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1According to a widely spread view, language is a phenomenon of communication. An occurrence of a sentence in speech (parole²) represents a unit message to be communicated by the addresser to the addressee by means of this code. This message is assumed to correspond to the content of a mental act of judging, simple or modified (wishing, etc.). A theory of linguistic performance³ which assumes that linguistic performance is communication will be called a communicational theory of linguistic performance.Recently, a theory of linguistic competence (or of grammar) has been proposed which incorporates a communicational theory of linguistic performance. What I have in mind is the performative analysis proposed by J. R. Ross .⁴ According to the performative analysis, each sentence has an underlying representation of a form like I assert to you that S, where I and you may be interpreted as the addresser and addressee. 2Narration is a type of linguistic performance; narrative theory must then be a part of a theory of linguistic performance. It is no surprise that modern theories of narration are influenced by the communicational theory of linguistic performance. Barthes states:[…] le récit, comme objet, est l'enjeu d'une communication: il y a un donateur du récit, il y a un destinataire du récit. On le sait, dans la communication linguistique, je et tu sont

It is a widely held view that language (langage) is a phenomenon of communication. A specific language as a system of knowledge (langue) would then be a system of code; each sentence would be a code for a minimum unit of message. An occurrence of a sentence in speech (parole²) would represent a unit message to be communicated by the addressor to the addressee by means of this communication system.A unit message to be represented by a sentence, in this conception of language, is the content of a mental act of judging, wishing, etc. We are not concerned with a systematic taxonomy of the mental acts that underlie such sentence uses in linguistic performance. It suffices for our present purposes to characterize the mental act underlying the use of a sentence as an act of judging or a modification of it in some sense or other. The substantive content of such an act of judging, genuine or modified, is an event, or a state of affairs, real, imagined, wished, etc. For the sake of simplicity of exposition, in what follows I shall in general write as if a sentence used in speech performance in communication is an expression for the content of an act of judging, leaving possible modifications of such acts to be understood implicitly.A theory of language must include both a theory of linguistic performance and a theory of linguistic competence.³ A theory of linguistic performance which assumes that an act of linguistic performance, and in particular the use of a sentence, is an act of communication, will be called a communicational theory of linguistic performance. A theory of language which contains a communicational theory of linguistic performance and which consequently considers a language (a system of knowledge) as a system of code to be used in linguistic performance as communication will be called a communicational theory of language.1 A French version of this paper has been published in Kristeva , Milner , and Ruwet (eds.) 1975. I am grateful to A. Banfield for conversations we have had on the problems of narrative [AN].

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