The founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure inaugurated semiology, structuralism, and deconstruction and made possible the work of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, thus enabling the development of French feminism, gender studies, New Historicism, and postcolonialism. Based on Saussure's lectures, _Course in General Linguistics_ (1916) traces the rise and fall of the historical linguistics in which Saussure was trained, the synchronic or structural linguistics with which he replaced it, and the new look (...) of diachronic linguistics that followed this change. Most important, Saussure presents the principles of a new linguistic science that includes the invention of semiology, or the theory of the "signifier," the "signified," and the "sign" that they combine to produce. This is the first critical edition of _Course in General Linguistics_ to appear in English and restores Wade Baskin's original translation of 1959, in which the terms "signifier" and "signified" are introduced into English in this precise way. Baskin renders Saussure clearly and accessibly, allowing readers to experience his shift of the theory of reference from mimesis to performance and his expansion of poetics to include all media, including the life sciences and environmentalism. An introduction situates Saussure within the history of ideas and describes the history of scholarship that made _Course in General Linguistics_ legendary. New endnotes enlarge Saussure's contexts to include literary criticism, cultural studies, and philosophy. (shrink)

The term discourse is generally used either as a technical equivalent for 'verbal communication' or as referring to a particular scientific notion, where discourses are spans of texts or of utterances obeying specific principles of organisation. The aim of this paper is to suggest that an account of discourse is possible, in both cases, only through a theory of utterance-meaning construction. If discourse stands for verbal communication, then it can be explained only with regard to speaker's intended meaning. If discourse (...) stands for organised spans of texts or utterances, then they must be meaningful spans of texts or meaningful utterances. Yet it is argued that a pragmatic explanation of meaning provides all the elements that discourse analysis describes. In the end, the paper claims that a theory of context combined with a theory on the semantic-pragmatic interface should prove sufficient to explain discourse, in whichever sense, along the idea that discourse should be viewed as a process, not as a whole, following the claims of a number of scholars in the field. A possible way to tackle this process is proposed in terms of procedures through the approach of procedural pragmatics. (shrink)

This paper aims at showing how pragmatics, today a discipline developing in close connection with cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, provides new ways to envisage Discourse Analysis. In this article, we first discuss the relationship between pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, focusing on the links between the process of utterance understanding, which is in the scope of pragmatic theories, and consenting to beliefs, which is in the scope of Discourse Analysis. Next, we introduce an extended notion of presuppositions which we name (...) discursive presuppositions, which are unexpressed contents but nonetheless propositions that need to be incorporated in the background and thus consented to in order to provide not meaning proper but relevance to the utterance. Last section is dedicated to the examination of two examples where discursive presuppositions are exploited in persuasiveness. (shrink)

This article echoes concerns recently formulated regarding CDA’s lack of attention to cognitive science. From a cognitive pragmatic viewpoint, I argue that discourse analysis should undergo an epistemological change in order to seriously take into account what cognitive approaches have to offer, in particular as regards the automatic processing of utterances and the subsequent non-conscious evaluation of contents vis-a-vis previously held beliefs. I regard the epistemological tension in CDA as stemming from a wider tension of the same sort affecting social (...) science in general. Considering discourse as a process of interpretation and evaluation, I address briefly the influence of evidentiality as a pragmatic category in persuasive discourse and conclude that the uptake of new beliefs on the basis of discourse is oriented towards the maximization of relevance in the sense of Sperber and Wilson. (shrink)

This article addresses, experimentally, the question of how presuppositions are cognitively processed and retrieved in discourse. In the proposed research, we have administered tweets produced by Italian politicians to native speakers so as to assess how easily they could retrieve the presupposed content of two presupposition triggers (definite descriptions and change of state verbs), as opposed to their explicit paraphrase, by answering verification questions. Results showed that content presupposed by change of state verbs was likely to receive more attention than (...) content conveyed by definite descriptions; this could possibly be due to the greater effort involved in mentally representing the event taken for granted by the predicates. Definite descriptions, on the contrary, seem to instruct to a shallower processing modality, which means that their content is processed less attentively or in a ‘good-enough’ way. (shrink)

