Page 39 - Oswald Ducrot, Slovenian Lectures, Digitalna knjižnica/Digital Library, Dissertationes 6
P. 39
Lecture II
cilable with our understanding of the moral environment of mediaeval so-
ciety; but if the painter or the sculptor of the Middle Ages can represent
those images, it is because he represents them as images of sin, as images of
actions which are to be condemned and, because of that moral condem-
nation, he manages to have those representations accepted. It seems to me
that the title Sins which a sculptor or painter of the Middle Ages gives to
his work works very much like linguistic negation: in saying Sins, he carries
out a kind of negation on those images. He gives an extremely crude repre-
sentation of pleasure, for example, and what allows him to represent pleas-
ure in that extraordinarily vivid way is that, at the same time, he has negat-
ed it by calling it Sin. In what follows, as unfortunately I am only a linguist,
I am not going to develop the psychological aspect of Freud’s theory of ne-
gation, a thing which is quite beyond my scope. Besides, there is probably
something slightly excessive in that theory of Freud’s; but it is Freud’s gen-
eral idea which seems to me a very useful one and which for my part, I con-
stantly use in the study of negation. My idea is the following: if I have to
describe a non-X utterance, I say that the non-X utterance represents two
points of view, in other words two enunciators, E1 and E2. So there are, if
you like, two persons who express themselves through a non-X utterance,
and this I will try to show by using strictly linguistic arguments: the first
person, enunciator E1, has a point of view which corresponds to the posi-
tive part of the utterance, that is to say X; and enunciator E2 disagrees with
E1; but the two points of view are simultaneously present. After the pause,
as from a certain number of examples and as from a certain number of lin-
guistic facts, I am going to try to show you that it is almost necessary to ac-
cept that representation of negative utterances: a negative utterance, prop-
erly speaking, has no unity...
***
Well, I was in the process of introducing the theory of polyphony, and
more especially the notion of enunciator, using the example of negation. I
remind you that for me a non-X utterance represents two enunciators, one
whose point of view is represented by the positive part, X, and the other,
E2, who disagrees with E1. Let us now apply that idea to a very simple sen-
tence: “John won’t come”. We have an E1, whose point of view is that John
will come and an E2, who disagrees with E1. How is one to justify that
analysis? To start with, I shall be using what might be called syntactic kinds
of proofs, by showing that this form of analysis enables one to understand
the phenomenon of anaphora, that is to say of pronominal back reference,
cilable with our understanding of the moral environment of mediaeval so-
ciety; but if the painter or the sculptor of the Middle Ages can represent
those images, it is because he represents them as images of sin, as images of
actions which are to be condemned and, because of that moral condem-
nation, he manages to have those representations accepted. It seems to me
that the title Sins which a sculptor or painter of the Middle Ages gives to
his work works very much like linguistic negation: in saying Sins, he carries
out a kind of negation on those images. He gives an extremely crude repre-
sentation of pleasure, for example, and what allows him to represent pleas-
ure in that extraordinarily vivid way is that, at the same time, he has negat-
ed it by calling it Sin. In what follows, as unfortunately I am only a linguist,
I am not going to develop the psychological aspect of Freud’s theory of ne-
gation, a thing which is quite beyond my scope. Besides, there is probably
something slightly excessive in that theory of Freud’s; but it is Freud’s gen-
eral idea which seems to me a very useful one and which for my part, I con-
stantly use in the study of negation. My idea is the following: if I have to
describe a non-X utterance, I say that the non-X utterance represents two
points of view, in other words two enunciators, E1 and E2. So there are, if
you like, two persons who express themselves through a non-X utterance,
and this I will try to show by using strictly linguistic arguments: the first
person, enunciator E1, has a point of view which corresponds to the posi-
tive part of the utterance, that is to say X; and enunciator E2 disagrees with
E1; but the two points of view are simultaneously present. After the pause,
as from a certain number of examples and as from a certain number of lin-
guistic facts, I am going to try to show you that it is almost necessary to ac-
cept that representation of negative utterances: a negative utterance, prop-
erly speaking, has no unity...
***
Well, I was in the process of introducing the theory of polyphony, and
more especially the notion of enunciator, using the example of negation. I
remind you that for me a non-X utterance represents two enunciators, one
whose point of view is represented by the positive part, X, and the other,
E2, who disagrees with E1. Let us now apply that idea to a very simple sen-
tence: “John won’t come”. We have an E1, whose point of view is that John
will come and an E2, who disagrees with E1. How is one to justify that
analysis? To start with, I shall be using what might be called syntactic kinds
of proofs, by showing that this form of analysis enables one to understand
the phenomenon of anaphora, that is to say of pronominal back reference,
