Énonciation, interaction, conversation : les théories du langage entre le psychique et le social

Abstract

ABSTRACT : The notion of interaction is omnipresent today in the various works that are attempting to restore to linguistic exchanges their social or micro- social dimension, or to provide a linguistic dimension for conceptions of the « social bond » that lack it ; this notion inevitably encounters the themes of enunciation, dialogue, language intersubjectivity, and linguistic sociality, the systemacity of which is problematic. The article therefore attempts, in an essentially exploratory and programmatic way, to place in question the widely accepted idea that formal linguistics - the linguistics which descends from Saussure and Chomsky - only came into being by radically repressing these questions. Symptomatic is the fact that Benveniste and Jakobson alluded to (without further developing) the necessity of shifting the traditional transcendental framework of linguitics towards a fundamentally intersubjective one. It is suggested that, starting in the last third of the 19th century, one can find traces of a broadly transdisciplinary cognitive interest organized around two main themes ; these latter the study endeavors to define. What is on the one hand the question of interior language, which, moving from V. Egger to Benveniste, and from psychology to linguistics, opens up the field of an intra-mental space in which the dialogic and the dialogal interconnect. On the other hand there is the theme of the linguistic essence of sociality, which is represented in a particularly suggestive way in G. Tarde's rough sketch of an analysis of conversation ; here, through, the metaphor of the « link », that is, in the terms used by H. Kelsen, the spatialization of inter-psychic phenomena, the relationships between psychology, sociology and linguistics are partly played out. In addition to the research orientations suggested here, the idea of a clear-cut division in the linguistic tradition between an abstract rationalism and an unprincipled empiricism, should doubtlessly be reconsidered. The dynamic of certain recent works, whether they associated with symbolic interactionism (Goffman) or with a pragmatics « of the third kind » (Berrendonner), suggests that the future of the notion of interaction will depend as much on the ability of theoreticians to accept the history of their cognitive interests, as on the rigorousness and inventiveness with which they will succeed in formalizing the experience of speaking subjects within the community.