ON POSSIBILITY IN LOGIC AND IN COGNITIVE SEMANTICS

ON POSSIBILITY IN LOGIC AND IN COGNITIVE SEMANTICS

Author:  V.Z. Demyankov

Affiliation:  Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract:  ‘Possibility’ belongs to the main concepts of modal logic, it plays a key role in the ‘theory of possible worlds’ which was initiated by G.W. Leibniz, restarted in the 1950’s and is still fairly popular in formal logic, in philosophy of mind, and in cognitive semantics. Its main axioms and their

consequences are here explored from a linguistic point of view demonstrating analogies between localist and purely logical approaches to the truth values in actual and in metaphoric worlds.
Statistical analysis of a French corpus of literary and scholarly texts shows that lexical items of the ‘possible’ / ‘possibilité’ class are almost two times more frequent than their negative counterparts of the ‘impossible’ / ‘impossibilité’ class. The most frequent construction is ‘possible’ / ‘possibilité’ + ‘de’ + infinitive requiring the maximal array of factual information available to the speaker. The least frequent construction is ‘possible / ‘possibilité’ + ‘à’ + infinitive.
Such and similar data reveal a scale of textual expectations generated by the lexical items belonging to the ‘possibility’ class in French.

    


        

Keywords:  cognitive semantics, localism, possible world semantics, possibility, French infinitive construction, discourse coherence.

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Acknowledgments:  The research presented in sections 4 and 5 is financially supported by the Russian Scientific Foundation, project 19–18–00429 “Language mechanisms of cultural system accommodation in various types of discourse of the 20th and 21st centuries” at Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The research presented in sections 2, 3, 6 is financially supported by the Russian Scientific Foundation, project 19–18–00040 “Parametrization of linguistic creativity in discourse and language” at Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

For citation:  Demyankov, V. Z. (2021). On possibility in logic and in cognitive semantics. Voprosy Kognitivnoy Lingvistiki, 4, 5-21. (In Russ.).

Pages:  5-21