On the pragmatics of logical connectives

Abstract

This paper discusses the issue of connectives in natural language, adopting a formalist approach in pragmatics. The outcome is that truth-conditional connectives are limited to conjunction, disjunction and conditional, and that negation, even in its metalinguistic and non-truth-conditional usages, has representational contextual effects, as suppressing a proposition and a presupposition or strengthening a proposition. As regards discourse connectives, they exhibits a strong pragmatic property, that is, they almost all exhibit factivity. Finally, quasi-synonym connectives, as causal ones, do not differ in meaning but in the way their conceptual and procedural meanings are distributed at different layers.