Les mots du discours By Oswald Ducrot et al. (review)

238 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 1 (1981) ... que], comparative, the que ... que 'wh-ever' concessive, and indirect questions) than in others (temporal, final, causal, consecutive, conditional , the other concessive, and object clauses). The relative length parameter is obvious. But the strength/weakness parameter, referred to as 'poids sémantique'—distinct from problems of topic and/or focus, and deriving from Firbas' fuzzy concept of 'communicative dynamism'— is much more debatable. It is supposed to allow for a rather ad-hoc classification of verbs into two groups. 'Weak' verbs, favoring inversion, refer to identification (A qu-est S), localization (A où est S), direction (A où va S, A d'où vient S), 'aspiration' (A que veut S), production (A que fait S), and perception/utterance (A que voit, que dit, dont parle S). 'Strong' verbs, favoring a progressive order, refer to feeling (A que S adore) and change (A que S change). The drawbacks to such a classification are multiple: W admits that a verb like désirer refers to both aspiration and feeling. Moreover, in On voit parfaitement où M. Wolinski déraille 'The point where M. W. goes off the track is perfectly clear' (145), the fact that dérailler implies change has nothing to do with an explanation for the impossibility of a reverse order. The inverted order is perfectly possible in On voit parfaitement où {le train a déraillé, a déraillé le train} . Thus W's lexical argument fails: the metaphorical meaning of dérailler, and the value judgment that the first sentence implies, make the progressive order necessary. This is obviously a problem of focus. One may reproach this work for many other biases: neglecting syntax as dealing with obvious phenomena (19), and spoken language as being the realm ofconjectures (21). But the main defect ofW's book is in the choice ofthe corpus, the stylistic tendencies ofwhich are never under control, and in the presentation itself. The figures are difficult to read; the conclusions are more frequently non-existent or forced. Although the material provided by such a study is irreplaceable, it would gain much by recourse to recent works on topic and word order, as well as sociolinguistics. [Jacques M. Julien, University of Texas, Austin.] Les mots du discours. By Oswald Ducrot et al. Paris: Minuit, 1980. Pp. 241. F 49.00. 'Mots du discours' or 'argumentative morphemes ' are here discussed in a collaboration between Ducrot and his students at the Hautes Études, written in the same vein as La preuve et le dire (1973). The first article is on Je trouve que (published in 1975); the others are on four connectors, mais 'but', décidément (no exact homolog in English), eh bien 'well', and d'ailleurs 'besides'. The last two articles are here published for the first time. These studies are preceded by a long introduction by Ducrot, 'Analyse de textes et linguistique de renonciation', defining the common perspective for analysis. The morphemes are not analysed as syntactic connectors, but as pragmatic connectors; however, D does not seem to like the word 'pragmatic', preferring to use 'semantic'. He divides meaning into 'signification ' (on the level of the sentence, conceived as a type of utterance) and 'sens' (on the level of particular tokens of sentences, called 'énoncés'). Instead of considering the meaning of a sentence as a nucleus resulting from the subtraction of all the particular modes of use, D views it as 'a set of instructions' about a strategy for decoding actual uses (15); the latter are to be thoroughly scrutinized, even for a mere linguistic analysis of such words. This semantics has very little to do with symbolic logic (D uses only a few symbols for propositions ) or with psychology. First, the speech acts accomplished through these connectors are analysed as means of rhetorical interaction, rather than related to a speaking 'ego'. Second, D clearly distinguishes the argumentative structure of the sentence (meaning as 'presented by' the speaker) from the various strategies made possible by discourse. He rejects the latter, just as he rejected the 'rhetorical component' in his previous books. This is his analysis ofdécidément (132): ' 1 . The utterance of décidément! may...