French causal connectives have often been analyzed through the lens of the subjective/objective divide. In this framework, objective causality refers to relationships between real-world events, while subjective causality pertains to the speaker’s internal thoughts. According to this traditional view, car is considered more subjective, whereas parce que is regarded as more objective.More recent research argues that such notion of subjectivity is insufficient and proposes a multilayered notion of subjectivity that encompasses both the what —the propositional content of the utterance—and the how —the way the speaker presents this content. This refined view of subjectivity enables a more nuanced integration of additional levels of meaning, such as causal relations and discourse relations, and allows for their investigation within the framework of Relevance Theory. In this approach, causal relations are treated as basic explicatures, discourse relations as higher-order explicatures, and the speaker’s subjective stance is captured by the hearer as non-propositional effects.The main research question is which combination of factors best characterizes the use of French causal connectives: the discourse relation signaled, the subjectivity, the causal connective itself, or a mix of all three? To address this question, we conducted an annotation-based corpus study in which sentences were annotated for both discourse relations of explanation and justification (higher-order explicatures) and expressive subjectivity (non-propositional effects). The results suggest that the 'flavor' of subjectivity arises primarily from the combination of the type of discourse relation and the non-propositional effects of the utterance, rather than from the specific causal connective employed.

This study explores how language influences concept formation, specifically how linguistic expressions signal what is central or essential to forming concepts of kinds. Prior research on preschool children suggests that generics (e.g., "Birds fly") create strong associations between a kind and its properties, signaling essential features. To gain a deeper understanding of how language influences concept formation and its developmental trajectory, we examined two linguistic expressions-generics and conditionals-and compared them to a third type: demonstrative sentences, i.e., sentences with the pronoun this (e.g., "This bird flies"). We hypothesize that, beyond generics, conditionals may also act as a cue indicating that certain information is essential in concept formation. Three French-speaking groups-late adolescents, young adults, and adults-participated in an elicitation task. While Experiment 3 (adults) confirmed the importance of both generics and conditionals in concept formation, Experiments 1 and 2 (late adolescents and young adults) found no significant differences between the linguistic expressions. These results indicate that conditionals, generics, and demonstratives influence the conceptualization of kinds in a comparable way in late adolescents and young adults whereas at adulthood conditionals and generics are strongest cues for considering a given property as essential to a kind. (c) 2025 Elsevier B.V. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.

French distinguishes between indicative vs. subjunctive markings morphologically, by showing mood on the embedded verb. Embedded subjunctive appears with specific (classes of) matrix predicates, like vouloir (want), while the indicative mood is found with others, such as dire (say). This suggests that the subjunctive is licensed lexically by specific classes of predicates. However, the existence of verbs like r & ecirc;ver (dream), which seem to accept both moods, poses a challenge to this idea and raises the question of the source of optional mood selection. A recent approach sheds light on the importance of emotive contexts in the selection of subjunctive mood cross- linguistically (Baunaz & Puskas 2022, Baunaz & Lander 2024). Our hypothesis is that in cases where mood selection is optional (i.e., with alternating verbs), the subjunctive mood is licensed by the presence of the [Emo] feature, which is activated in emotive contexts. Consequently, we predict for alternating verbs, that the emotive contexts will favor the subjunctive mood, whereas the non-emotive contexts will favor the indicative mood. In contrast, the context manipulation will not affect the mood selection patterns of verbs that exclusively select either the indicative or subjunctive mood. We provide an experimental confirmation of this claim.

French distinguishes between indicative vs. subjunctive markings morphologically, by showing mood on the embedded verb. Embedded subjunctive appears with specific (classes of) matrix predicates, like vouloir (want), while the indicative mood is found with others, such as dire (say). This suggests that the subjunctive is licensed lexically by specific classes of predicates. However, the existence of verbs like rêver (dream), which seem to accept both moods, poses a challenge to this idea and raises the question of the source of optional mood selection. A recent approach sheds light on the importance of emotive contexts in the selection of subjunctive mood cross-linguistically (Baunaz & Pusks 2022, Baunaz & Lander 2024). Our hypothesis is that in cases where mood selection is optional (i.e., with alternating verbs), the subjunctive mood is licensed by the presence of the [Emo] feature, which is activated in emotive contexts. Consequently, we predict for alternating verbs, that the emotive contexts will favor the subjunctive mood, whereas the non-emotive contexts will favor the indicative mood. In contrast, the context manipulation will not affect the mood selection patterns of verbs that exclusively select either the indicative or subjunctive mood. We provide an experimental confirmation of this claim.

