# Discourse Analysis and Narrative Theory: A French Perspective

John Pier

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John Pier. Discourse Analysis and Narrative Theory: A French Perspective: Chapter 6. John Pier. Contemporary French and Francophone Narratology, Ohio State University Press, pp.110-135, 2020, Theory and Interpretation of Narrative, 978-0-8142-1449-7. hal-03869311

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CHAPTER 6

Discourse Analysis and Narrative Theory

A French Perspective

JOHN PIER

# 1. FROM STRUCTURE TO DISCOURSE

Structural narratology in France can be dated from Claude Lévi-Strauss's "The Structure of Myth," published in 1955, to Gérard Genette's *Nouveau discours du récit*, which appeared in 1983. During that period, the theory and method of narrative analysis evolved considerably (see Pier 2011, 2017). Later, under the effect of developments such as poststructuralism, deconstructionism, and French Theory, narratology seemed to be eclipsed before reemerging in international research during the 1990s in yet other forms. Where "classical" structural narratology was said to be "text-centered," "postclassical" narratologies, nourished by input from the narrative turn, the growth of interdisciplinarity, and the increasing diversity of narrative objects, has proved to be resolutely "context-oriented." In recent years, narrative theorists have tended either to embrace the lines of continuity between the achievements of structural narratology and the new advances or, on the contrary, to call those accomplishments into question in the light of present-day research.

These developments have all been widely documented, debated, and integrated into ongoing scholarship in a broad array of narratological schools. They, however, are not the concern of this chapter, except in an incidental way. The focus will be on narrative theory from the angle of discourse analysis and, more specifically, on how French discourse analysis, since its inception
tion at the end of the 1960s, has introduced a number of insights, concepts, and analytical practices that deserve to be taken into consideration. Relatively unknown outside the French-speaking scholarly community, the various approaches that have arisen out of French discourse analysis can be associated with structuralism, but this is largely to the extent that they have taken a critical distance from structuralist doctrine in ways that cannot be assimilated into the poststructuralist framework familiar to narrative theorists working in the international mainstream context. This is due in no small measure to the fact that French discourse analysis, particularly in its early stages, was focused on a corpus drawn from political discourse, not narrative.

Discourse analysis lies at the crossroads of the human and social sciences. For this reason, it has been described as “the analysis of language in use” (Brown and Yule 1983: 1) or as “a non-autonomous theory of language” (Toolan 2002: xxiii) and is sometimes referred to as the “discursive turn.” Moreover, it has acquired various inflections according to whether it is oriented toward history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, or any of a host of other disciplines, including narratology in its literary and other branches. Overall, according to Patrick Charaudeau and Dominique Maingueneau’s *Dictionnaire d’analyse du discours*, four orientations can be distinguished in this field: (1) studies that emphasize discourse within the framework of social interaction; (2) studies that focus on situations of language communication and thus on discourse genres; (3) those that seek to link together the functioning of discourse and the production of knowledge along with ideological positioning; and (4) studies that highlight textual organization or identify marks of enunciation (Charaudeau and Maingueneau 2002: 44). The more specifically French tendencies of discourse analysis are the following:

* relatively restricted corpuses, and more particularly corpuses of a historical interest (this applies particularly to early studies in the field);

* an interest not only in the discursive function of language units but also in their properties as linguistic units;

* the privileged role of theories of enunciation;

* the importance granted to interdiscourse; and

* the modes of inscription of the subject in his or her discourse (Maingueneau 1997 [1991]: 24).

“The object of discourse analysis,” according to Maingueneau in an important essay, is “*neither textual organization considered in and of itself, nor the situation of communication, but the intrication of a mode of enunciation and a determined social place*. Discourse is apprehended here as an activity related
to a genre as a discursive institution: its interest is to not think of places independently of the enunciations they make possible and that make them possible” (1995: 7–8; emphasis added; see 1997 [1991]: 13).<fnref n="1" /> In order to develop the analysis of discourse along these lines, three areas of study are called upon: text linguistics, theories of enunciation, and pragmatics.

