من سوسّور إلى فلسفة اللغة، لأوزفالد ديكرو

Abstract

What is the location of Searle’s idiomatic phrase "speech act" within the Saussurean distinction between tongue and speech? This is an important question that Ducrot seeks to answer in the introduction to the French translation of Searle’s Speech Act (1969). While the language in the Saussurean conception represents a whole that is devoid of the materialistic linguistic dimension, speech represents the various biological, social, and psychological linguistic manifestations, for it is about establishing a special subject for linguistics. He regarded the Saussurean interpretation as an unprecedented contribution that drew the precise boundaries of the scientific study of language. Therefore, the origin of the problem that Ducrot raised in this introduction was that while the Saussurean tradition places "speech" outside the social sphere of the tongue, attributing to it an individual character, nothing in speech explains its separation from the social contexts that frame its borders with a number of constraints whose value and degree are no less than the social coercion that characterizes the phenomenon of the tongue. One of these arguments is that the speaker engages in the sincerity of what he says. He ‘commits’ to a promise he makes, and one of them is that the listener obeys an order issued by the speaker in a mutual manner that makes the verbal act a system of using rules for the language that puts the independence of the tongue in the Saussurean concept. In this article, the reader will find to what extent Searle’s theory of speech acts is related to the Saussurean perspective of speech.