Sémantique et approximation

Semantics and approximation: the presquel'a peine problem. "Scalar" linguistic items, such as those involving fuzziness and approximation, seemingly support the view that natural language is free from any deductive process, and calls rather for a sociology of arguing or applied fuzzy set theory. Observation suggests that some of these items are in fact correlated with complex reasoning-like features, in which linguistic hierarchies (most notably presuppositional ones) and dynamic logical properties (under the generic label of "partial inference") get entangled. In French, presque and à peine exhibit an operational structure: semantic features are activated according to a special ordering, which filters out some subsequent utterances, accounting for the contrast in pairs like: C'est presque cent francs, c'est cher / ? C'est presque cent francs, ce n'est pas cher. In this respect, the linking of utterances appears to be controlled by properties of lexical items.