Abstract
Studies in the new rhetoric have accustomed us to minimizing the role played in argumentation by facts and deduction from facts. More precisely, C. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca have pointed out the many interferences that exist between this factual or objective basis (in the usual sense of the term “objective”) and the intersubjective relationships that the speaker establishes with his audience.
Translated by Jean-Claude Anscombre.
Modern science is constituted by substituting... an Archimedean world of geometry which has become considered as real, for the qualitative world, or (which amounts to the same thing) by substituting a universe of measurement and precision for the world of the more or less, which is that of our daily life. Indeed such a substitution excludes from the Universe anything which cannot be submitted to exact measurement...
(A. Koyré, Etudes d’histoire de la pensée scientifique).
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Notes
Cf. on this point A. Ibrahim: “Y-a-t-il deux manieres de dire la meme chose”, La nouvelle revue du Caire (1978), No. 2.
Already formulated in O. Ducrot: “Peu et un peu”, 1970.
The formulation will be found in Anscombre-Ducrot, 1983.
Here we are following a suggestion by R. Zuber.
In this paper, we only consider the case in which the comparative structure occurs with Peter as its topic. When it occurs with Mary as its topic, the equivalence of heights leads to a conclusion which could be drawn from “Mary is not tall”.
See for example O. Ducrot et al. Les mots du discours, 1980.
On this notion, see O. Ducrot: Le dire et le dit, final chapter.
This is particularly obvious in all the works with a pedagogical vocation, and is not limited to grade-school grammars. As an example, here are the adjectives used to illustrate the comparative degree in the opuscules of the Que sais-je? series devoted to specific languages: B. Pottier, Grammaire de Vespagnol: “aimable”, “grand”; A. Tellier, Grammaire de langlais: “grand”; D.J. Veyrenc, Grammaire du chinois: “grand”, “cher”; P. Guiraud, La syntaxe du frangais: “rouge”, “vite”; G. Giraud, Grammaire du grec: “grand”, “bon”; J. Allières, Les basques: “vieux”, “bon”; J. Varenne, Grammaire du Sanskrit: “bon”, “lourd”, “petit”. There is an exception: in his Physiologie de la langue française, G. Galichet takes “courageux” as the prototype of scalar adjectives.
In the case where Mary is the topic (case which is not examined in this paper), the sentence then stipulates that in the utterance, the sole converse topoi is to be applied to Mary.
Bibliography
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© 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Anscombre, JC., Ducrot, O. (1989). Argumentativity and Informativity. In: Meyer, M. (eds) From Metaphysics to Rhetoric. Synthese Library, vol 202. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2593-9_6
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