In recent years, the healthcare field welcomed an emerging field of practices captured under the umbrella term ‘Big Data’. This term is surrounded with positive rhetoric and promises about the ability to analyse real-world data quickly and comprehensively. Such rhetoric is highly consequential in shaping debates on Big Data. While the fields of Science and Technology Studies and Critical Data Studies have been instrumental in elaborating the neglected and problematic dimensions of Big Data, it remains an open question how and (...) to what extent such insights become embedded in other fields. In this paper, we analyse the epistemological claims that accompany Big Data in the healthcare domain. We systematically searched scientific literature and selected 206 editorials as these reflect on developments in the domain. Through an interpretive analysis, we construct five ideal-typical discourses that all frame Big Data in specific ways. Three of the discourses frame Big Data in positive terms and disseminate a compelling rhetoric. Metaphors of ‘capturing’, ‘illuminating’ and ‘harnessing’ data presume that Big Data are benign and leading to valid knowledge. The scientist and critical-interpretive discourses question the objectivity and effectivity claims of Big Data. Metaphors of ‘selecting’ and ‘constructing’ data illustrate another political message, framing Big Data as limited. We conclude that work in the critical-interpretive discourse has not broadly infiltrated the medical domain. Ways to better integrate aspects of the discourse in the healthcare domain are urgently needed. (shrink)

Pour présenter la thérapie familiale psychanalytique, l’auteure en évoque la genèse en France, en explicite les visées, puis s’attache à en décrire le processus. En appui sur le cas clinique d’une famille suivie, sont mis en évidence les points délicats depuis la demande de la famille jusqu’à l’arrêt de la thérapie. La technique est décrite ainsi que les différentes étapes qui tentent d’amener chacun à gagner en individuation. L’auteure insiste sur les prérequis nécessaires de la formation dispensée aux thérapeutes qui (...) s’engagent dans cette pratique. (shrink)

La sexualité, force vitale essentielle, anime l’humain en tant qu’individu et membre d’un groupe. Depuis les soins primaires indispensables à l’éveil de la sensualité et à la construction de l’identité sexuée chez le jeune enfant jusqu’au temps des pratiques sexuelles possibles de l’adolescent, l’article scande les moments de transformation portée par les liens intersubjectifs indispensables de cette évolution, de la sexualité infantile à la sexualité génitale.

Après une évocation des travaux de quelques cliniciens qui se servent du génogramme comme médiation, l’article s’attache à présenter cet outil dans le cadre de la formation des thérapeutes familiaux de l’association psyfa (Psychanalyse et Famille). Sont envisagés en particulier sa finalité et les modalités de son utilisation. Le but de cet exercice en groupe est de permettre à chacun de réfléchir à la place qu’il occupe dans sa famille actuelle, de repérer les legs des générations précédentes, de s’intéresser aux (...) phénomènes de répétition qui impactent les différents membres du groupe familial ainsi que les relations traduites en termes d’alliances. Les particularités de la situation groupale sont aussi évoquées, comme les nécessités du cadre contenant, les résonances induites chez les participants et la créativité du goupe qui s’exprime. Les témoignages de thérapeutes en formation jalonnent cet écrit et illustrent les propos. (shrink)

Recent buzzes around big data, data science and artificial intelligence portray a data-driven future for healthcare. As a response, Europe's key players have stimulated the use of big data technologies to make healthcare more efficient and effective. Critical Data Studies and Science and Technology Studies have developed many concepts to reflect on such overly positive narratives and conduct critical policy evaluations. In this study, we argue that there is also much to be learned from studying how professionals in the healthcare (...) field affectively engage with this strong European narrative in concrete big data projects. We followed twelve hospital-based big data pilots in eight European countries and interviewed 145 professionals between 2018 and 2020. In this study, we introduce the metaphor of dreams to describe how professionals link the big data promises to their own frustrations, ideas, values and experiences with healthcare. Our research answers the question: how do professionals in concrete data-driven initiatives affectively engage with European Union's data hopes in their ‘dreams’ – and with what consequences? We describe the dreams of being seen, of timeliness, of connectedness and of being in control. Each of these dreams emphasizes certain aspects of the grand narrative of big data in Europe, makes particular assumptions and has different consequences. We argue that including attention to these dreams in our work could help shine an additional critical light on the big data developments and stimulate the development of responsible data-driven healthcare. (shrink)

This paper proposes a pragmatic solution to utterances where the various indicators of time and aspect (tenses, lexical-conceptual features of Aktionsart, adverb phrases and contextual cues) seem to have divergent temporal reference and aspectual properties. This type of cases is usually treated at the semantic level as ‘mismatches’ and resolved compositionally through logical operations of ‘aspectual coercion’. We suggest on the contrary that no such effect of ‘mismatch resolution’ or ‘coercion’ is at work: these utterances are worked out inferentially according (...) to the various pieces of evidence they provide for their relevance, in line of Deirdre Wilson’s and Dan Sperber’s (1995) relevance theory. Such utterances give rise to cognitive effects that are hardly attainable by apparently more literal formulations, while being cost-effective. Our analysis follows the work ofEscandell-Vidal and Leonetti (2011)about the rigidity and thus prevalence of computational linguistic expressions, called ‘procedural expressions’ byBlakemore (1987)withinSperber and Wilson’s (1995[1986])framework, relevance theory. (shrink)