As can be seen from the delimitations above, French discourse analysis, because it is geared toward discourses emerging in all social spheres, draws no fast boundary between text and context. In effect, this approach, by its very origins, was context-oriented well before the advent of postclassical narratology, a fact that seems to have escaped the attention of many narrative theorists. This is so even though French discourse analysts began looking more closely at the problems of narrative and literary theory starting in the 1990s.<fnref n="2" /> What distinguishes French discourse analysis in its various forms from structuralism, and from structural narratology, is that the focus is no longer on structure or on the structure of text but on discourse as it occurs in context. This orientation entails a number of significant departures from the concepts, principles, and methods that have typically been associated with structuralism and with structural narratology. The mutations that have occurred under the influence of discourse analysis, and that will be taken more fully into consideration here, are the result of research carried out in the areas of text linguistics, the theory of enunciation, discourse genres, and the scene of enunciation.

Before looking into these topics more closely, it is important to take a brief look at the environment in which French discourse analysis emerged. The 1960s are widely hailed as the age of structuralism, and while the impact of this movement cannot be contested, it must be remembered that during those years the so-called Nouvelle critique (not be confused with the Anglo-American New Criticism) was more widely embraced in French academia than structuralism. The Nouvelle critique originated partly from a rejection of the philological approach to literary history that prevailed in French universities from the end of the nineteenth century and partly from the particular interest of literary and academic circles in the individual style of authors. One important source of this emphasis on style is Marcel Proust's *Contre Sainte-Beuve* (a collection of essays published posthumously in 1954), although Leo Spitzer's *Stilstudien* (1928; French translation 1970) was also influential. This development, which was closely aligned with the aesthetics of Romanticism, contrib-

<footnote n="1">1. All translations from the French are my own.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. For example, Maingueneau's *Pragmatique pour le discours littéraire* (1990) and *Le Contexte de l'oeuvre littéraire* (1993). Already in the mid-1970s some elements of text grammars and enunciative theories began to appear in literary studies. See, for example, Jean-Michel Adam's *Linguistique et discours littéraire* (1976). The same year Maingueneau's *Initiation aux méthodes de l'analyse du discours* appeared.</footnote>
uted to the rise of the Nouvelle critique, culminating with the appearance of two important publications: *Pourquoi la nouvelle critique. Critique et objectivité* (Doubrovsky 1966; English translation 1973) and *Les Chemins actuels de la critique* (Poulet 1966). The tendencies of the Nouvelle critique were diverse (phenomenology, psychocriticism, genetic structuralism, etc.), but all were united in their rejection of traditional literary history. The dominant school in this current of research was thematic criticism (represented in particular by Jean Starobinski and Jean-Pierre Richard), an approach inspired by the Proustian conception of style and heir to the Romantic conception of the artist.

In principle, as argued by Maingueneau, structuralism should have offered an alternative to the positions held by thematic criticism. However, during the 1960s the “immanent” approach of structural analysis, with its emphasis on the work-in-itself, was believed to complement and buttress the focus of thematic criticism on the structures of the artist’s creative consciousness. This parallelism was facilitated by the fact that both structuralism and thematic criticism were rooted in the Romantic understanding of the work as an organic whole. The connection is underscored by Serge Doubrovsky, according to whom, “Unity, wholeness, coherence: I believe that this is the motto common to all the new criticisms or, if you like, their common postulate” (1973 [1966]: 83). At the same time, structuralism, as a linguistic doctrine, was adopted in a piecemeal way by literary scholars, who employed only general concepts such *langue* and *parole*, signifier and signified, paradigmatic versus syntagmatic axes, and so on, often resorting to the categories of traditional grammar while bypassing such developments as transformational grammar, text grammar, text linguistics, and pragmatics. Nevertheless, structuralism did take an essential step by opening the way toward discourse analysis. “By rigorously dissociating literary history and stylistics, context and text, structuralism . . . prepared the conditions for renewal. Unlike most earlier approaches to literary texts, it delved into the nature and modes of organization of texts” (Maingueneau 2004: 26). It is precisely the nature and modes of organization of texts *as discourse* that were then to come into perspective. Discourse analysts took a growing interest in literary texts during the 1990s, but it was not until 2003 that the response to the two publications devoted to the Nouvelle critique appeared: *L'analyse du discours dans les études littéraires* (Amossy and Maingueneau 2003).

