78 Marjut Johansson & Eija Suomela-Salmi
representation of someone else. It is of no importance whatsoever whether the other be an individual, a crowd or everyone.
(Bally, Traité de la stylistique française, vol.2 1909: 8)
This means that an utterance, or rather the meaning of an utterance, is co-constructed in interaction, but at the same time it is a means of acting upon the interlocutors (Durrer 1998: 123), that is to say that utterances contain always an argumentative (implicit or explicit) dimension too.
When we say that it is hot or that it is raining, it is very rarely just an affirmation of the state of affairs but rather an affective impression or a judgement which is likely to determine an action. (Bally 1952: 17)
Here again the affinities with modern pragmatics are striking: there is a general agreement in pragmatics that the informative function of the language is never the only one operating in any discourse.
2.2.2 Gustave Guillaume (1883–1960)
Gustave Guillaume, a contemporary of Bally and a disciple of Antoine Meillet,4 can be regarded a representative of a psycho-cognitive orientation of the first phase of enunciative pragmatics, especially in his early scholarly production, whereas his later work can rather be associated with cognitive linguistics à la française (Joly & Roulland 1981; Valette 2003). Being a representative of his time, Guillaume is obsessed with the relationship of language and thought. He tries to give thought a linguistic status which would establish the thought/language relation permanently. According to Guillaume, thinking takes place in time. In other words, the conception of ideas is an intellectual process which requires a certain, even if at times a minimal lapse of time. To think about a notion means to construct it and the time needed for it is called operative time (temps opératif). This process is characterized by a twofold activity which moves from the maximal to the minimal extension of a concept and then again from the minimal to the maximal extension. The maximal extension corresponds to universality and the minimal extension to a singular case. The movements in operative time serving to construct a notion are generalization and particularization. (Ducrot & Schaeffer 1995: 59–60). From the enunciative point of view the following elements are essential in Guillaume’s reflexion: the use of language is an act, language is dynamic, and the relation of language and thought is intrinsic.
. Antoine Meillet (1866–1936) was one of the leading linguists of his time. He was a specialist in the history and structure of Indo-European languages. He seems also to have been one of the first to use the concept of grammaticalization.
Énonciation 79
According to Guillaume (1912), language is on the one hand always an act, motivated by the speaker’s will to influence the other, and, on the other hand, it is a means by which the human thought changes and evolves in time (Valette 2006: 61).
[…] language (parole) is a force, a means to act upon others. This action upon other human beings who are like us, foreseen before the act of speaking, guides our thought, gives it a form and at certain moments becomes so imperious that it can break ancient moulds and create new ones which are more suitable for our purposes.
(Guillaume 1912: 4)
Guillaume rejects Saussure’s opposition between synchronic and diachronic. According to Guillaume, language can only be understood as a system that is dynamic and in constant evolution. The system of language is also dynamic because of the relation of language to discourse (a term analogous to Saussure’s parole). The linguistic phenomena to be explained (diverse uses of a grammatical form, polysemy, ambiguity, etc., in short, everything that has to do with actualized meaning (effet de sens)) manifest themselves in discourse, whereas the operations which lead to such usages are psychomechanic in nature and thus belong to the level of the language system. They cannot be directly apprehended but have to be discovered via methodological reflection (cf. Culioli’s model of enunciative operations infra). In other words language preexists discourse, but the linguistic analysis is based on an ascending description, from discourse to language (Valette 2006: 24).
At the beginning of the 20th century the concept of actualization (cf. Bally supra) is one of the key theoretical notions in the first phase of enunciative pragmatics (linguistique de la parole). It seems as though it was invented by Bally and Guillaume almost simultaneously. Bally uses it for the first time in 1922 and Guillaume in 1929 (Valette 2004). As we have seen, Bally defined actualization as a process that converts a virtual linguistic entity belonging to language to an actual entity of discourse. For Guillaume, actualization is necessary in order to produce discourse. In both cases actualization necessarily implies an activity instantiated by the speaking subject. There is still a marked difference between Bally and Guillaume. Guillaume’s psychomechanic approach is confined to the level of the word; actualization is consequently a process that concerns the word which, by virtue of the article, is activated in discourse; its status changes from puissance in posse (potential meaning) to effet in esse (meaning in discourse) (Valette 2006: 40). He had developed a similar line of thought already in 1919, in Le problème de l’article et sa solution en langue française, but instead of mentioning actualization, there he proposed the hypothesis of “fundamental kinesis” (cinétisme fondamental), the way in which thought creates the specific/universal relation by moving from the maximal extension of a notion to the minimal, and then from the minimal to the maximal extension again. Such a movement (kinesis) explains the different referential meanings (effets de sens) actualized by French indefinite and