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WHAT IS ENUNCIATION?

Enunciation, namely “who speaks?”, constitutes one of the fundamentals of literary

writing. Three major linguists have established principles that still hold sway today, and
help us structure our perception of any linguistic act, of which the literary text is of course a
category.

The famous Saussure

https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/ferdinand-de-saussure-8121.php

1) Ferdinand de Saussure differentiated langue from parole: any parole (coherent

utterance) actualises the langue by means of various operations that linguistic is out to
identify and analyse. He and his followers further segment utterances into elements
that may be classified along two parameters, or rather relations: syntagmatic and
paradigmatic. The syntagmatic relationship of parole to langue is one that has to with
substitutability: instead of writing “I am studying stylistics”, one may write “He is
watching a film”: each and every component of the sentence has been replaced, the
meaning completely altered, but the “deeper structure” is left intact. This structure is
called a “paradigm”, and the relation between the actual components is syntagmatic.
However, the relation between sets (types) of (virtual) components that may be
substituted one for another in a specific context is called “paradigmatic”.

2) Emile Benveniste, on the other hand, distinguishes between story (or narrative –
énonciation historique) and discourse (énonciation de discours). Discourse is
characterised by the linguistic signs of the enunciator’s presence (verbal tenses such as
the present, present perfect or future, modes other than assertive, subjectivity, spatio-
temporal deixis or shifters), whereas story (récit) is characterised by the absence of

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such signs, the use of the third person, the use of the past essentially, the absence of
spatio-temporal deixis or shifters, the assertive mode, and as little subjectivity as
possible). For him an utterance (énoncé) is a product, and enunciation is an act
performed by the speaker.

3) Noam Chomsky, finally, makes a distinction between competence (the implicit

knowledge of speakers of a language), and performance (the actual utterance of
sentences).

So we see that the three theories are closely related and probably indebted to each other
for following on with the distinction made by Saussure.

The study of enunciation is essentially textual and consists in tracking down the
traces or signs of the process of enunciation within the utterance (l’énoncé, that
which is enunciated): deixis (shifters: grammatical elements that can only be
interpreted in relation with the situational context, such as pronouns etc),
actualization (the operation through which semantic features may be identified from
the context) through which the speaker (“énonciateur”) leaves his trace in the
message, which thus receives the imprint of his subjectivity.

Enunciation is thus characterised by a sort of triad that is correlative to any written text or
speech act (see below):

SUBJECT (1)

HERE (2) NOW (3)

(1) Is the speaking “I”.

(2) Is a deictic reference (representation of space)
(3) Is a deictic reference (representation of time)

I, HERE and NOW may also be called “shifters” (translation of the French “embrayeur”,
used by the semiotician A. J. Greimas, and also used by Roman Jakobson, the Russian
linguist) because they enable the speaker/speaking subject to relate to his subjecthood, to
“shift in”, to reappear as subject in the course of the utterance. If the subject leaves this
plane of enunciation to engage in a more “objective” or distanced discourse, then one
speaks of “shifting out” (using for instance deictics – also called shifters – such as “he”,
or “then”, or “there”).

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Personal shifters are important: “I” designates the speaker (also: enunciator,
addressor); “you” (or “thou”) the one who is being spoken to, (the addressee, the co-
enunciator, the hearer), “we” the speakers or the speaker and the hearer, “you” (plural)
several hearers or persons spoken about. “He”, “she”, “they” point out the persons that
are spoken about, and as such, they have a referent that does not change when there is a
change of speaker; so they are not shifters.
Also important are verbal tenses, syntactical modes, modalization, characterization in
enabling the reader to identify a literary utterance (énoncé) and differentiate discourse
from narrative.
We have mentioned the adjective “deictic” (see p. 20-21). The notion of “deixis”
refers to the way in which a text encodes spatial and temporal relations between
objects, characters etc (see next section). Linguists often distinguish five types of deixis:
1) Place deixis
2) Time deixis
3) Person deixis
4) Social deixis
5) Empathetic deixis.

Deixis is important in a narrative because it induces the reader to leave his own
phenomenological universe to embrace that of the narrator, and within it, the sub-
worlds of the various characters. So the extent to which the reader manages indeed
to enter these worlds is a function of the deictic markers and their efficiency.

