Énonciation : French pragmatic approach(es)
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French enunciation theory is not a unified theory, but represents several different diversified approaches to pragmatic questions. It developed out of French structuralism, from the heritage of Saussure and grammatical traditions, whereas pragmatics in the Anglo-American tradition grew out of analytical philosophy and logic (Fuchs 1981). It bears resemblances to other pragmatically oriented theories (see, for instance, Banks 2004), but presents an original view on language use. First of all, énonciation is not a modern discovery, but rather a rediscovery of old problematics of language concentrating mainly on issues that concern language-internal systems, such as deictics and modality (Fuchs 1981: 35). Basically, enunciation deals with utterance-level meaning from the perspective of different linguistic elements. In other words, the activity of the speaker is the focus: on the one hand there are traces or indices left by the speaker in the utterance; on the other hand there is the relationship the speaker maintains with her/his interlocutor (Dubois 1969). Enunciation is understood as an act of producing an utterance as an individual instance of language use in a specific situation (Benveniste 1974: 80).