Textual Invention and Quotation

Abstract

The development of linguistic competence allows a greater access to linguistic knowledge and control of its actual use. Linguistic competence is built on the capacity of manipulating systemic rules and units (grammar), and it is in a speaker’s vital interest that the system remains stable, i.e. unchanged, to ensure his communicative efficiency. But the competence is no less constructed based on perceiving and reproducing texts that the speaker has acquired in order to possess them, as it is said, “by heart”. These texts belong, as does systemic knowledge, to the general image of a speaker’s communicative abilities.By analogy to linguistic rules and forms, texts that a speaker is ready to quote at any moment of his linguistic activity are best used when they undergo no change, i.e. when they preserve their stability. Considering those texts as parts of their intimate and social identity, the speakers develop a specific attitude towards textual units known by heart in a way that, in their view, they are referred to as untouchable. Sacred texts, for instance. A prayer (e.g. The Lord’s Prayer) is a text of such kind. It is used in speakers’ everyday linguistic practice, gradually uttered in a uniform manner, quoted and requoted. The result of that specific communicational practice is the growing importance of the sole act of utterance rather than the speakers’ interest in its meaning. This is one of the reasons why speakers are justifiably reserved when it comes to changing this kind of text. A change interferes with the continuity of their practice, and is thus felt as a violation of their linguistic identity. But even when the speakers pay little attention to the content of what they are saying, they are entitled to use texts with accurate meaning. This fact justifies the reflective interventions and changes that are being continually made in the historical existence of texts.