We may sum up things by suggesting that the meaning of a piece of writing, a text, is
not enacted until it is actively employed in a context of use. In other words this enactment,
or activation process through connection to a given context is what we may call discourse.
Therefore discourse, or language in action, may be said to offer two sites of meanings,
located within:

a) Its formal properties (lexicon, sounds, grammar etc).

b) The referent and signifieds to which these formal properties relate.

These two interacting sites of meaning justify two different fields of study:
a) semantics, which examines the formal meanings within the text;

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b) pragmatics, which examines the meaning of language in discourse, namely when used
within a specific context and designed to achieve certain aims.
The two approaches are of course complementary and pertain to the textual or stylistic
study of a given piece of literary writing.

Speech acts
This is a linguistic theory that was developed by two philosophers, John
Austin (How to Do Things with Words, 1962) and, after him, John Searle Speech
Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, 1969). It consists in ascribing to
language as used in discourse a powerful practical value involved with truth (or
truthfulness): indeed any linguistic utterance points to a referent about which
something is said (“predicated”); further, it often results in producing something real:
the truth of a statement, for example (“she will come on Tuesday”). And sometimes it
goes one step further in altering reality, as in the case of a promise, a threat, a query
etc. In other words, the utterance is said to have “performed” something, which Searle
calls an “illocutionary act” (“I beseech you to come on Tuesday”). Of course, various
extra-linguistic conditions must be met for the sentence to be performed successfully,
namely to have an effect either on the phenomenological or on the psychological
reality shared by the addressor and by the addressee. A further step still in the
performativity of speech acts, namely having the effect of bringing about a change in
the addressee’s awareness, understanding, or even simply bringing about an action
and all its attendant consequences, is called “perlocutionary”. Thus a perlocutionary
act may have momentous and irreversible effects, such as a judge’s ruling or sentence:
“the jury has declared you guilty”. This is a speech act par excellence, and one, to
boot, whose effect on the listener may be regarded as radical: he or she becomes aware
of his or her being now officially guilty and thus liable to conviction: in other words, a
change has been effected (perlocutionary dimension).

It is to be noted that some literary theoreticians have built upon the speech act theory
as a template that could and indeed should be applied to literary discourse. For
instance Mary Louise Pratt wrote a book in the late 1970s entitled Toward a Speech
Act Theory of Literary Discourse, in which she analyses what she called the “literary
speech situation” as a two-way communicative dynamic between a literary “speaker”

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and a “literary audience”. She substitutes the notion of “audienceship” for that of
“readership”, arguing that whilst the literary audience cannot verbally participate in
the exchange, it can judge the contents of the literary narrative, and that this judging
stance implicitly influences the “literary speaker”. Therefore she defines a “rhetoric of
audienceship”, which, in her system, supersedes the more “classical” rhetoric of
fiction. This, however, is a vision that seems to me to apply to narrative fiction (novel
and short story), or literary autobiography, but much less to poetry, unless it be
narrative poetry. Indeed the function of non-narrative poetry is not one of direct
reference to the phenomenological world, but one of indirect representation of a
particular perception of this world (the poet’s). In this way this poetic shaping of
experience is not socializing –and thus not so easily audience-targeted as narrative
prose--, but on the contrary individualizing, and from then on, a call to respond
individually to someone else’s emotional (or mental, or aesthetic etc) experience by
becoming aware of one’s own.

Here is Professor Jacobsen’s synthesis (https://www.wtamu.edu/~mjacobsen/SpActCats.htm)

- “Constative” utterances: declarations characterized by truthfulness or falseness.

- “Performative” utterances: declarations that do things.

And his further explanatory chart (to tabulate performative categories):

Category Action Example

Representatives Tell how things are Concluding
Directives Encourage action Requesting
Commissives Commit speaker to action Promising
Expressives Express psychological state Thanking
Declarations Change the state of affairs Christening

Three conditions are called for so that these categories may actually function:

1) The addressee must understand and adhere to the utterance.

2) The speaker must be sincere in delivering his/her utterance.
3) The speaker is implicitly in a position to do what he or she utters – and the addressee
is aware of it (and fully expects) it.

These conditions are sometimes called “felicity conditions”.

(Also see: http://www.rdillman.com/HFCL/TUTOR/Relation/relate2.html for a further

development.)