Contenu du sommaire : Phrase, texte, discours, sous la direction de Étienne Stéphane Karabétian

For a speech grammar. The « oratory order » against the praelectio : a missed opportunity The « Français » still persists in treating the study of the language as a preliminary to the study of the texts (lot of grammar in primary school and Junior High School, lot of literature and no grammar in High School), especially by laying the emphasis on sentence's grammar. In reaction to its kicks, has appeared a text's grammar. But the language exists, in practice, as a speech, and is learned before school, and, more, the notion of « text » is problematical. The persistence of such an inadequate mechanism has historical reasons. In the middle of 18th Century, Batteux, by proposing to study the French authors aside of the Ancients, started a movement towards the « oratory order ». But the scholar institution didn't extend it, under the influence of the dominating model : the teaching of latin with a grammar of sentence — for a foreing language — and praelectio — for the literary texts. So there is an aggiornamento necessary and possible by the way of a "speech grammar"

Words without things : the praelectio The history of praelectio from Erasmus to the 18th century reveals an increasing orientation towards to form more than substance. The Jesuits, indeed, stay away from the moral of the Ancients pagans, but they think that their « beautiful style » can and should be used to tell God's glory. The Jansenists, opposed to the flashing eloquence, turned the exercice towards language and translation. These process of thoughts have made a concept of « explication de texte » wich separates them from their fonction of speech.

This article is a contribution to an international and interdisciplinary history of text linguistics. It focuses on the works of three authors who have influenced text linguistics in various ways : Bühler, through his theory of four modes of language, his organon model, his theory of anaphora and deixis and his theory of language understanding influenced by Gestalt psychology ; Bartlett, through his theory of schemata or mental models that structure the understanding and memorisation of stories, a theory that had a direct influence on all later models of text comprehension based on schemata, frames, scripts and plans ; and finally Benveniste, through his theory of pronouns and indexicals and his discussion of two broad types of enunciation or genres of text : the story and the discourse.

People are able to distinguish with a large degree of consensus between texts and non-texts. In the present article, I discuss the theoretical implications of this fact for text linguistics. I demonstrate, partly via a small experiment, that sentences in text can contain three categories of linguistic expressions which contribute to signal their position in the text : anaphors, argumentative signals and mental space builders. Taking a partly psycholinguistic point of view, I argue how text linguistics must integrate cognitive as well as linguistic aspects, but suggest that it can nevertheless obtain status as a linguistic science by satisfying the three criteria proposed by Milner (1995) of falsification, « mathematisation » and « technical application ».

Contribution pour une histoire récente de l'analyse du discours The development of discourse analysis at the end of the sixties was made possible because the instigators of the major paradigms in the field (analysis of enunciation, analysis of cohesion, text-grammar) reserve to this analysis a specific field not encroaching on the sentence. More recently, the progression of pragmatics which integrates some aspects of discourse analysis deepened the gap between this analysis and sentence grammar. This problematic situation is changing with the diffusion of works presenting a less formal image of the grammatical relations. Between the cohesive relations expressed by the grammar and those specified by the cohesive markers intervaining beyond the sentence there is only a difference of degree of grammaticalization. These perspectives favorish new topics of investigation on discourse in connection with sentence grammar.