Sémantique Et/Ou Roman Feuilleton? Sur Un Style D'Analyse Sémantique Qui Semble à La Mode Aujourd'Hui

Semantics and/or Serial About a Style in Semantic Analysis that Seems to be Fashionable Nowadays.In a chapter of his book Les Mots du Discours, O. Ducrot propounds an analysis of the French adverb décidément that seems to us typical of semantics and pragmatics in France nowadays. The detailed discussion of this analysis brings out the difficulties that originate from the author's method; he wants to reconstruct, with comments of a literary and psychological kind, "movements of thought" which is impossible to bear out or invalidate. And these reconstructions come from a conception of linguistics which is based on questionable principles: isomorphism of the signifier and the signified, epistemological irresponsibility, failure to recognize the methods appropriate to linguistics, diachronic and synchronic invariability. In conclusion, there is no magic formula that is likely to explain the meaning of a word, but only differing uses we must try to arrange in homogeneous classes.