Abstract
In this paper, I will deal with the way linguistics and semiotics focus on person and subjectivity in language. I start from two different meanings of the “person” word and from Benveniste and Latour’s theories of enunciation. Later, I deal with the problem of subjectivity in language and I connect it to two different views: Benveniste’s idea that subjectivity is grounded on the “I” and Guillaume’s idea of a primacy of the “he”. Starting from the Iliad and from the semiotic idea of subject, I take side for Guillaume and Latour’s theory: it is the delocutive structure of the “he” which, in language, expresses subjectivity, namely the capacity of the subject to make himself the object of his reflections and of his words.
Highlights
In this work I will show how the linguistic category of person is connected to the idea of subjectivity
This will be done through a semiotic theory of enunciation grounded on the primacy of the “he”, the category that, according to the linguistic theory of enunciation, used to express the “non-person”
In order to show the way linguistics and semiotics handle the “personhood” idea, I want to start from the two different Greek and Latin etymologies of the word ‘person’, which both arrive to the “grammatical person” sense, but by means of a totally opposite semantic genealogy
Summary
In this work I will show how the linguistic category of person is connected to the idea of subjectivity. This will be done through a semiotic theory of enunciation grounded on the primacy of the “he”, the category that, according to the linguistic theory of enunciation, used to express the “non-person”. In order to show the way linguistics and semiotics handle the “personhood” idea, I want to start from the two different Greek and Latin etymologies of the word ‘person’, which both arrive to the “grammatical person” sense, but by means of a totally opposite semantic genealogy. As Létoublon [1] has shown, Greek prosôpon primarily means “what is before the eyes”, “face”, “outward appearance” (sense 1). The second meaning of the word is, on the other hand, “physical person” (sense 2), while only much later, via Etruscan influences, prosôpon began to mean “mask”
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