Page 35 - Oswald Ducrot, Slovenian Lectures, Digitalna knjižnica/Digital Library, Dissertationes 6
P. 35
Lecture II
er of the utterance B addresses to A, the producer (I have said that one does
not always exactly know who the producer is but here the situation is clear)
is B. It is B who carries out the phonetic activity and makes the grammat-
ical choices involved in the production of that utterance. But the je here
does not refer back to B at all. The sentence does not mean “What is B in-
terfering with?” The sentence means “What is A interfering with?” So that,
to analyse such an example, I cannot but say that the je does not refer back
to the producer at all but to someone, the locutor, who within the utter-
ance, is represented as being the imaginary author of the utterance. In oth-
er words, B tries to imagine a question which A should have asked himself
before committing his indiscretion. If I were to paraphrase B’s utterance, I
would do it in the following way: “Before going through my things, you,
A, should have asked yourself ‘de quoi je me mêle?’” Mr B thus makes Mr
A speak. Another possible paraphrase but which, as far as the theoretical
status of the locutor is concerned, leads to the same conclusion, would be:
“After committing your indiscretion, you should have an uneasy conscience
and say ‘de quoi je me mêle en regardant les papiers de mon ami B?’” In any
case, we have an example here in which the locutor, understood as being the
person whom the I pronoun designates as being responsible for the utter-
ance, cannot be identified with the producer at all.
I am now going to take another, perhaps more universal example than
the first (which perhaps can be found only in a few languages). It is ex-
tremely easy to use the I pronoun to designate persons, objects, which are
incapable of the physical action which speech requires. I remember while
travelling in Germany, seeing a sign posted up on the door of a shop bearing
the words “Ich muss draussen bleiben”, that is to say “I must stay outside”
and what stood for the signature under the utterance was the picture of a
dog. The whole thing meant that dogs were not to go into the shop. Who
is the producer of that sign? Perhaps the shop-keeper, perhaps the mayor of
the German town. I do not really know who. But I do know who or what
the locutor, designated by Ich, is, and that is all that matters to me, as a lin-
guist: the locutor is the dog. A well-disciplined German dog is pictured, be-
fore going into the shop, as saying to himself: “Careful now, I must stay out-
side”. A creature is thus pictured as speaking who cannot be the producer of
the utterance. That way of speaking is an extremely frequent one. There is a
sign often on dustbins such as “Don’t think twice about using me!” There,
it is the dustbin which speaks to passers-by and says: “Throw your cigarettes
and throw your pieces of dirty paper inside this dustbin!” The producer,
which, in this example, are the local authorities, makes the dustbin speak.
er of the utterance B addresses to A, the producer (I have said that one does
not always exactly know who the producer is but here the situation is clear)
is B. It is B who carries out the phonetic activity and makes the grammat-
ical choices involved in the production of that utterance. But the je here
does not refer back to B at all. The sentence does not mean “What is B in-
terfering with?” The sentence means “What is A interfering with?” So that,
to analyse such an example, I cannot but say that the je does not refer back
to the producer at all but to someone, the locutor, who within the utter-
ance, is represented as being the imaginary author of the utterance. In oth-
er words, B tries to imagine a question which A should have asked himself
before committing his indiscretion. If I were to paraphrase B’s utterance, I
would do it in the following way: “Before going through my things, you,
A, should have asked yourself ‘de quoi je me mêle?’” Mr B thus makes Mr
A speak. Another possible paraphrase but which, as far as the theoretical
status of the locutor is concerned, leads to the same conclusion, would be:
“After committing your indiscretion, you should have an uneasy conscience
and say ‘de quoi je me mêle en regardant les papiers de mon ami B?’” In any
case, we have an example here in which the locutor, understood as being the
person whom the I pronoun designates as being responsible for the utter-
ance, cannot be identified with the producer at all.
I am now going to take another, perhaps more universal example than
the first (which perhaps can be found only in a few languages). It is ex-
tremely easy to use the I pronoun to designate persons, objects, which are
incapable of the physical action which speech requires. I remember while
travelling in Germany, seeing a sign posted up on the door of a shop bearing
the words “Ich muss draussen bleiben”, that is to say “I must stay outside”
and what stood for the signature under the utterance was the picture of a
dog. The whole thing meant that dogs were not to go into the shop. Who
is the producer of that sign? Perhaps the shop-keeper, perhaps the mayor of
the German town. I do not really know who. But I do know who or what
the locutor, designated by Ich, is, and that is all that matters to me, as a lin-
guist: the locutor is the dog. A well-disciplined German dog is pictured, be-
fore going into the shop, as saying to himself: “Careful now, I must stay out-
side”. A creature is thus pictured as speaking who cannot be the producer of
the utterance. That way of speaking is an extremely frequent one. There is a
sign often on dustbins such as “Don’t think twice about using me!” There,
it is the dustbin which speaks to passers-by and says: “Throw your cigarettes
and throw your pieces of dirty paper inside this dustbin!” The producer,
which, in this example, are the local authorities, makes the dustbin speak.
