Page 42 - Oswald Ducrot, Slovenian Lectures, Digitalna knjižnica/Digital Library, Dissertationes 6
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Slovenian Lectures
children. She represents a first enunciator E1, according to whom it is the
mother who has broken the vase, and, undeniably, enunciator E1 is the chil-
dren. She makes the children out as being forced to say “You have broken
the vase” to defend themselves; and the mother has no difficulty then in re-
butting that justification of the children’s, as she was not there at the mate-
rial time. So, in saying “Well, I didn’t break it”, the mother makes the chil-
dren speak, and she makes them do so in an absurd way. The mother, in the
case in point, does exactly what Mr A, in the previous example, did when he
spoke to his wife: they both put claims in their interlocutors’ mouths which
makes their interlocutors seem ridiculous. In France and, I believe, in many
Christian countries, there is a formula which enables one to replace the I in
my . My mother could have said, not “Well, I didn’t break it”, but “Well, the
Holy-Ghost [le Saint-Esprit] didn’t break it”, the Holy Ghost’s function be-
ing to do impossible things. My mother would thus have imagined in her
discourse that, to defend myself against the accusation, I would have to as-
cribe the responsibility to the Holy Ghost. The remarkable thing is that ne-
gation is not even useful here. My mother could simply have said, ironically,
“In that case, the Holy Ghost [le Saint-Esprit] must have broken it”, with-
out negation, but with irony in her tone of voice; and the irony would have
played exactly the same role as negation.
A last example to show the usefulness of polyphonic analysis. I will
show how, through negation, one manages to construct an image of the
other in one’s own discourse. I go back to my example “John won’t come”.
“John won’t come” said by A. One can very well imagine that B, A’s address-
ee, answers something like “But I never said John would come!” One could
even have a shorter version: “But I never said that!” The interesting thing is
that in his utterance “But I never said that!”, B takes up the polyphony in-
troduced by A. B interprets A’s utterance as representing E1 and E2, with
E1 thinking that John is coming. B gives that analysis of A’s utterance and,
moreover, he makes out enunciator E1, whom A represents in his utter-
ance, as being identical with himself. B makes A out as having identified B
with enunciator E1. That is to say, B makes A out as having made him speak
when A represented enunciator E1, according to whom John would be
coming. Or in other words: B imagines that, in A’s speech, there is a repre-
sentation of the addressee, that is to say B, with which B disagrees. And one
could easily imagine the dialogue going on. A could defend himself saying
“But I wasn’t thinking of you, I was thinking of somebody else, of C, who
had claimed that John would come”. Suppose that A answered “I wasn’t
thinking of you, I was thinking of somebody else, of C, who had claimed
children. She represents a first enunciator E1, according to whom it is the
mother who has broken the vase, and, undeniably, enunciator E1 is the chil-
dren. She makes the children out as being forced to say “You have broken
the vase” to defend themselves; and the mother has no difficulty then in re-
butting that justification of the children’s, as she was not there at the mate-
rial time. So, in saying “Well, I didn’t break it”, the mother makes the chil-
dren speak, and she makes them do so in an absurd way. The mother, in the
case in point, does exactly what Mr A, in the previous example, did when he
spoke to his wife: they both put claims in their interlocutors’ mouths which
makes their interlocutors seem ridiculous. In France and, I believe, in many
Christian countries, there is a formula which enables one to replace the I in
my . My mother could have said, not “Well, I didn’t break it”, but “Well, the
Holy-Ghost [le Saint-Esprit] didn’t break it”, the Holy Ghost’s function be-
ing to do impossible things. My mother would thus have imagined in her
discourse that, to defend myself against the accusation, I would have to as-
cribe the responsibility to the Holy Ghost. The remarkable thing is that ne-
gation is not even useful here. My mother could simply have said, ironically,
“In that case, the Holy Ghost [le Saint-Esprit] must have broken it”, with-
out negation, but with irony in her tone of voice; and the irony would have
played exactly the same role as negation.
A last example to show the usefulness of polyphonic analysis. I will
show how, through negation, one manages to construct an image of the
other in one’s own discourse. I go back to my example “John won’t come”.
“John won’t come” said by A. One can very well imagine that B, A’s address-
ee, answers something like “But I never said John would come!” One could
even have a shorter version: “But I never said that!” The interesting thing is
that in his utterance “But I never said that!”, B takes up the polyphony in-
troduced by A. B interprets A’s utterance as representing E1 and E2, with
E1 thinking that John is coming. B gives that analysis of A’s utterance and,
moreover, he makes out enunciator E1, whom A represents in his utter-
ance, as being identical with himself. B makes A out as having identified B
with enunciator E1. That is to say, B makes A out as having made him speak
when A represented enunciator E1, according to whom John would be
coming. Or in other words: B imagines that, in A’s speech, there is a repre-
sentation of the addressee, that is to say B, with which B disagrees. And one
could easily imagine the dialogue going on. A could defend himself saying
“But I wasn’t thinking of you, I was thinking of somebody else, of C, who
had claimed that John would come”. Suppose that A answered “I wasn’t
thinking of you, I was thinking of somebody else, of C, who had claimed
