Comment (se) représenter un texte littéraire?

La pragmatique et la linguistique textuelle fournissent un certain nombre de concepts utiles à l'analyse des discours littéraires et non littéraires. Mais comment définir la spécificité littéraire? Cet article présente d'abord les fondements linguistiques de la « fictionalité » et de la « littérarité » et introduit ensuite la notion de « représentativité », qui permet de supposer que l'interprétation d'un texte littéraire active chez le lecteur un type particulier de représentations mentales. Cette hypothèse, plus cognitive que linguistique, est étayée par une modeste expérience d'interprétation de texte.Pragmatics and text linguistics afford several notions useful for the study of literary as well as of non-literary texts. But how do we define the specifically literary? This article first discusses the linguistic bases of "fictionality" and "literarity"; it then introduces the notion of "representativity", suggesting that the interpretation of literary texts drives a special type of mental representations into play. This cognitive rather than linguistic claim is supported by a small experiment in text interpretation

La cohérence textuelle argumentative : illocution, intention et engagement de consistance

Ayant constaté qu’il existe un principe d’interprétation textuelle, fondé sur la valeur argumentative de certaines expressions linguistiques, nous fournissons ici une explication pragmatique à ce phénomène. Nous référant entre autres à Austin, Searle, Strawson, Grice et Kuroda, nous montrons que l’emploi dans un énoncé de marqueurs argumentatifs constitue un acte illocutoire spécifique, un « acte d’argumenter », qui (étant la manifestation d’une intention argumentative) engage l’énonciateur à quatre types de consistance en ce qui concerne la continuation de son texte : les consistances dites épistémique, polyphonique, topique et orientative.It has been shown empirically that a certain type of text coherence is established by means of the argumentative value of certain linguistic expressions. In this paper, I give an explanation of this fact in pragmatic terms, showing that the use of argumentative expressions constitutes for the enunciator a specific illocutionary act, an "argumentative act". I propose a distinction between four types of consistency, which are activated by the argumentative act, namely an epistemic, a polyphonic, a topical and an orientative type of consistency

Humour socialisation. Why the Danes are not as funny as they think they are

The article presents the main idea from my recently published book on Danes’ use of humour in professional relations with non-Danes. The key notion is humour socialisation. This notion contributes to describing the dynamic role played by language and society in moulding a person’s humour. It also brings the aspect of personal humour to the level of “national humour”, which again helps to explain why people from different countries who speak different languages do not always share the same kind of humour

A linguistic contribution to the comparative study of national ways of thinking and communicating

Recently, it was observed that the French President Nicolas Sarkozy ‘uses a lot of verbs’ (Calvet & Véronis 2008), what contributes to the impression he makes of being a “turbopresident”. At the same time, the (then) Minister of State in Denmark, Anders Fogh-Rasmussen, was characterised as being arrogant because of his top-down, formal, and impersonal way of communicating. If these two styles of communication stuck out as being noticeable in their French and Danish political framework respectively, it is because they were seen against the backdrop of social norms spelling out other rules for communicating in the two societies; a French norm, for presidents at least, stipulating not to use a lot of verbs, and a Danish norm telling not to be formal and impersonal

40 ans de linguistique textuelle et didactisation du français langue étrangère

L’article retrace l’histoire des 40 ans de la linguistique textuelle telle qu’elle s’est formée, dans une perspective didactique continue du français langue étrangère, dans le contexte scandinave. Différents modèles, structuraux et procéduraux, seront présentés pour aboutir à un modèle visant plus particulièrement l’apprentissage de la lecture de textes académiques en français. En même temps, on montrera comment l’analyse et la compréhension de textes ne s’arrêtent pas au linguistique et au textuel ; bien au contraire, la linguistique textuelle enchainera naturellement sur le cognitif et sur le culturel. En maintenant ces extensions dans une perspective contrastive, le cas échéant entre langues germaniques et romanes, entre manières de « faire texte » et de penser au Danemark et en France, la linguistique textuelle témoigne de sa capacité à faire face aux nouvelles exigences dans le domaine de la didactique des langues étrangères, tout en éclairant la relation entre langue, texte et société.The article presents different models from the 40 years history of Scandinavian text linguistics and its didactic application for teaching French as a foreign language, ending with combining the structural and the procedural approach in a model for reading academic texts in French. It is shown how text linguistics can be naturally extended to also comprise cognitive and cultural aspects; this is illustrated by the systematic comparison of Danish and French languages, belonging to Germanic and Romance languages respectively, a linguistic comparison which shows interesting differences also in the way Danes and French think and make texts. On a more general level, the article points to interesting relations between language, text, cognition, culture and society

Nordic Humour

Starting from my former empirical studies but supplemented with fresh fictional “data” from Lars von Trier’s latest TV series Riget Exodus (2022), I first describe how Danes use humour in very characteristic ways, also in cross-cultural professional settings. Next, I explain not only Danish humour but all national humour with the notion of humour socialisation, which integrates and combines national humour with the national language on the one hand, and the specific national process of civilisation on the other hand. Moving to Nordic humour, I focus on how Danes and Swedes perceive each other’s humour, and then explain divergences between the humour of these two Nordic countries. These differences, I conclude, are the result mainly of differences in their respective civilising processes, while I am waiting and hoping for deeper comparative linguistic studies of the use of ‘humour warning signals in Danish and Swedish

Sprog og disembodiment. Simultantolkning af humor i Europaparlamentet.

When people speak their mother tongue, they do it from a fundamental experience of embodiment. This article treats the topic of disembodiment of language, i.e., the experience of body and language being separated in communication, what necessarily occurs when the communication partners speak different and foreign languages. For the study of linguistic disembodiment I shall use the case of simultaneous interpretation of humour in the European Parliament (EP), which poses problems of disembodiment on several levels; verbal humour in itself being an embodied type of linguistic expression will supposedly be threatened not only by the transfer between languages, but also by the very technicalities of the simultaneous interpretation process. The study is based on empirical data, comprising interviews with Danish interpreters and with their “customers”, Danish members of the EP (MEPs), as well as about ten hours of observations from the interpreters’ booth. The findings show a disagreement between interpreters and MEPs as to the perceived successfulness of interpreting humour and having it interpreted; a discrepancy, which can be led back to the experience of disembodiment, and which I shall explain within a sociological framework, the so-called Associative-Network Theory (ANT). In fact, I shall consider the interpreters’ booth, used here as a metonym for all the technical devices involved in the interpretation process, as a negative social mediator in social interaction, putting obstacles in the way of a successful translation of humour; humour which, in contrast, I consider a positive social mediator because of its potential for furthering cooperation between communication partners across languages, cultures and political observation

Utro anaforer i fransk og dansk. Anvendelse og fortolkning, forklaring og oversættelse

Når man møder en nominalfrase, en NP, der er ny i en tekst, er der store chancer for at denne NP enten opretter en ny eller opretholder en tidligere diskursreferent i teksten. Om diskursreferenten er ny eller allerede kendt er altafgørende for hvordan den mentale model (Garnham 2001) som læsning og afkodning af teksten gerne skulle give anledning til, ser ud