Le pouvoir du verbe

Simone Delesalle

Claude Désirat

pp. 35-45

in: Les idéologues et les sciences du langage, Histoire Épistémologie Langage 4 (1), 1982.

Abstract

Le pouvoir du verbe (S. Delesalle & Cl. Désirat) This article concerns a crucial point of grammatical theory, Le. the analysis of predicates, showing that the descriptive principles used by the grammarians who are contemporaries of Ideology should be classified less in their support for or their opposition to certain doctrines than in respect of the various fields of human sciences related to linguistic research. Destutt de Tracy continuing philosophical grarnmar, tends toward a kind of functionalism that combines all grammatical and semantic categories -noun, verb, adjective -as so many modalities of the subject's existence. In his research on Semitic languages and civilizations, as well as in his desire for unifying the different kinds of writing, Volney takes up the analyses in Arabic grammar where the verb dominates the nominal categories. The work that originated from these two positions contains severa! aspects that are related to Port-Royal and Humboldt and lead to divergent propositions not only in grammar (particularly on word-order), but also on the origin and function of language.