ARGUMENTATION AND THE LEXICAL TOPICAL FIELDS

Most of the work which has been done within the framework of the theor y of Argumentation Within Language (AWL) was, until recently, centred on what can be called 'articulators of argumentation'. This work, whic h consisted, mainly, in studying the constraints that articulators suc h as but, nevertheless, therefore, even, or almost, little, a little, impose on the meaning, has concentrated on the fact that the argumenta tive movements operated in utterances containing those words bear on g radual argumentative rules presented as general and shared by the ling uistic community. Those rules, which we call topoi (singular: topos) a ppear to belong to the speakers' implicit knowledge and beliefs: from the perspective of the study of articulators, what belongs to the sema ntic description are the constraints on those topoi, not the topoi the mselves. Now, if the semantic description could say nothing about thos e topoi, the study of the argumentative articulators would strictly be long to pragmatics, since it could be achieved only after those topoi have been determined. We defend here a different position: the argumen tative description of articulators belongs to semantics; as a conseque nce, semantics must mark in a certain way the emergence of the topoi u sed in utterances, even if those topoi belong to the speakers' knowled ge and beliefs. In this paper, we present a way to mark this emergence : we describe the lexical items with argumentative 'ingredients' - we call those ingredients topical fields - on the basis of which the topo i used in each utterance containing those lexical items are constructe d, according to what the situation requires. We first reconsider the d efinition of topos and topical field used in the past; we propose a re cursive definition of topical fields, which we then apply to the descr iption of lexicon. We then define an operation which allows the transf ormation of a chain of topoi into a topos. This definition is used in order to construct the dynamic topoi out of the lexical ones. Finally, we step back and reflect about the relationship between the conceptio n of language which underlies our work and the structuralist program, In particular, we evaluate the consequences, from a structuralist poin t of view, of our account of the grounding of language in the world.