This paper delves into the phenomenon of subjectivity, with a particular focus on one of its components - perspective taking. It explores two linguistic cues categories: verb tenses in their perspectival usages and Free Indirect Discourse (FID). In this paper, we experimentally test how readers process sentences in which the French Passe Simple is employed in a perspectival manner within two types of subjective contexts: those with FID and those without FID markers. In addition, we consider whether the processing is influenced by the type of emotion expressed in these subjective contexts, whether it is positive or negative. We find a facilitation effect exclusively in FID contexts and only when the emotion expressed is positive. This could suggest that it is not the verb tense itself which is a cue for speaker's subjectivity, but rather its occurrence in contexts such as FID. To interpret the results, we build on an array of empirical results found on connectives, verb tenses, and FID to put forward a comprehensive pragmatic model of subjectivity. (c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

This study deals with the issue of mood choice in complement clauses in French, in which speakers may choose between the indicative or the subjunctive. We report on the results of two experiments using an elicitation task, in which we investigated how the matrix verb, via its distributive patterns (i.e. verbs selecting only the subjunctive vs. only the indicative vs. verbs accepting either mood), tense and grammatical aspect influences mood choice in the complement clause. While the role of the semantics of the matrix verb has been extensively studied in semantic studies, considering its tense and its grammatical aspect is a novel approach to explaining mood choice. Our experiments confirm that mood choice depends on the distributive patterns of the matrix verb: there are verbs selecting only the indicative (e.g. constater ‘notice’), verbs selecting only the subjunctive (e.g. apprécier ‘appreciate’) and verbs which allow both the indicative and the subjunctive, called alternance verbs (e.g. rêver ‘dream’). Crucially, our results reveal important interactions between the matrix verbs’ distributive patterns and their tense, as well as with their grammatical aspect. Specifically, both alternance verbs and subjunctive verbs undergo the influence of tense but the direction of the effect is different for each of these categories. In contrast to alternance and subjunctive verbs, verbs selecting the indicative are not influenced by tense and aspect. At a general level, our experimental study opens a new path towards enriching our knowledge about what factors play a significant role for mood choice in complement clauses and reveals that the polysemy of certain verbs strongly affects their selection of the subjunctive or of the indicative.

Human beings often fall prey to fallacious reasoning. One influential view holds that reasoners endorsing fallacies do not commit logical errors but rather that they endorse such fallacies on pragmatic grounds, i.e. by tacitly considering a conditional premise (If you wash my car, I will give you $10) a biconditional one (I will give you $10, if and only if you wash my car). If such an operation – known as invited inference or pragmatic enrichment – does occur, the acceptance of an invalid argument becomes legitimate. This paper seeks to find out if pragmatic enrichment happens for conditionals and, if so, under what circumstances. To address this issue, we conducted two complementary experiments in which we manipulated the type of material used in reasoning (abstract vs realistic) and the nature of the major premise (conditional vs biconditional). Our results indicate that both of these factors do indeed affect reasoning processes and performance. Overall, our findings suggest that only conditionals undergo pragmatic enrichment albeit not systematically as enrichment takes place only with a subclass of realistic materials.

In contemporary French, the difference between the causal connectives parce que and car is traditionally related to the prototypical causal relations they are meant to convey. The main claim has been that car more frequently conveys subjective relations whereas parce que is equally well-suited for both subjective and objective relations. Nevertheless, in the recent years, empirical evidence offered by a number of studies suggests that car has gained ground over parce que in expressing objective relations too. Despite the decline of car in oral speech, its presence is still widely attested in the written press, in SMS and in chats. In this chapter, we present the results of an exploratory study in which we compare how university students aged 19-25 (Experiment 1) and other native speakers, aged 20-70 and recruited via a crowdsourcing platform (Experiment 2), evaluate the acceptability of objective and subjective relations expressed with car and parce que. Our study reveals significant differences between the two target groups of participants. The results show that the mapping between the subjective-objective divide and the two French causal connectives depends on the type of relation (i.e., subjective relations are overall less acceptable than objective causal relations) and on the connective (i.e., parce que does not seem to fit objective and subjective relations equally well, but this applies only to older people). This suggests that the use of the two connectives to express subjective and objective relations may also depend on the speakers’ educational background, reasoning skills, and age.

The presence of discourse relations can be marked explicitly with lexical items such as specialized and underspecified connectives or left implicit. It is now well established that the presence of specialized connective facilitates the processing of these relations. The question is to gauge how different degrees of explicitness affect the processing of discourse relations. This study investigates this question with respect to two relations, which are fundamental to our cognition and which are closely tied: causal relations and temporal relations. We carried out a self-paced reading experiment, in which we sought to compare the cost of inferring the presence of causal vs. temporal relations in the absence vs. presence of a connective indicating a given relation in French. For the explicit marking, two types of connectives were tested - one specialized for each relation (donc for causality and puis for temporality) and one underspecified (et in its temporal and causal readings). Overall, our results confirm the facilitator role of discourse connectives: we find that explicit discourse relations are processed faster than implicit ones. The specific (rather than underspecified) connective facilitates processing for temporal relations but not for causal relations; and temporal relations were read equally fast as causal relations.

