О ВОЗМОЖНОСТИ В ЛОГИКЕ И В КОГНИТИВНОЙ СЕМАНТИКЕ

Abstract

‘Possibility’ belongs to the main concepts of modal logic, it plays a key role in the ‘theory of possible worlds’ which was initiated by G.W. Leibniz, restarted in the 1950’s and is still fairly popular in formal logic, in philosophy of mind, and in cognitive semantics. Its main axioms and their consequences are here explored from a linguistic point of view demonstrating analogies between localist and purely logical approaches to the truth values in actual and in metaphoric worlds. Statistical analysis of a French corpus of literary and scholarly texts shows that lexical items of the ‘possible’ / ‘possibilité’ class are almost two times more frequent than their negative counterparts of the ‘impossible’ / ‘impossibilité’ class. The most frequent construction is ‘possible’ / ‘possibilité’ + ‘de’ + infinitive requiring the maximal array of factual information available to the speaker. The least frequent construction is ‘possible / ‘possibilité’ + ‘ à ’ + infinitive. Such and similar data reveal a scale of textual expectations generated by the lexical items belonging to the ‘possibility’ class in French.