This book explores the semantic and pragmatic mechanisms underlying grammaticalization. Regine Eckardt argues that language change frequently involves a structural reorganization at the phonological, morphological, and syntactic levels. Speakers not only master the structural aspect of such reanalyses, they also-as the author argues-keep a detailed mental record of what has happened to meaning. The author develops semantic reanalysis as the semantic correlate and tracks its effects in meaning change. Several case studies offer new insights in the architecture of (...) conceptual thinking that is part of the human language faculty. Professor Eckardt develops her approach in terms of formal semantic theory. She shows how neatly tailored analyses in truth-conditional compositional semantics can elucidate the structural mechanisms of meaning change. Her exposition is advanced in the context of several in-depth case studies containing data new to historical linguistics. This book will be of central interest to scholars and advanced students of historical and comparative linguistics and of formal semantics in departments of linguistics and philosophy. (shrink)

This paper investigates the meaning of German selbst (≈ E N-self) in its intensifying use, and the relation of this selbst to the focus particle selbst (≈ E even). I propose that intensifying selbst denotes type-lifted variants of the identity function on the domain of individuals, and that the observed stress accents must be analysed in terms of by now well-established focus theories. This analysis covers the core range of data correctly, predicting obligatory stress on selbst, sortal restrictions, centrality effects, (...) and the distribution of examples that express some kind of surprise. Moreover, it allows for a treatment of the reanalysis of intensifying selbst into focus particle selbst that stipulates fewer historical accidents than previous accounts. (shrink)

A logic for generic sentences -- A dynamic causal theory of references.

Disjoint imperative sentences like ( Nimm die ) Hände hoch, oder ich schiesse! , literally ( take your ) hands up, or I’ll shoot! intuitively present the addressee with all her alternatives for action. The speaker informs that all future worlds, as far as the speaker can forsee, are such that the addressee raises her hands or gets killed. I propose a semantic/pragmatic analysis for sentences in the imperative mood that adopts this exhausitve description of future alternatives as a semantic (...) backbone. Different contextual instantiations of alternatives capture a wide range of uses of sentences in imperative mood, as well as coordinations of imperative and declarative sentences, in a uniform way. (shrink)

The collection focuses on meaning change as a topic of interdisciplinary research.

Several authors propose that performative speech acts are self-guaranteeing due to their self-referential nature (Searle 1989; Jary 2007). The present paper offers an analysis of self-referentiality in terms of truth conditional semantics, making use of Davidsonian events. I propose that hereby can denote the ongoing act of information transfer (more mundanely, the utterance) which thereby enters the meaning of the sentence. The analysis will be extended to cover self-referential sentences without the adverb hereby. While self-referentiality can be integrated in ordinary (...) truth conditional semantic analysis without being a mystery, the resulting account shows that self-referentiality in this sense is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for performative utterances. I propose that the second ingredient of performative utterances consists in an act of the speaker defining her utterance to be an act of the respective kind. The final theory can successfully predict the performativity, or lack thereof, of a wide range of performative sentences, and leads to an explicated interface between compositional sentence meaning and speech act. (shrink)

Tous les évènements traumatiques instaurent un rapport spécifique au temps. Parmi eux, le génocide constitue un paradigme de l’expérience extrême. Le génocide est un évènement qui échappe au temps commun et qui instaure une nouvelle temporalité, tant pour les victimes que pour les bourreaux. En analysant des témoignages oraux et écrits de rescapés de la Shoah et du génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda, on constate que la temporalité instaurée par le génocide continue longtemps après la fin des massacres à se (...) réverbérer sur la vie des survivants dont les familles ont été décimées. (shrink)

In this richly detailed analysis, Barbara Von Eckardt lays the foundations for understanding what it means to be a cognitive scientist.

La nostalgie est cet état psychique qui se tient quelque part entre le deuil, la dépression et la mélancolie, avec lesquels on la confond souvent. Définie très tôt comme la maladie de l’exilé, la nostalgie est un pharmakon, à la fois baume et poison pour celui qui s’y adonne. À partir des écrits de Jean Améry, survivant de la Shoah, et de sa propre expérience auprès des survivants du génocide rwandais, l’auteur, psychanalyste, distingue ici deux positions face à la nostalgie (...) : la position nostalgique et l’évitement, toutes deux à l’origine d’états pathologiques qui peuvent conduire à la mélancolie, voire au suicide. (shrink)

While an ethical obligation to report findings of clinical research to trial participants is increasingly recognised, the academic debate is often vague about what kinds of data should be fed back and how such a process should be organised. In this article, we present a classification of different actors, processes and data involved in the feedback of research results pertaining to an individual. In a second step, we reflect on circumstances requiring further ethical consideration. In regard to a concrete research (...) setting—the one of clinico-genomic research—we discuss what kinds of difficulties have to be faced when returning individual research results to trial participants. In a last step, we elaborate on a stepwise model to trigger the individual feedback process. Hence, this paper gives guidance on how to feedback individual research results in a specific research setting and responds at the same time to new challenges in the debate on the duty to return individual research findings. (shrink)

