Chapter 3. Reflections on the foundations of narrative theory, from a linguistic point of view

Abstract

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].

Parameters of Narrative Perspectivization: The Narrator

“…Likewise, Hamburger ([1957] 1968) has argued that (third person) narrative fiction is not a form of a "statement about reality" ("Wirklichkeitsaussage") and therefore categorically different from discourse. A comparable position is also found in Kuroda ([1973Kuroda ([ , 1974Kuroda ([ , 1979 2014) who has argued that sentences of narration do not serve a communicative, but rather an objective function of language that cannot be accounted for in any framework of speech act theory. Similarly, Benveniste (1974: 269) has defined narration as a sequence of events that speak for themselves without any traces of an act of narrative mediacy.…”

“…This has grammatical consequences in languages such as Japanese, where there is a grammatical opposition between information that belongs to the territory of the speaker and information that does not. Kuroda ([1973Kuroda ([ ], [1974Kuroda ([ ], [1979 2014), for example, has shown that some grammatical forms are used within narration only, so that "one would be led to conclude that the omniscient narrator uses a special grammar of his own" (Kuroda, [1979] 2014: 81).…”