Experts provide an alternative source of information to classical data collection methods such as surveys. They can provide additional insight into problems, supplement existing data, or provide insights when classical data collection is troublesome. In this paper, we explore the (dis)similarities between expert judgments and data collected by traditional data collection methods regarding the development of posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSSs) in children with burn injuries. By means of an elicitation procedure, the experts’ domain expertise is formalized and represented in the (...) form of probability distributions. The method is used to obtain beliefs from 14 experts, including nurses and psychologists. Those beliefs are contrasted with questionnaire data collected on the same issue. The individual and aggregated expert judgments are contrasted with the questionnaire data by means of Kullback–Leibler divergences. The aggregated judgments of the group that mainly includes psychologists resemble the questionnaire data more than almost all of the individual expert judgments. (shrink)

Linguists and philosophers examine the representation of temporal reference; the interaction of the temporal information from tense, aspect, modality, and context; and the representation of the temporal relations between facts, events, states, propositions, and utterances. They link this to current research in psychology and anthropology.

RésuméFerdinand de Saussure postule une science générale des signes qu’il ap-pelle sémiologie. La langue n’en serait qu’un cas particulier caractériée par l’arbitrariété totale de ses unités. Cette caractéristique reviendrait aussi à l’écriture qui n’est cependant pas un systéme sémiologique primaire, mais un système secondaire dont la fonction est de représenter un système pri-maire. Il existe en outre des systèmes tertiaires comme, par example, l’alphabet Morse, l’écriture Braille, les systèmes de chiffrage, etc. Les modes de manifestation peuvent être soit acoustique (...) soit visuel. Tandis que la langue et l’écriture sont totalement arbitraires, les autres systèmes sémiologiques peuvent être motivés jusqu’à un certain de-gré. À côté des sémiologies utilitaires il existe aussi des sémiologies esthé-tiques comme, par example, les légendes. La sémiologie elle-même n’est qu’un cas particulier de la sémiotique qui tient aussi compte des signes naturels. Les frontières entre langue, sémiologie et et sémiotique sont souvent flottantes et imprécises. (shrink)

The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) revolutionized the study of language, signs, and discourse in the twentieth century. He successfully reconstructed the proto-Indo-European vowel system, advanced a conception of language as a system of arbitrary signs made meaningful through kinetic interrelationships, and developed a theory of the anagram so profound it gave rise to poststructural literary criticism. The roots of these disparate, even contradictory achievements lie in the thought of Early German Romanticism, which Saussure consulted for its (...) insight into the nature of meaning and discourse. Conducting the first comprehensive analysis of Saussure's intellectual heritage, Boris Gasparov links Sassurean notions of cognition, language, and history to early Romantic theories of cognition and the transmission of cultural memory. In particular, several fundamental categories of Saussure's philosophy of language, such as the differential nature of language, the mutability and immutability of semiotic values, and the duality of the signifier and the signified, are rooted in early Romantic theories of "progressive" cognition and child cognitive development. Consulting a wealth of sources only recently made available, Gasparov casts the seeming contradictions and paradoxes of Saussure's work as a genuine tension between the desire to bring linguistics and semiotics in line with modernist epistemology on the one hand, and Jena Romantics' awareness of language's dynamism and its transcendence of the boundaries of categorical reasoning on the other. Advancing a radical new understanding of Saussure, Gasparov reveals aspects of the intellectual's work previously overlooked by both his followers and his postmodern critics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article aims to reflect upon the presence of the language acquisition theme in the works of Ferdinand de Saussure, Mikhail Bakhtin and Émile Benveniste, in order to, based on such reflection, describe how this presence gave rise to work perspectives around the theme in research panorama in Brazil. Three major perspectives for studying language acquisition in the country are highlighted: based on Saussurean assumptions, there are the social interactionist studies; in the Bakhtinian perspective, the dialogic-discursive approach; from (...) the Benveniste perspective, the enunciative acquisitional perspective. The reflection presents a summary table with the configuration of each perspective derived from its affiliation with the authors in question. (shrink)