AbstractIn this paper, we carried out two experimental studies to investigate whether verbal tenses, in their perspectival usages, give access to the speaker’s perspective. Study 1 is an annotation study in which annotators evaluated corpus excerpts as expressing situations or narrating events in a subjective or objective way. We manipulated access to the verbal tense: half of the annotators saw the tense of the verbs, and half saw only infinitive forms of the verbs. Study 2 is a self-paced reading experiment in which we examined how native speakers of French process utterances with the Passé Simple when it is preceded byaujourd’hui(semantic incompatibility solved pragmatically by perspective-taking),hier(semantic and pragmatic compatibility) anden ce moment(semantic incompatibility which cannot be solved pragmatically). The results of Study 1 suggest that the subjective interpretation of an utterance is not triggered by its verbal tense. Study 2 questions the idea that perspective-taking is a component of speaker’s subjectivity. In general, our experimental findings do not support the hypothesis that verbal tenses give access to speaker’s subjectivity, a theoretical hypothesis which has never before been directly experimentally tested.

This study investigates the role of non-linguistic biases in the obligatory (verb tenses) and optional (discourse connectives) linguistic marking for inferring temporal relations at the sentence and the text genre levels. Specifically, we formulated and tested several assumptions: (1) the linguistic cueing assumption (verb tenses inform language users about the temporal relation), (2) the implicitness assumption (highly expected relations need not be overtly marked), (3) the specialized connective assumption (specialized connectives are more efficient than underspecified ones), (4) the text genre assumption (language users’ expectations of temporal relations are linked to the text genre), and (5) the text status assumption (information in translated texts tends to be more explicit than in original texts). We carried out an annotation study of a bilingual corpus (French–English) belonging to two different text genres: literary and journalistic. Our results challenge the implicitness and the text status assumptions while confirming the linguistic cueing and the text genre assumptions. So, we put forth an alternative view, according to which language users have equal expectations about all three types of temporal relations and are oriented to one relation or the other by linguistic cueing (obligatory and optional marking) as well as text genre.

In French, the difference between the causal connectives 'parce que' and 'car' is traditionally related to the prototypical causal relations they are meant to convey. The main claim is that 'car' conveys more subjective relations and is also used in higher register language, whereas 'parce que' is equally well-suited to both types of relations. In line with recent studies, this contribution questions the clear-cut distinction between the two connectives on the basis of a comparative corpus investigation with annotation tasks (journalistic and text messaging registers). Our results do not corroborate the traditional hypotheses that 'car' is used to express more subjective relations and it is restricted to higher register language. On the contrary, we find that 'car' has a strong tendency to be perceived by addressees as providing the information in a more objective way. Our empirical investigation has allowed us to put forth a modified notion of subjectivity which is associated with 'car' and 'parce que': we distinguish between the more classic approach – the type of subjectivity related to causal relations, and a novel approach – the evaluative type of subjectivity related to the expressive use of language. We rely on the relevance-theoretic framework to spell out our theoretical proposal.

The phenomenon of descriptive and metalinguistic negation has been debated for a long time from a theoretical perspective. On the one hand, there are defenders of the ambiguist approach to negation, in which the descriptive negation basically serves to deny an utterance's propositional content, and that this takes place by default (Horn 1985; 1989; Burton-Roberts 1989), while the metalinguistic negation surfaces only when the descriptive negation cannot be applied, and targets the non-truth-conditional contents of the utterance (e.g. implicatures, its register, its morphology or its phonology). Only the former is truth-functional, and the latter is claimed to be non-truth-functional as it does not operate on propositions. On the other hand, there are proponents of the non-ambiguist approach, who maintain that both types of negation are truth-functional since, in the case of metalinguistic negation, the process of pragmatic enrichment guarantees that the full proposition on which negation can operate will be reached (Carston 1996; 2002; Noh 1998; 2000; Moeschler 2010; 2013; 2017). Regarding processing, the ambiguist account predicts that it will take more time to treat metalinguistic negation because it always occurs as the second of two steps; in contrast, the non-ambiguist account makes no such prediction, since the interpretation of negation is contextually driven and the right context will issue the correct interpretation from the start. This paper will be devoted to the presentation of two self-paced reading experiments and of one offline elicitation experiment we carried out on French descriptive and metalinguistic negation. Our findings provide evidence in favor of the non-ambiguist approach.

In this paper, we aim to enhance our understanding about the processing of implicit and explicit temporal chronological relations by investigating the roles of temporal connectives and verbal tenses, separately and in interaction. In particular, we investigate how two temporal connectives (ensuite and puis, both meaning 'then') and two verbal tenses expressing past time (the simple and compound past) act as processing instructions for chronological relations in French. Theoretical studies have suggested that the simple past encodes the instruction to relate events sequentially, unlike the more flexible compound past, which does not. Using an online experiment with a self-paced reading task, we show that these temporal connectives facilitate the processing of chronological relations when they are expressed with both verbal tenses, and that no significant difference is found between the two verbal tenses, nor between the two connectives. By means of an offline experiment with an evaluation task, we find, contrary to previous studies, that comprehenders prefer chronological relations to be overtly marked rather than implicitly expressed, and prefer to use the connective puis in particular. Furthermore, comprehenders prefer it when these relations are expressed using the compound past, rather than the simple past. Instead of using the continuity hypothesis (Segal et al. 1991, Murray 1997) to explain the processing of temporal relations, we conclude that a more accurate explanation considers a cluster of factors including linguistic knowledge (connectives, tenses, grammatical and lexical aspect) and world knowledge.