Gabriel Manessy: the foundations of an open linguistics

Abstract

Resorting to concepts such as vehicularization, creolization, and semantax, Gabriel Manessy demonstrated that a language develops under the combined constraints of culture-specific ways of thinking and of social norms inherent to community membership. Manessy devoted the last twenty years in his life to the comparison of the vehicular and the vernacular varieties of the same language, in two kinds of communicative situations, each marked by a different kind of social norms exerting their pressure on the speakers: situations of vehicular communication (lingua franca) and situations of vernacular communication. Each variety can be identified and observed in areas of urban immigration in French-speaking Africa, where a speaker's integration can be measured by reference to the degree of vernacularization reached by his discourse practices. In this perspective the creole languages in the plantation societies, being the result of the vernacularization process, were the field slaves' linguistic answer to the social double-bind their masters had designed to control them.