La langue pense-t-elle pour nous ?

Résumé 0

Does language think for us? We think with and through words, but no one can warrant their meaning. This is the paradox of semantics. A way out of this deadlock is the notion of discourse, which stresses the constraints on syntagmatic ties between words, not depending on language rules but on the speaker’s ideological positions. Yet, many linguistic trends disregard this notion of discourse and insist, on the contrary, on the restricting and compulsory frame which is imposed on the choice of our words by the very system of the language that we speak. Orwellian linguistics is a well known example, which claims that some masters of words can change our thoughts by changing the meaning of our words. Political correctness is another example. But a less known linguistic trend is the Moscow semantic school, a well established neo-humboldtian group of linguists, which states that the form of our words is the content of our thoughts. Neo-humboldtian linguistics mistakes language for discourse. The consequences of this position are explored in this paper.