True to fact(s)

Jacques Jayez (1) , Danièle Godard (2)

1 EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales
2 Université de Lille, Sciences Humaines et Sociales

There is a long-standing controversy in the philosophy of language concerning the nature of facts. Linguists have used the term to categorize a type of semantic argument.The philosophical approaches oscillate between a realistic conception and a more abstract conception. In linguistics, it is unclear whether fact labels sentential arguments which can be paraphrased by the fact that S or arrays of distributional and semantic properties. the problem partly stems from a confusion between the lexical content of the word and the category of facts. In this paper, we address the semantic and ontological status of the singular noun "fait" (fact) in French.

Mots clés: facts; fact; intensional objects; referential types

Domaines: Linguistique

Jacques Jayez, Danièle Godard. True to fact(s). 12th Amsterdam Colloquium, 1999, Amsterdam, Netherlands. pp.151-156. ⟨halshs-00157216⟩