The semantics of polyphony (and the pragmatics of realization)

Abstract

Polyphony deals with the numerous points of view (POV) likely to be communicated through an utterance. After a brief historical review, this paper gives an introduction to the Scandinavian Theory of Linguistic Polyphony (ScaPoLine), which is a formal elaboration of Ducrot's original ideas. The theory introduces a distinction between the polyphonic structure and the polyphonic configuration, which deal with linguistic coding and utterance meaning, respectively. The configuration is composed of POV, discourse entities (DE) held responsible for certain POV, and (enunciative) links between the POV and DE. The DE are constructed images of the discourse referents. The polyphonic structure is composed of instructions for the configuration and thus yields semantic constraints on the interpretation. The exact identification of the configuration is governed by general interpretation principles. The whole process is modelled in the theory, which thus proposes a formal description of the semantic-pragmatics interface. Special attention is paid to the speaker's role, and it is shown how language creates different images of his verbal activities.