Revue semestrielle de linguistique et littératures romanes

Écho des études romanes 2005, 1(2):23-30 | DOI: 10.32725/eer.2005.026

Les déictiques - des subjectivèmes ?French

Raluca BALATCHI
Université Stefan cel Mare, Suceava

Deictics - subjectivemes?

The paper discusses the phenomenon of subjectivity in language through a specific linguistic item : the first person pronoun in French. Starting from the idea that deixis is related to subjectivity in a different manner than evaluative items are (e.g. adjectives like wonderful, boring, etc.), it aims to show that, whenever a deictic item appears in a discourse, it makes it subjective irrespective of the receiver's interpretation. Each deictic item has to do with the subject responsible for the utterance ; this is why, any discourse built around the first person pronoun will be undoubtedly subjective. No matter the linguistic context, the essential indexical I never lose its subjective 'force'. In order to illustrate this idea, the paper discusses some literary examples in which there could be the case of a 'weakening' of the deictic content in the first person, suggesting therefore a possible subjective hierarchy of occurrences of the pronoun I. However, in each case, the relationship with the subject is strongly preserved. Subjectivity is therefore a problem of degree only when it comes to evaluative subjective items in language.

Keywords: deictics; subjectivity; first person pronoun; French

Published: December 11, 2005  Show citation

ACS AIP APA ASA Harvard Chicago Chicago Notes IEEE ISO690 MLA NLM Turabian Vancouver
BALATCHI, R. (2005). Les déictiques - des subjectivèmes ? Écho des études romanes, 1(2), 23-30. doi: 10.32725/eer.2005.026
Share...
Download citation
  • BibTeX (.bib)
  • Bookends (.ris)
  • EasyBib (.ris)
  • EndNote (.enw)
  • EndNote 8 (.xml)
  • ISI WoS (.isi)
  • Medlars (.medlars)
  • Mendeley (.ris)
  • MODS (.xml)
  • Papers (.ris)
  • RefWorks (.txt)
  • RefManager (.ris)
  • RIS (.ris)
  • MS Word (.xml)
  • Zotero (.ris)
    • Open full article

    References

    1. BENVENISTE, Emile (1966), Problèmes de linguistique générale, tome 1, Gallimard, Paris.
    2. BREAL, Michel (1897), Essai de sémantique (science des significations), Hachette, Paris.
    3. CHARAUDEAU, Patrick - MAINGUENEAU, Dominique, (2002), Dictionnaire d'analyse du discours, Seuil, Paris.
    4. JAKOBSON, Roman (1963), Essai de linguistique générale, Minuit, Paris.
    5. KERBRAT-ORECCHIONI, Catherine (1980 / 2002), L'énonciation de la subjectivité dans le langage, Armand Colin, Paris.
    6. Le Petit Robert, Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française, 2000, Dictionnaires Le Robert, Paris.
    7. MILNER, Jean-Claude (1982), Ordres et raisons de langue, Seuil, Paris.
    8. MOESCHLER, Jacques - REBOUL, Anne (1994), Dictionnaire encyclopédique de pragmatique, Seuil, Paris.
    9. TODOROV, Tzvetan (1970), Freud sur l'énonciation, in Langage, no. 17., p. 36-45. Go to original source...
    10. CENDRARS, Blaise (1998), Les Confessions de Dan Yack, Denoel, Paris.
    11. YOURCENAR, Marguerite (1968), L'oeuvre au noir, Gallimard, Paris.

    This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original publication is properly cited. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.


    Return to the content