Contenu du sommaire : Cognition, catégorisation, langage, sous la direction de Rodolphe Ghiglione, Jean-Pierre Desclés et Jean-François Richard

The purpose of this article is to test the psychological reality of some linguistics descriptors used for the classification of predications (Action, Act, Activity, event, process, state). We have analysed the psychological processes implicated in the attribution task of semantic components . Data from experiment provided an evidence that these linguistic descriptors have a corresponding at the cognitive level, and that the semantic of verbs and cognitive working introduce some fluctuations into the attribution of semantic components.

This paper presents the results of a study associating linguists and psychologists interested in the representation of the meaning of lexical items. The different theories proposed in the literature are discussed : semantic primitives, componential analysis, schemas... A general conception of a cognitive analysis of meaning is proposed : The Applicative and Cognitive Grammar. In this theory different levels of representation are defined : primitives which are the basic components of the description of meaning, semantico-cognitive schemes which are organizations of semantic primitives and which represent a given acceptation of a lexical item in a given context, cognitive archetypes which represent the structure of the different acceptations of a lexical item, and semantico-cognitive fields which represent the similarities of meaning of groups of lexical items .

The hypothesis investigated is that the semantic similarities of verbs of action are organized according to a limited number of semantic fields and the experiment is designed to identify these fields. Seven subjects have been asked to classify 172 verbs of action, chosen as a function of their frequency of occurrence, so that the verbs belonging to the same class have a definite similarity in meaning, with the possibility for a verb to be classified into several classes. A similarity index between each pair of verbs has been defined as the number of times both verbs of the pair have been ascribed to the same class, and using multidimensional methods six semantic fields have resulted from the analysis : movement and change in place, possession and transfer of possession, modification of a property of an entity or construction of a new entity by fitting parts together, causing damage to an entity by attack or destruction, basic activities neces- sary for life, processes describing the course of action. These semantic groupings have proved to be quite stable in a replication of the experiment using the same subjects.

The interconcept organization of verbs and nouns were studied by examining the stability of organizations in three tasks a) a unconstrainded sort task, in which subjects sorted sets of 16 verbs or 16 nouns into clusters as they wanted ; b) a semantic sort task, in which subjets sorted sets of 16 verbs or 16 nouns into clusters based on meaning ; c) a script sort task, in which subjets sorted sets of 16 verbs or 16 nouns into clusters based on situations. This study show that only the clusters of nouns are affected by the different tasks, and confirmed our hypothesis that there are functional and conceptual differences between nouns and verbs.

This article examines a theoretical point of view about the organisation of adjectives. Two major classes are proposed : objectives and subjectives. Objective adjectives ascribe to their nouns, values founded on normative perceptual identification ; subjective adjectives expresses affective participation and evaluative judgements about objects, events and facts. The formers plays an important role in the recognition processes of discourse reference, the latter constitutes the evaluative knowledge activated to denote the referents of discourse. The principal operation of adjectives is to direct and adjust the denotative description and the psychological assessment about the referents of discourse. In an empirical study, a list of 1600 adjectival lexical entries is tested, both categories were composed by 75 participant-students in social sciences at the university of Paris 8 (psychology, sociology, educational sciences and language sciences). Semantic and pragmatic hypothesis are proposed and some research directions examined.

This study analyses argumentative operators in terms of how they work and tries to show the characteristics of a situation can, on one hand, determine the speakers' objectives and, on the other hand, organize the choice of certain language elements, bringing with the functionally differentiated use of the operators. Resolutely, we take the point of view of a speaker who is a member of a social group, carrying with him a history, beliefs, images, etc., and who finds himself in a communication situation in which he has a stake and specific objectives, (all) underlying his discursive strategies. We propose to identify four different discursive strategies which make up as many argumentation variations, translated into language through a differentiated use of language operators according to situations and speakers' objectives. Globally, the results will show that the finalities sought (inferred by the directions) are detectable in language through the analysis of specific linguistic markers, translating thus the discursive strategies of the subjects.