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of one enunciator who does not take responsibility for the utterance, does not commit her/himself, but instead distances her/himself from it as in the next example:

(7)What a disaster! (In quite the opposite situation)

In this view, the speaker can commit her/himself to the utterance meaning or distance her/himself from the utterance meaning and leave the responsibility for the utterance meaning to somebody else. In the case of first person marking, the commitment is clear:

(8)I think that X (Je pense que X)

In the following example, the speaker shows a different enunciator who takes the responsibility for the utterance meaning:

(9)It seems that the weather is going to be nice (Il paraît qu’il va faire beau)

By using an impersonal pronoun (il) in a impersonal verbal construction (il paraît que) that introduces a subordinate clause, the speaker distances her/himself from the responsibility that the meaning “the weather is nice” is produced by him.

This split subject has as its counterpart the split hearer: the listener (auditeur), who is hardly mentioned by Ducrot, the hearer (allocutaire), present at the discourse, and the addressee or receiver (destinataire) of the enunciator’s opinion and the act of utterance. Speaker and hearer are the ones who can use the first and second person pronouns. To Ducrot, polyphony can be described with the help of a theatre metaphor: in the enunciation, the speaker gives a certain kind of representation in the utterance (cf. Ducrot 1984: 231).

2.4.3  Jacqueline Authier-Revuz (born in 1940)

Quite a different theoretical approach is developed by Jacqueline Authier-Revuz, who also takes not only Bakhtinian polyphony as an inspiration, but also Jacques Lacan and his conception of the division of the subject. In her earlier work, Authier-Revuz ­introduces one basic conception about the nature of enunciation which she sees as enunciative heterogeneity (hétérogénéité énonciative). This means that the production of utterances, speech, parole, is essentially heterogenous as the subject is divided. The use of language is fundamentally polyphonic and the production of discourse is a result of interdiscursivity (Authier-Revuz 1984: 100–101). Furthermore, Authier-Revuz (1982) makes a distinction between two types of heterogeneity, namely constitutive and shown heterogeneity. The constitutive heterogeneity is that of the unconsciousness and the way it traces itself in language: therefore the subject is an effect of language, divided, split, decentralized; the subject cannot be a center, but what is central is the encounter of the subject with the Other (Authier-Revuz 1984: 101). However, it is the shown heterogeneity that allows a linguist to see how the Other is inscribed in the discourse. In other words, these are the phenomena found on the metadiscursive or metalinguistic