Une pragmatique lexicale des prédicats d’état

Although the aspectual class of states is understood as an elementary component in the constitution of more complex eventualities (Dowty, 1979; Rappaport Hovah & Levin, 1998), it is rarely studied for itself. In fact, we claim in this paper, these types of eventualities don’t show as simple as they seem. In particular their internal structure and their interpretation are worth a closer look. We thus focus on their distributional and semantic properties and conclude that the best way to describe this aspectual class is to determine what it means exactly for a predicate to denote a state, even when that predicate is not typical of the category. Doing so, we can avoid to mix up what is actually encoded with what is in fact inferred pragmatically; and thus we aim at allowing for a more precise semantic-pragmatic interface in the aspectual domain to develop (following Khallouqi, 2007).