## 2. BEYOND THE SENTENCE

The principal methodological concern of the early discourse analysts had to do with language units beyond the sentence, reaching into the domain
of discourse. Two partly complementary but divergent approaches to this problem were available. One, described as "inter-sentential," was initiated by Zellig S. Harris's distributionalism, a method for segmenting texts syntactically into equivalence classes beyond the sentence (Harris 1952). The other, "trans-sentential," is attributed to A. J. Greimas and is based on the logical and semantic rules of isotopy that escape the framework of the sentence (Greimas 1983 [1966]: chap. 6).<fnref n="3" /> To be sure, French narratologists did make efforts toward bridging the sentence/discourse gap that are instructive even in today's research environment. A case in point is Roland Barthes's 1966 article "Introduction à l'analyse structurale des récits," in which the author postulates "a relation of homology between sentence and discourse . . . discourse would be a long 'sentence' (whose units would not necessarily be sentences), just as the sentence, allowing for certain specifications, is a small 'discourse.'" Putting forth "an identity between language and literature," he goes on to state that "structurally, narrative partakes of the sentence, just as every constative sentence is, in a certain way, the sketch of a small narrative" (3-4). On this basis, discourse was to be the subject of a "second linguistics," a linguistics that, a few years later, he would dub a "linguistics of discourse or translinguistics (the term meta-linguistics, although preferable, already being taken in a different sense)" (Barthes 2002 [1970]: 611).<fnref n="4" />

These considerations clearly point in the direction of discourse analysis, but they fall short of a satisfactory framework for such analysis. This is due, in part, to the fact that Barthes's proposal fails to distinguish clearly between sentence (a grammatical construction) and enunciate (énoncé), the result of an act of enunciation (énonciation).<fnref n="5" /> As Barthes rightly observed, a discourse is not a sum of sentences: As was to become clear in subsequent years, it was the task of text linguistics to sort these matters out more carefully. For the text linguist, as for the discourse analyst, text breaks down into a text-structure and a text-product (see Maingueneau 2014: 33-36). Text-structure bears on relations beyond the sentence at the level of microlinguistic coherence (sometimes called "texture," built up out of anaphors, co-reference, etc.; see Adam 2011: 103-50) and at that of macrostructural coherence (also called

<footnote n="3">3. For a brief history of early French discourse analysis, see Mazière (2010 [2005]).</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4. The notion of translinguistics comes from Benveniste (1974 [1969]: 66), to which we shall return below. Shortly after his "Introduction," Barthes began to renounce structuralism in favor of deconstruction, opting instead for a theory of text (see Adam 2001a; Pier 2011: 347-48).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5. The same can be said of Paul Ricoeur when he states that "the structural analysis of narrative can be considered as one of the attempts to extend or transport this [structural] model to linguistic entities beyond the level of the sentence, the sentence being the ultimate entity for the linguist" (1984: 50). In English, both énoncé and énonciation translate as "utterance." In order to preserve the distinction between the product and the act of enunciating, "enunciate" (the said) and "enunciation" (the saying) will be employed.</footnote>
"structure" or "compositional structure," consisting of narrative, descriptive, argumentative, explanatory, and dialogical sequences or prototypes together with their combinations; see Adam 2001b [1997]). As for text-product (to be distinguished from *text-archive*—roughly speaking, the signifier), this is the enunciate, in other words, the empirical, observable, and describable trace of a discursive activity, whether written, oral or visual, consisting of ungrammatical segments as well as of entire books, but also of road signs, operating instructions, political discourses, short stories, films, and so forth—that is, the vast array of speech genres. Moreover, text-product, being an enunciate, is not something that falls out of the sky but is the result of an act of enunciation, defined by Émile Benveniste as "the putting into operation of *la langue* by an individual act of use" (1974 [1970]: 80). From this perspective, the emphasis falls not on the text of the enunciate (the text-product) but on the act of producing an enunciate. It is important to bear in mind that enunciation is not the act of an isolated individual, but that it occurs within the context of interpersonal interaction. Consequently, enunciation must be thought of as co-enunciation involving the participation of more than one enunciator or interlocutor. Interpersonal interaction as it occurs in discourse is analyzed through various linguistic markers including the use of personal pronouns, verb tense, and deictic expressions such as "here," "there," "now," and "then."

The advantages of disentangling text and sentence in this way, and thus of avoiding confusion between grammatical units and structures and the problems associated with enunciation in discourse, are not to be underestimated. Among other things, this calls into question not only the older idea of "a profound unity of language and narrative" in which "character is a noun" and "action a verb" (Todorov 1969: 27), but also the more recent assimilations and distortions resulting from overexpansion of the word "narrative" to cover virtually all forms of discourse.

