Contenu du sommaire : Représentations métalinguistiques ordinaires et discours, sous la direction de Jean-Claude Beacco

Towards a linguistic approach of social representations. The concept of social representation is currently used in all human sciences, although with different meanings, which vary according to the kinds of research methods and theoretical framework used. We have decided to closely correlate social representations to the speech. Then comes the question about the status of what we have come to name social representation: is it an abstract object deprived of any effective reality, a speech object, or a social object? Social representations originate, scatter, change, dilute and disappear within and through the speech. Their purpose is to give a meaning to daily life circumstances and thus allow decision-making, debate and communication. They may adopt rather complex speech structures, such as two-level structures, depending on whether they are merely used by the speaker as a reference, or whether they depict an experience or personal beliefs. We conclude the article with a short analysis of relevant data.

Ordinary metalinguisitic representations in front of nomination, institutionalization and normalization processes. Everyday metalinguistic representations are inquired into through talks with a small sample of bilingual French - Patois speakers of an alpine valley belonging to the Occitan domain of Franco-Alpine Provençal. Six topics are explored: differences between French and Patois, speaking and writing, child and adult speech, oral and written discourse, known and foreign languages, ordinary personal and young people's language. The main results concern the centrality of an abstract, unvarying entity called "French", with no further qualification, opposed to an empirical entity, named "Patois", usually indexed by its local origin and linked to some behavioural rules. Naming a language, by way of its' institutionalization, standardization, is seen as the main factor influencing ordinary metalinguistic representations.

Speech activities ordinary names and speech communities equivalence. This study takes place in the field of interaction analysis, and is based on naturally occurring data. It focuses on the way people ordinarily name speech activities. Our main aim is to propose some first research lines on that point, but we also intend to show that, in the field of talk-in-interaction, the participants' linguistic representations are necessarily, and naturally, taken into account in the analyses. The first part of the paper is an overview of the way in which classical linguistics deals with speech activities naming (speech acts theory), in comparison with what a folk linguistic approach could be. The second part is devoted to methodological aspects and their implications. In the third part, we turn to a cross-cultural comparison between French and Greek spontaneous speech activities names.

Classification of arguments on ordinary discourses. The representations ordinary speakers have about argumentative procedures is necessary to the scientific analysis of argumentation itself. Actually, this ordinary knowledge of argumentation is of great influence on the strategies speakers use in specific contexts. In particular, their perception of the social legitimacy and value of an argument is crucial for their choices when criticising the antagonist discourse. The question arises of the homology of scientific and non-scientific categorisations of arguments and of their respective use in argumentative interactions.

Predicates of speech in French: a short inquiry about speakers' choices. This paper intends to investigate if any regularities can be found in the vocabulary native speakers use to report certain speech acts. After a rapid examination of prior linguistic researches on verba dicendi, the author first explains how electronic dictionaries deal with the lexicon of predicates of speech. After, he presents the questionnaires he made up to collect data about the real use of some elements of this lexicon by native speakers. In the last part, he discusses the results obtained, comparing them with the repartition of syntactic features in the lexicon of speech predicates.

Ordinary speech nouns and discourse genre nouns. The non-scientific lexicon of nouns referring to speech genres is analysed as being of a particular value to describe the genres themselves. In French, the speech related nouns, especially if not derived from verbs, tend to specify discourse activities, in a way which is not substantially different from genres: they define ordinary speech events focusing on some of their semantic components as medium, content or tone. This ordinary semantic model of genres is similar to the ethnography of communication one and it might be the root of the scientific definitions of linguistic genres.

Ordinary grammatical culture: a study on metagrammatical and metacognitive verbalisations of native speakers. This paper is an overview of the grammatical and metacognitive verbalisations produced by native learners in difficulty with their mother tongue. Erroneous linguistic structures and mysterious behavior are often disregarded in schoolroom contexts as well as in research work. In studying the "end-products" and their meta-interpretation we have tried to clarify the complex network of grammatical representations. If meta-grammatical activity is a powerful means of appropriation and of elaboration of representations, our work shows in what way it can also be an obstacle to learning. At the same time the results we have obtained, have enabled us to bring to the fore the constituent elements of ordinary knowledge and thus to help sorting out the concept of ordinary grammatical culture.

The metalinguistic dimension of school reading pedagogy. Based upon data gathered in twelve classrooms, the aim of this paper is to emphasize the importance of metalinguistic activity associated with the teaching of reading. Three types of metalinguistic treatments are observed; 1) autonymy alone when the schoolmasters repeat and validate or invalidate pupil sentences; 2) autonymy accompanied by units of ordinary language such as words, small words, bits of words... 3) Finally, the beginning of a grammatical nomenclature. However, even this last category have pragmatical dimension related to reading activity. It is quite different from the scholarly categories, which belong to academic disciplines (grammar and linguistics).