Des écrivains et leur rapport à la Première Guerre mondiale : traces littéraires de la Grande Guerre dans la littérature produite en Alsace (allemand, parler dialectal alsacien) entre 1914 et 1939

Das Ende des Krieges bedeutet für das Elsass nicht nur endlich Waffenruhe, sondern auch einen politischen Wechsel, da das Reichsland Elsass-Lothringen wieder Frankreich angehört. Dieser Umschwung schlägt sich im Leben aller Menschen nieder, beruflich, sprachlich, kulturell und sozial. Die Frage stellt sich nun, ob er auch im literarischen Wirken ein Echo findet, ganz besonders als schriftstellerischer Stoff. Um der Frage nachzugehen, fokussiert sich das Interesse auf Autoren, deren Ruf nicht viel weiter als die eigene Region geht und/oder die eher in der Mundart schreiben, da das Werk berühmter deutschschreibender Schriftsteller bereits schon diesbezüglich untersucht wurde. Der Krieg wurde eigentlich literarisch wenig thematisiert, so wie die soziopolitischen Umwälzungen, die danach stattgefunden haben. Die Schreibenden haben sich eher in ein emotionsgeladenes Elsass geflüchtet, das als Matrix ihrer Identität fungiert. En Alsace, la fin de la guerre a amené un soulagement général de la population, comme partout ailleurs, mais a aussi entraîné un changement d’appartenance étatique dans la mesure où la « Terre d’Empire » est (re)devenue française. Ces événements touchent chaque individu dans sa vie et ses habitudes, professionnelles, linguistiques, culturelles, sociales, … La guerre et les grands bouleversements qui en sont issus se manifestent-ils aussi dans la production littéraire, notamment sur un plan thématique ? On ne retiendra ici ni les écrivains les plus célèbres, ni ceux qui ont quitté l’Alsace après 1918, mais ceux dont la renommée reste plutôt régionale ou locale, notamment ceux qui utilisent un parler dialectal comme moyen d’expression. De fait, peu d’auteurs ont thématisé la guerre et, encore moins, les bouleversements sociopolitiques qui ont suivi. La « trace » est bien plus émotionnelle, sous la forme d’une affirmation identitaire et d’un recours à une Alsace matricielle. In Alsace, the end of the First World War brought a great sense of relief to the population, as it did everywhere else; yet, it also brought about a major political change to the former ‘Empire land’ (Reichsland) which became part of France (again). This affected the daily lives of each individual, in their professional, linguistic, cultural or social dimensions. Did the war and its aftermaths manifest themselves in literature, especially at a thematic level? To answer this question, we shall focus neither on the most famous writers, nor on those who left Alsace after 1918, since their work has already been examined under that angle, but on writers whose reputation remained regional or local, in particular on those writers who turned to the Alsatian dialect as means of expression. Indeed, in this literature, the war was rarely addressed and its socio-political upheavals even more rarely so. The ‘trace’ left by that conflict is of an emotional nature; it takes the form of an identity statement. Such writers found refuge in an emotionally charged Alsace, which functions as a matrix of their identity.

Perspectival reference

This chapter is about substitutability of co-referential terms and argues that what is required is a general semantics of perspectives. It begins by reviewing the standard sort of puzzle, which involves embedding distinct terms under a propositional attitude verb. It then reviews evidence that embedding is in fact not necessary for a substitution puzzle to arise. It also reviews a related puzzle that shows that similar problems can arise without distinct terms. It builds on this to illustrate a limiting case of lack of substitutability, which involves an identity statement. Two formalizations are compared. A Logical Form analysis is shown to have various issues, including generalizing meanings to the worst case. A contrasting monadic analysis is presented which avoids this problem and is demonstrated with four key examples. The chapter ends with a generalization to non-referential expressions. Some exercises are provided to aid understanding.

Constructing and Cleaning Identity Graphs in the LOD Cloud

In the absence of a central naming authority on the Semantic Web, it is common for different data sets to refer to the same thing by different names. Whenever multiple names are used to denote the same thing, owl:sameAs statements are needed in order to link the data and foster reuse. Studies that date back as far as 2009, observed that the owl:sameAs property is sometimes used incorrectly. In our previous work, we presented an identity graph containing over 500 million explicit and 35 billion implied owl:sameAs statements, and presented a scalable approach for automatically calculating an error degree for each identity statement. In this paper, we generate subgraphs of the overall identity graph that correspond to certain error degrees. We show that even though the Semantic Web contains many erroneous owl:sameAs statements, it is still possible to use Semantic Web data while at the same time minimising the adverse effects of misusing owl:sameAs.

