Contenu du sommaire : La polyphonie linguisitique

This article aims at providing a comprehensive view of the notion of polyphony in semantics. In the polyphonic approach, any utterance is seen as a multiple-voiced entity, or as a show produced and conducted by the utterer (the locuteur), with several characters (the énonciateurs) on the stage, each representing a viewpoint. The meaning of the utterance is determined by the position of the utterer as regards the different viewpoints : he may or may not adopt a viewpoint, reject it, etc. The first part of the article is devoted to a historical survey of the notion and its problems. The second part intends to make the basic definitions more explicit as regards the utterer and the different voices that he evokes as well as their specific linguistic properties. It examines the different semantic theories based on the notion of polyphony, as well as the type of semantics they advocate.

The aim of this article is to reconsider the characteristics of Polyphony Theory from Le dire et le dit (Ducrot 1984), modifying some terms in a rather radical way. There are two points which are essential to us. The first one is to admit the existence of the triplet (speaker's attitude, énonciateur, content) existing in the meaning of every utterance in so far as the content is defined in an argumentative way. In so doing, we are opposed to the dualistic conceptions of polyphony which do not recognize the pairs (attitude, content) or (reported speaker, content). The second point, which concerns the characters of the enunciation, is our dismissal of any individualization of the enunciators, as we consider them examples of guarantees, Persons (in the Latin sense of ‘role') who validate the content : L, TU, IL, the World, the Witness.

In this article, I intend to re-examine the perspective known in French linguistics as the “Théorie de la polyphonie” by discussing the nature of the “voices”, technically called énonciateurs , that the term polyphony allows us to “hear” (or to refuse to “hear”) within the meaning of utterances. After briefly criticizing the conception of énonciateurs as sources of viewpoints, I will define them as “tones” (section 1). This non-exhaustive presentation will describe three énonciateurs (section 2) and offer some discursive criteria for identifying them (section 3).

This study concerns two oppositions. The first is between two levels in the constitution of the semantic subject constitutive of polyphonic structures of language, voices and points of view. They relate to responsibility for forms and for contents, respectively. The second is between external and internal polyphony. It concerns the fact that polyphonic structures can simply link a voice and a point of view from the same énonciateur (responsible for the effective utterance), or be enriched to include different énonciateurs responsible for virtual utterances either cited (as a voice) or reformulated (as a point of view) by the effective utterance. These oppositions are finally applied to the issue of descriptive, polemical and metalinguistic negation.

This article presents a theoretical and empirical study of the nature of Discourse Entities (DE) – an important element of the Scandinavian Theory of Linguistic Polyphony (ScaPoLine) – in an attempt to better understand the role that they play in actual polyphonic interpretation. First, the general conceptual framework and the (other) central elements of ScaPoLine are introduced. Then the different types of DE are defined and classified, and by means of linguistic analyses it is shown that their presence may be coded by various types of linguistic material. Finally, other linguistic traces of the speaker's utterance activity are exposed and some perspectives on linguistic polyphony opened by this approach are discussed.

The theories of “possible worlds” and “mental spaces” eclipse, or tend to eclipse, the subject whilst focusing on the representational aspects of the “worlds” and the “spaces”. By contrast, the analysis presented in this article of predictive content conditionals (Si P, Q) places the subject at the centre of the theory and thus enables linking different aspects of the semantics and the interpretation of these constructions, so as to account for the intrinsically polyphonic nature of language. The locutor (LOC), a discourse entity distinct from the speaker as the empirical producer of the utterance, constructs images, coded by these constructions, of himself as utterance locutor (l0) asserting the hypothetical relation which holds between the protasis (p) and the apodosis (q) and as discourse locutor (L) showing his epistemic attitude ( “positive” vs. “negative”) towards p and q. The coding of this attitude is underdetermined in several cases, notably when the conditionals are reported in (Free) Indirect Speech in the past, but can be specified by resorting to the epistemic state ( “ignorance” vs. “knowledge” of the truth of p and q) of LOC. The epistemic state is inferable from the context and/or the speech situation as well as from the illocutionary act ( “threat”, “promise”, “wish”, “regret” etc.) accomplished by uttering the conditional.

This paper presents some preliminary considerations on which criteria one should establish to determine whether a question is polyphonic. The important distinction to be made is between form and function : between the notion of interrogative, which refers to the syntactic form of the clause, and the notion of question, which refers to the illocutionary act. The main point is that a question is not intrinsically polyphonic, but that it can become so if the clause contains some linguistic element which encodes polyphony. The notions elaborated in the discussion make it possible to discriminate between the factors which turn a clause, whatever its form, into a question in the first place and those which could subsequently render the question polyphonic.

This study is devoted to an analysis of the polyphonic nature of adversative constructions like Pierre n'est pas français mais danois . As the syntactic negation ne... pas and the connector mais both represent a typical polyphonic nature, the interaction between these two linguistic elements within the same syntactic structure represents a rather complex analysis in spite of the fact that there is only one single utterance present. The two arguments in adversative structures have to fulfil certain syntactic and semantic demands, such as being part of the same paradigm. We find traces of one speaker (the utterance locutor) who refutes another speaker's point of view but who also rectifies his own point of view. The study suggests that the two arguments in the adversative structure reveal an internal polyphony as well as an external polyphony, which gives a particular polyphonic nature to the adversative structure.

This article concerns the French indefinite pronoun on in relation to linguistic polyphony. Two questions of different epistemological status are addressed. The first one is theoretical. The study examines the correspondence between the third person in ScaPoLine theory and the uses of on. It is demonstrated that some revisions of the standard 2004 version are called for : eliminating subdivisions of the third person and establishing the third person's two images, parallel to the ones given for the locuteur and the allocutaire. The second question is methodological. The article suggests that a corpus-based study of polyphony can reveal differences between genres. This approach is illustrated by the use of two sets of data : one drawn from the literary genre (Madame Bovary) and the other from political discourse (French debates in the European Parliament).