During the last third of the 19th century, the ‘new’ French psychology developed within ‘the hypnotic context’ opened up by Charcot. In spite of their claims to the scientific nature of their hypnotic experiments, Charcot and his followers were unable to avoid the miracles that had accompanied mesmerism, the forerunner of hypnosis. The hysterics hypnotized in the Salpêtrière Hospital were expected to have supernormal faculties and these experiments opened the door to psychical research. In 1885 the first French psychology society (...) was founded. The research carried out by this society may seem surprising: its members – Charles Richet in particular – were interested in strange phenomena, like magnetic lucidity, ‘mental suggestion’, thought-reading, etc. Very quickly, psychologists applied themselves to finding rational explanations for these supposedly miraculous gifts. Generally, they ascribed them to unconscious or subconscious perceptual mechanisms. Finally, after a few years, studies of psychical phenomena were excluded from the field of psychology. However, during the 4th International Congress of Psychology, which took place in Paris in 1900, the foundation of an institute devoted to the study of psychical phenomena was announced, but Pierre Janet and Georges Dumas founded within it the Société Française de Psychologie, from which psychical research was excluded. As for Charles Richet, disappointed by the psychologists, he devoted himself to the development of a new ‘science’ which he called ‘Métapsychique’. Several hypotheses have been put forward to account for this early research undertaken by the French psychologists, pertaining as much to parapsychology as to scientific psychology. (shrink)

In focusing on relations between data and vision and proposing to address big data in terms of currently dominant optical metaphors, the paper makes a case for an approach that allows for clearer distinctions between big data as ‘visions’, and data technologies. assessing notions and visions of panoptic data technologies, I outline three perspectives on the nexus between data and vision. Following Bruno Latour’s counter-image of “oligoptica”, I argue, more generally, in favour of a conceptual framework that understands big data (...) as a sociotechnical infrastructure, and discuss, drawing on more recent studies, in which ways this approach allows to address social and ethical implications of present data technologies and practices in a more differentiated way. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The first part of this article relies on a number of well-known notions drawn directly from Bakhtin's work, while bringing to bear others inspired by the Bakhtinian perspective. The second part proposes a study dealing with the diverse kinds of verbal interactions rooted in Bakhtin's notion of responsive act. These include interdiscursivity, interlocution, and intralocution, elaborated by Jacques Brès among others, as well as moves and shifts, which we owe to Frédéric François. In the third part, this body of (...) notions is tested on a corpus of verbal interactions between young children and adults, and between two or more children. The study stresses the diversity and early use of these different kinds of dialogical relations in children's language practices. It also shows how a Bakhtinian approach can contribute to research on language acquisition. (shrink)

La mesure d'audience est au coeur de l'activité des médias dits de masse: elle sert de référence pour quantifier les auditoires et s'impose comme mode de consultation du public. Le présent numéro d'Hermès présente tout d'abord les systèmes de mesure d'audience des différents médias , mettant en évidence que l'audience est le résultat d'un ensemble de contraintes et d'un consensus toujours fragile entre les partenaires concernés. La deuxième partie, plus particulièrement centrée sur la télévision généraliste, analyse les effets de la (...) concurrence sur les programmes et les programmations. La partie suivante s'interroge sur la validité de l'audience comme moyen de connaissance des publics, et sur la possibilité de créer d'autres types de liens avec le téléspectateur. Enfin, la spécificité d'Internet par rapport aux médias traditionnels permet d'affirmer que la mesure d'audience n'y jouera sans doute jamais le rôle central, un nouveau mode de relation s'instaurant avec l'usager.Audience research is at the centre of mass media activity: it serves as a reference to quantify viewers and are considered to be THE way to survey audiences. This issue of Hermes first presents different audience rating systems used by the media , emphasizing the fact that the audience is the result of many constraints and of an invariably weak consensus between the partners concerned. The second part focuses more particularly on traditional TV channels, analyses the effects of competition on schedules and programming. The section that follows questions the validity of the audience as a means of getting to know viewers and also questions the possibility of creating other types of links with the viewer. Finally, the specificity of the Internet as opposed to more "traditional" media leads us to observe that audience rating might never play a central role in this media since a new type of relations is being created with users. (shrink)

L'évolution de la mesure d'audience TV est indissociable des principales étapes qui ont mené d'une télévision publique en situation de monopole à un système mixte public/privé. Les résultats du panel postal de l'ORTF, premier dispositif fiable et permanent , sont réservés aux seuls dirigeants des chaînes, afin d'éclairer une politique de programmes encore volontariste, tandis que le CESP mène une enquête parallèle à destination de la profession publicitaire. La montée de la compétition entre chaînes publiques s'accompagne de l'attention croissante accordée (...) à l'audience et, en 1982, la mise en place de l'audimétrie-foyer représente une véritable révolution, par la rapidité et la précision des résultats obtenus. Avec l'arrivée des chaînes commerciales et la concurrence entre diffuseurs qui en résulte, les publicitaires sont en mesure d'exiger leur participation au contrôle de l'outil géré par Médiamétrie et imposent l'audimétrie individuelle , qui permet un suivi par cible.The evolution of TV audience research is indissociably linked to the main stages of television’s own history which saw it progress from a single state-owned channel with no competition to a system where public and commercial channels co-exist. Results from the ORTF postal panel set up in 1969, the first reliable and permanent measuring device, are only given to channel executives to help shed some light on a programming policy which is still volontarist. The CESP also conducts a parallel survey used by advertisers. The rise in competition between public channels has gone hand-in-hand with the growing attention paid to audience ratings and the introduction, in 1982, of rating measurement meters represented a real revolution since results are accurate and rapidly obtained. The arrival of commercial channels and the resulting competition between broadcasters meant that advertisers were able to demand a say in the control of the “Médiamétrie” audience ratings system and imposed the introduction of the TV “people meter” which permits the calculation of target audiences. (shrink)