Contenu du sommaire : Actualité de Jacques Damourette et Edouard Pichon, sous la direction de Henri Portine

The title in the form of a pun intends both to refer to the ressources of a strictly speaking inexhaustible book and to single out the chapter on verbal forms, which is probably one of the most powerful theoretical constructions in French grammar since Nicolas Beauzee (1767). Marc Wilmet points out what to him is its main quality — the opposition between the nunc 'now' and the tune 'then' — and its main defect — the unacknowledgment of aspect, which was by contrast discovered by Gustave Guillaume (1929) at the same time. By way of conclusion, he proposes a reexamination of the uses of the "imparfait" based on a simultaneous account of the two parameters.

The chapter written by Damourette et Pichon about "les complements ambiants" is, in my opinion, among the studies which are at once most original and representative of their theoretical approach. There are to be found the finest analysis on the different relationships that can be established between the constituants of the sentence, which are very difficult to deal with in the context of the traditionnal grammar taught at school, and wich contemporary linguistic theories have merely enlightened. This chapter also sheds light on a number of conveying points with the theoretical hypotheses which have been developped in the past few years at the university of Paris III (EA 1483 "Recherches sur le francais contemporain" under my supervision, JE "Acquisition et contrastivite" under the supervision of L.

Henri Portine, : « The Description of the Range of Meaning and Structures in Damourette and Pichon's Essai de Grammaire de la Langue francaise : The Case of the french Word comme » This article sets out the analysis of the french word comme by J. Damourette and E. Pichon in their Essai de Grammaire de la Langue francaise (1940). This analysis develops on syntactic and semantic levels. Damourette and Pichon distinguish : utterances of comme introducing a subordinate clause (then, comme is named « strument oncinatif » by Damourette and Pichon) ; different turns of phrases (« echantillants », « qualifiants », « quasiceptifs », in accordance with Damourette and Pichon's terms) ; uses of comme in exclamations. The author of this article studies the relationship between « confrontatif » and « echantillant » in the way Damourette and Pichon describe it, then he analyses their use of zeugma. After a brief comparison between Damourette and Pichon's analysis of comme and Beauzee's one (Beauzee is a french grammarian of eighteenth century), this article ends with some reflections about the notion of "strument » and the place of syntax in any grammatical analyses.

« "Temporal struments" and "oncinative struments" : the example of encore » The way Damourette & Pichon deal with the semantics of polysemous grammatical terms ("struments") is illustrated here on the exemple of the word encore. Encore is analysed as having one basic sense, namely a temporal one, which can be observed in affirmative ("occeptive") as well as in negative ("forclusive") constructions. From that basic sense, a large range of logical values can be derived, provided that encore is concatenated with specific items, such as encore + postponed subject, encore + comparative, encore + superlative, and the subordinating conjunction ("strument oncinatif") encore + que.

The aim of this paper is the description of the connections between the linguistic theory of the negation in Damourette and Pichon's Essai de grammaire de la Langue francaise and the analysis of the subject in Jacques Lacan's Ecrits and Seminaire. For Damourette and Pichon, there is no really negation in french, but the combination of the discordance (the word ne) and the forclusion (pas, point, jamais, etc.). For Lacan, the discordance and the forclusion are operations of the subject of unconsciousness.