Les verbes de jugement en dagara (Burkina Faso)

Verbs of « judgement » are defined as verbs which can be followed by an object-clause. The morpho- syntactic component establishes four types (with/without a linking particle ; subordinate with indicative, aoristic or optative mode). The pragmatic component shows that those four types correspond to four types of speech acts : expositive, exercitive, behabitive and categorical (such a structure refers to the four actors of communication : me, you, him and the norm). But each type contains sub-classes : speecnVnon-speech verbs ; subjective/objective judgement ; interlocutor primordial/non primordial or adjuvant/opponent). In the semantic component, each verb shows specific inferences and changes of meaning in definite contexts ; a relationship is also established between semantic fields and available vocabulary. In the semiotic component, the author considers dicto-modal operations (with truth-tables for the various logical connexions P- Q) and several predicative values (verbs implying a locative/causal relation). Eventually, the author — a linguist, not an anthropologist — focusses the unity of Human Language and debates on the mutual status of linguistics and ethnolinguistics. He particularly shows how important it is to question informants in their own language (spontaneous definitions and paraphrase-tests). Also, he stresses the fact that the rules underlying communication are a part of « Culture ». And he makes it a point to search for cognitive mechanisms which genrate human cultures, and for the useful concepts that would help account for correlations between ethnolinguistic features.