L'énonciation de Benveniste à Weinrich

Jacqueline Fontaine

pp. 207-220

in: Simone Delesalle (ed), Histoire des conceptions de l'énonciation, Histoire Épistémologie Langage 8 (2), 1986.

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this article is not to evaluate the influence of E. Benveniste's writings on H. Weinrich; rather, it is to locate the epistemological shift of "enunciation" from the first point of view to the second. I here try to show how the field of exploration discovered by H. Weinrich, which is characterized essentially by the priority attributed to the syntagmatic axis over the paradigmatic axis, enables a linguist to avoid the theoretical "blind alley" to which Emile Benveniste's thinking leads. It proposes to place linguistic reflection before the reality of particular languages again, or, more precisely, to activate the give-and-take between the hypothetical and the empirical so that the linguist will be free to discover new syntactic facts.

Cited authors

Weinrich Harald

Benveniste Émile