Living beings as autopoietic bodies

In the target article, it was claimed that the enactive extended interpretation of the autopoietic theory (AT) of living beings is incorrect, and an embodied reformulation of AT (EAT) was put forward to remedy and prevent such an interpretation. In this general reply, I want to clarify the motivation, reach, philosophical commitments, and theoretical status of EAT. I do this, mainly, by explicating the notions of body and autopoiesis, and by reconstructing EAT, not as a conceptual definition of life but as a theoretical identity statement of living beings as a natural kind.

The Son of God and Trinitarian Identity Statements

Classical Trinitarians claim that Jesus—the Son of God—is truly God and that there is only one God and the Father is God, the Spirit is God, and the Father, Son, and Spirit are distinct. However, if the identity statement that ‘the Son is God’ is understood in the sense of numerical identity, logical incoherence seems immanent. Yet, if the identity statement is understood according to an ‘is’ of predication then it lacks accuracy and permits polytheism. Therefore, we argue that there is another sense of ‘is’ needed in trinitarian discourse that will allow the Christian to avoid logical incoherence while still fully affirming all that is meant to be affirmed in the confession ‘Jesus is God.’ We suggest a sense of ‘is’ that meets this need.

Definition

A definition is a statement, declaration or proposal establishing the meaning of an expression. In virtue of the definition, the expression being defined (the ‘definiendum’) is to acquire the same meaning as the expression in terms of which it is defined (the ‘definiens’). For example, ‘Man is a rational animal’ determines the meaning of the term ‘man’ by making it synonymous with ‘rational animal’. Classical theory maintains that a good definition captures the ‘real nature’ of what is defined: ‘A ‘‘definition’’ is a phrase signifying a thing’s essence’ (Aristotle). Historically, philosophers have come to distinguish these ‘real’ definitions from ‘nominal’ definitions that specify the meaning of a linguistic expression rather than signify the essential nature of an object, ‘making another understand by Words, what Idea, the term defined stands for’ (Locke). A further distinction can be drawn between contextual or implicit definitions, on the one hand, and explicit definitions, on the other. Often a definition fixes meaning directly and explicitly: for example, the definition of a proper name might well take the form of an explicit identity statement (‘Pegasus = the winged horse’) and a definition of a predicate is usually given (or can be re-cast) in the form of an equivalence (‘For every x: x is a man if and only if x is a rational animal’). But sometimes the meaning of a term is specified in context, by way of the meaning of larger expressions in which the term occurs. A paradigmatic example of this is Bertrand Russell’s analysis of the meaning of the definite article.

Counteridenticals and dream reports

Counteridenticals are counterfactual conditional sentences whose antecedent clausescontain an identity statement, e.g. If I were you, I’d buy the blue dress. Here, we argue thatcounteridenticals are best analyzed along the lines of dream reports. After showing that counteridenticalsand dream reports exhibit striking grammatical and perceptual parallels, we suggestan analysis of counteridenticals with Percus and Sauerland’s (2003) analysis of dreamreports. Following their proposal, we propose to make use of concept generators, realized ascentered worlds. To this end, we argue that the presence of if licenses the presence of an imagine-operator, which constitutes the attitude the antecedent clause ‘x be-PAST y’ is taken under;The speaker predicates, in the imagine mode, the consequent property to his/her imagined self.To capture the different degrees of identification between the subject and the predicate of theidentity statement of counteridenticals’ antecedents observed in the literature, we incorporatePercus and Sharvit’s (2014) notion of asymmetric be into the analysis. This proposal has severaladvantages over existing analyses (Lakoff, 1996; Kocurek, 2016) of counteridentical meaning,as it both explains the different degrees of identification observed for counteridenticals andcorrectly predicts the parallels between counteridenticals and dream reports.Keywords: Counteridenticals, counterfactuals, dream reports, pronoun movement

On Identity Statements: In Defense of a Sui Generis View

This paper is about the meaning and function of identity statements involving proper names. There are two prominent views on this topic, according to which identity statements ascribe a relation: the object-view, on which identity statements ascribe a relation borne by all objects to themselves, and the name-view, on which an identity statement ‘a is b’ says that the names ‘a’ and ‘b’ codesignate. The object- and name-views may seem to exhaust the field. I make a case for treating identity statements as sui generis instead of attempting to explain them by means of the idea that they ascribe a relation. My contention is that once we do this, no analysis is required.