact uttered. In other languages, however, some indexicals may depend on the context of a reported speech act,…
Iconic Agreement
Two apparently contradictory insights about sign language can be made compatible within a formal semantic analysis: (i) the claim that directional verbs incorporate agreement markers/pronouns (e.g. Lillo-Martin and Meier, Theoretical Linguistics, 2011); (ii) the observation that directional verbs have an iconic component (e.g. Liddell, Grammar, Gesture, and Meaning in American Sign Language, Cambridge University Press, 2003). I sketch formal rule…
Presupposition Projection
How do complex sentences inherit the presuppositions of their parts? This is the problem of presupposition projection . An old idea is that the presupposition of an elementary expression must be entailed by the context in which it is evaluated; the relevant notion of context is, as a first approximation, what is ‘common ground’ between the speech act participants. We survey two theories of presupposition projection which are crucially based on th…
DRT with local contexts
The Proviso Problem
Presupposition Projection
How do complex sentences inherit the presuppositions of their parts? This is the problem of presupposition projection . An old idea is that the presupposition of an elementary expression must be entailed by the context in which it is evaluated; the relevant notion of context is, as a first approximation, what is ‘common ground’ between the speech act participants. We survey two theories of presupposition projection which are crucially based on th…
Incremental vs. symmetric accounts of presupposition projection
Maximize Presupposition and Gricean reasoning
Moral Judgments and Semantic Judgments
In Mikhail (2011),1 John Mikhail developed an ambitious research program for moral psychology, one that has both a sophisticated theoretical component and a rich empirical base. Rather than commenting on Mikhail’s oeuvre, we thought the best tribute we could offer to his pioneering contribution was to show in detail how his ideas inspired one of our recent experimental endeavors—a modest one, but one which is consonant, we hope, with Mikhail’s ow…
Predicting moral judgments from causal judgments
Several factors have been put forward to explain the variability of moral judgments for superficially analogous moral dilemmas, in particular in the paradigm of trolley cases. In this paper we elaborate on Mikhail's view that (i) causal analysis is at the core of moral judgments and that (ii) causal judgments can be quantified by linguistic methods. According to this model, our moral judgments depend both on utilitarian considerations (whether po…
Iconic variables
Temporal and modal anaphora in sign language (ASL)
Monkey semantics
Iconic features
Formal monkey linguistics
We explain why general techniques from formal linguistics can and should be applied to the analysis of monkey communication – in the areas of syntax and especially semantics. An informed look at our recent proposals shows that such techniques needn’t rely excessively on categories of human language: syntax and semantics provide versatile formal tools that go beyond the specificities of human linguistics. We argue that “formal monkey linguistics” …
Philosophy (63 obras) · Linguistics (61 obras) · Computer Science (59 obras) · Mathematics (32 obras) · Psychology (32 obras) · Epistemology (28 obras) · Hearing Impairment and Communication (28 obras) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (28 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (21 obras) · Programming language (19 obras)