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She Said You Said I Saw It with My Own Eyes: A Pragmatic Account of Commitment

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Formal Models in the Study of Language

Abstract

Following a proposal made in Moeschler (2013) we want to draw the main lines of a pragmatic and cognitive approach to commitment. After a detailed survey of different linguistic approaches that have provided an account of commitment (‘prise en charge’ in the French tradition), we identify a set of different linguistic phenomena that pertain to this notion. We proceed with a new definition of commitment which crucially hinges on four types of distinct processes which relate to commitment. This typology is based on a double opposition between, on the one hand, speaker and hearer, and on the other hand, between mental representations and linguistic markers. In the last part of this paper, we will suggest an alternative model of commitment built on the notion of strength as envisaged by Sperber and Wilson (1995) for assumptions held in the cognitive environment of a participant during a communicative interaction.

Kira Boulat’s research leading to this contribution is funded by a Doc. Mobility fellowship from the Fonds National Suisse, obtained for the project entitled “Are you committed? A pragmatic account of commitment”.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It is important to stress that this structure is not fixed but always dynamically redefined through context selection.

  2. 2.

    Following the views expressed in Sperber et al. (2010), if we distinguish between the content of an utterance and its source: certainty concerns the former, while reliability concerns the latter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Fribourg, Av. de l’Europe 20, 1700, Fribourg, Switzerland

    Kira Boulat

  2. Department of English, University of Fribourg, Europe 20, 1700, Fribourg, Switzerland

    Didier Maillat

Authors
  1. Kira Boulat
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  2. Didier Maillat
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Correspondence to Kira Boulat .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept of Linguistics, University of Geneva, Genève, Geneve, Switzerland

    Joanna Blochowiak

  2. Batiment Landolt, 7th Floor, Univ of Geneva, Dept of Linguistics, Geneva, Switzerland

    Cristina Grisot

  3. Dept. of Psycholinguistics, University of Geneva Dept. of Psycholinguistics, Geneva, Switzerland

    Stephanie Durrleman

  4. Department of Linguistics, University of Geneva, Genève, Geneve, Switzerland

    Christopher Laenzlinger

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Boulat, K., Maillat, D. (2017). She Said You Said I Saw It with My Own Eyes: A Pragmatic Account of Commitment. In: Blochowiak, J., Grisot, C., Durrleman, S., Laenzlinger, C. (eds) Formal Models in the Study of Language. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48832-5_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48832-5_14

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-48832-5

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