Sémantique des énoncés itératifs. Une approche formelle

Abstract

This article is about the semantics of iterative statements, expressing repetition in time of a type-eventuality. With these statements are associated frequency properties, quantified by iterative adverbs (often, sometimes, sporadically, n times out of p…). Our purpose is to design a formal representation, with a method allowing to compute it from the text. The interpretation of an iterative statement closely relies on its information structure so that we first study precisely the topic-focus partition for a significant range of configurations. In the formal model, the occurrences of iterative eventualities or circumstants are represented by sequences of intervals. The temporal semantic of a sentence is then formalised as an instanciation of generic formulas using two types of generalised quantifiers.