Abstract
During the seminar, we have buckled down to the arduous task of understanding and using a brand new theoretical field of study as far as the great family of linguistics is concerned. This paper and the database we have come to build out are the concrete results of a work which turned out to be very interesting, for it allowed us to open up to things fundamentally different from the Culiolian approach we have been familiar to so far. Indeed, within the framework of pragmatics, language is not just a logical system: any time one talks, one performs a speech act and implies conversational implicatures, using conversational maxims, in order to follow the cooperative principle, and therefore, the context and the intention of the speaker have to be taken into account. The speaker –or, to a more general extent, the one who utters or writes a sentence–'s meaning, as we shall see, is often different from the sentence meaning, and therefore, taking language as a mere binary system –things being categorized as true or false– can be erroneous. We have tried to apply all those principles to the study of grammatical constructions, which are patterns –ranging from words to complex sentences– that integrate form, intonation and meaning(s) –both semantic and pragmatic. What is important in this prism is to work within a tripartite framework, involving syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Once we have understood what speech acts, implicatures and grammatical constructions stand for, we can tackle the analysis of various examples of grammatical constructions. This paper will put the emphasis on adjectives in their broadest sense –that is to say, modifiers and determiners, or any word or group of words that function as an adjective proper. We will try to highlight the different grammatical constructions involving an adjectival form, using the various contexts in which those units were uttered. We will first of all try to analyse two short paragraphs which are replete with adjectival forms, in order to show the importance of the context on such and such grammatical construction involving adjectives. Namely, we will give the form of each construction, its meaning, and try to show how the context influences –or not– our understanding of the unit. A second part will be dedicated to a less systematic analysis, for we will only take into account the most relevant –those which can stand for representatives of either a linguistic form or of a pragmatic meaning– grammatical constructions, in order to come up to certain generalizations concerning adjectives.
