Welche Bedeutung hat der Diskurs und wie können wir ihn verstehen?

Abstract

Discourse is the very heart of universal human society and its cultural diversity. To make sense of the meaningless unspoken world around us and inside us, we give meaning to the sense data we perceive, translating them into experience. But meaning is not fixed. We discourse participants negotiate the meaning of words, text segments and whole texts, always reserving the right to disagree. Thus it is discourse that drives our creativity. Or is it? Do not the recent Large Language Models, fed with discourse and trained to say the right things, demonstrate that they can perfectly emulate human utterances? Are we in charge of what we say or are we just the mouthpiece of discourse? Because meaning is not fixed, utterances must be interpreted. The quantitative approach of corpus linguistics is no more than a heuristic tool. Even if there will never be a true or final interpretation, it is the art and craft of hermeneutics that can make sense of what has been said. Exploring discourse as a fabric of intertextual links, interpretive linguistics takes account of the diachronic dimension of discourse. This is how linguistics finds its purpose at the centre of the social and human sciences.