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COCOA (Converging On Causal Ontology Analyses)

13
sep.
2023.
17h00
19h00
COCOA

Merci d'écrire à cocoa-info [at] services.cnrs.fr pour le lien zoom.

Causality and modality: plural causal instantiations in Teochew

Zhuosi Luo, Georgetown University
 
Many linguistic works have adopted the CAUSE operator to analyze causal relations. However,  more recent studies have gradually converged on the idea that a denotation like CAUSE(e, e') is not sophisticated enough to capture complex causalities encoded in linguistic structures, echoing long-time discussions on causation in the field of philosophy. This study supports this view by working on the plural instantiations of causation encoded in five periphrastic causative constructions in Teochew, an understudied Southern Min language. Using data collected from 30 Teochew speakers, I demonstrated causality notions encoded in Teochew causatives differ in four dimensions: (i) (in)directness (temporality, space and acceptability of mediation), (ii) (non-)actuality entailment of the caused event, (iii) (not) bearing speaker attitude and (iv) (not) encoding social relations between event participants. I provide a sublexical modal analysis paired with event semantics to capture all these complexities, with an aim to replace the monolithic CAUSE event linker and to show most of the causal complexities result from different flavors of sublexical modality encoded in the causative verbs.
 
 

Modal models vs. causal models: French être en train de

Bridget Copley, SFL (CNRS/Paris 8)

Copley & Roy (2015) propose to analyse the French progressive être en train de (literally `be in process of') with a doubly model denotation. Their claim is that êetd has a modal at-issue meaning with a circumstantial modal base and a stereotypical ordering source (cf. Portner 1998); and in addition, they argue, it has a modal conventional implicature with either a stereotypical or a bouletic ordering source. While this analysis gets the truth conditions and implicatures right, it fails to explain why there would be two stacked modal meanings associated with morphology that essentially locates the subject of the sentence "in the process of" some event. Moreover, there is no explanation in that analysis as to why certain parts of the meaning are at issue and others are not at issue. Here I propose that a causal model does better than a modal model at providing these explanations.

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