Linguistics Of Enunciation Research Articles

Assessing Apparently Equivalent Translations in the News Media

This essay represents a preliminary attempt to devise a method for examining words and their apparently equivalent translations as they appear in the news media. Taking Walter Benjamin’s essay on the task of the translator as a starting point and drawing on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and Antoine Culioli’s and Paul Laurendeau’s enunciative linguistics, the author argues that this appearance of equivalence is deceptive, for at least two reasons: first, because differing, culturally specific assumptions underlie the interpretations of these words and their translations; and second, because as the implications of these words and their translations are reported upon and contested (by political actors, by reporters, by editorialists), their meanings effectively change.

Une lecture, avec Georges Lantéri-Laura, de quelques postulats de la pathologie du langage dans la psychiatrie du XX e siècle

While contributing to the phenomenological elucidation of the psychiatric field, George Lantéri-Laura proceeded to the diachronic study of the possible conditions of linguistic studies. He showed how, at the end of the XIX th century, a certain number of postulates - Bouillaud, Baillarger and Séglas - constituted the implicit basis of later semiology of language. We may add the postulate of the independence of word, idea and the ideational theory of the meaning proper to the philosophy of associationism. At the end of XX th Century, while the transformation of associationism took place, a theoretical change encouraging the idea of a field which is neither translinguistic, nor universal. Refusing to regard this question as closed, G Lantéri-Laura proposed his own structural reading of semantic disorders in psychiatry by including the stylistic study, and beyond the strictly structuralist point of view the study of the autobiographical narration. This approach studies the links of language and subjectivity as, linguistics of enunciation (linguistic pragmatics), as French psychoanalysis has done since the Sixties, by questioning the ordinary dialogism of the inner language and its troubles, in particular verbal hallucinations, it also studies the heterogeneity of discourse, and the modalities according to which the subject of enunciation is explicitly inscribed, or not, in statements.

Le style dans la langue et dans les textes

Jean-Michel Adam : Style in language and texts Study of style and study of language are not to be separated, nor should grammar and stylistics be opposed. Such an opposition prevents further more an approach to language on a broader than purely grammatical basis. This is what imply Benveniste's "translinguistique", Bally's "stylistique" and Bakhtine works. The beginning of Edouard Dujardin's Les Lauriers sont coupés is used to illustrate Benveniste's and Bally's enunciative linguistics. A poem taken from Paul Eluard's Les Petits justes apply Bakhtine's theory and is used as a transtextual analysis textbook case.

Instances frontières et angélisme narratif

Dominique Maingueneau : Borderline beings and narrative "angelism" This article, based on some concepts of discourse analysis and of the linguistics of enunciation, deals with fuzzy relationships between narrator and character in novelistic narration. The author studies especially two notions that he has already introduced in previous works: "generic character" and "witness- narrator", in order to give them a more precise definition. A distinction is made between "unidentifiable character" and "any member of a group", as enunciative positions in the narrative. The next step is the introduction of a new notion, "narrative angelism", which makes it possible to analyse some short passages beyond the scope of classical narration. Two examples (from Zola and Mauriac) are commented. It is argued that such phenomena, which are very few, are narrowly bound with the resources of a given language (for example, French writers can use the subject pronoun "on") and with the aesthetic universe of the works in which they appear.

Rhetorics of truth, justice and secrecy in Pascal's text

Beginning from a definition of philosophical discourse which states the necessity of rhetoric meant as the whole of the linguistic devices aiming to persuade the interlocutor of truth and justice, the author points out that Pascal's text would be an outstanding example of such a discourse, while showing, nevertheless, the specificity of the rhetoric he employs. Such a specificity would aim to carry out a complex logic of the secret, concerning chiefly the ackowledgement and identification procedures of the subject of the discourse-enunciation, and its pronominal and nominal markers. The author studies this logic on one hand by starting from the pragmatic patterns developed by the linguistics of enunciation, and on the other taking into account the philosophical, ethical and religious themes of the Jansenist thought in the XVIIth century. The distinction between concealment and secret leads the author to set up the forms of political rhetoric against the actual Pascalian aspects of philosophical rhetoric. Such a logic of the secret, which is the projection of the hidden God teologema into the field of philosophical discourse, would enable us to position as “absent” the subject producing this discourse and thus to transform what he states into a discourse of truth and justice. The very careful examination of the anonymity strategies and mostly of the writing tactics concerning the author's real name (anagram) would seem to confirm this conception of the rhetoric of Pascal's philosophical discourse.