### 3. TEXT AND DISCOURSE

Now, these distinctions raise yet another point that calls for commentary and clarification. Following the lead of text linguistics, discourse analysis gives priority to text and discourse rather than to story and discourse, the pair favored by many narratologists. Strictly speaking, the term "story" covers only a limited number of varieties of verbal or other communicative activities. Can a logical demonstration, a military command, a commercial contract, or instructions on how to install a computer program be construed as stories? Clearly there are many forms of discourse circulating in society that can be
qualified as stories only marginally, if at all, even though it is the case that
such discourses might in some way incorporate narratives without actually
being narratives themselves.

This is by no means a mere matter for terminological quibbling, for there
is in fact a charged conceptual history behind the standard story/discourse
paradigm. It was Tzvetan Todorov who, in "Les catégories du récit littéraire"
(1966), proposed the terminology that has become one of the mainstays of
classical and postclassical narratology alike. The difficulty with Todorov's pro-
posal is that it superimposes principles taken from the modes of enuncia-
tion in French linguistics (*histoire*, characterized by the absence of addressor
and addressee, and *discours*, where their presence is marked)<fnref n="6" /> onto narrative
content and the signifying medium, respectively; this move, in turn, is said
to also replace the Russian formalists' principles of *fabula* and *sjuzhet*. Tak-
ing things a step farther, in English-language narratology the French and the
Russian terms are often presented as equivalent to "story" and "plot." This
unhappy mixture of concepts in which *histoire*, *fabula*, and *story*, on the one
hand, and *discours*, *sjuzhet*, and plot, on the other, are presented as an appar-
ently homogeneous system has sometimes been diagnosed and occasionally
revised (I myself have examined the issues from the standpoint of semiotics;
see Pier 2003; Patron 2019 [2015]). Nevertheless, its influence remains wide-
spread, revealing a variety of forms whose parameters are sometimes difficult
to define. For example, proposals have been put forth to "export" narratologi-
cal concepts and categories to disciplines and forms of expression where they
may not yield the most pertinent and fruitful results. This has contributed to
a "narratological imperialism" (see Phelan 2005) that, for example, has taken
on the form of calls for the story/discourse distinction to serve as a basis for
interdisciplinary research in fields as diverse as feminist studies and interna-
tional relations (Dawson 2017). Such undertakings might well be tempered by
taking into account the conceptual origins of story and discourse and the fact
that narrative is one form of discourse among others.

## 4. LANGUE VERSUS PAROLE?

The critical view of structuralist categories taken by discourse analytical
approaches also extends to another feature that continues to exert an influ-
ence in narratological research, particularly as it has been handed down in

<footnote n="6">6. The fundamentals of these two modes of enunciation are presented in Benveniste (1966: section 5: "L'homme dans la langue"). For a systematic presentation of Benveniste's theory of enunciation, see Ono (2007).</footnote>
its vulgarized form: Saussure's *langue* and *parole*. In structural narratology, as Gerald Prince has pointed out, these concepts are often used to describe "narrative *langue*" as "the system of rules and norms accounting for the production and understanding of individual narratives," the individual narrative thereby corresponding to "narrative *parole*" (Prince 2003 [1987]: 70).<fnref n="7" /> It is worth remembering, however, that Saussure's formulation of *langue* and *parole* is itself problematic and has been the subject of various observations and criticisms. *Langue*, the object of linguistic study, is the abstract "system of signs," a code governed by rules and constraints that are external to the individual but are nonetheless lodged in the minds of the members of the speech community.<fnref n="8" /> *Parole* (sometimes called the message) is the material of language and corresponds to an individual and momentary act of will and intelligence; it would thus be "chimerical" to combine *langue* and *parole* from the same point of view, for *parole*, because it escapes the rules of *langue*, is not the object of linguistic study (Saussure 1972 [1915]: 30, 36). Indeed, while Saussure described the sentence as the *syntagm* (words or groups of words ordered through syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations) par excellence, he simultaneously excluded the sentence from *langue*, considering it to be a manifestation of *parole*, characterized by "the liberty of combinations" (172).<fnref n="9" />

Various proposals to remedy this ambivalent situation have been set forth. One example is Noam Chomsky's generative-transformational grammar in which *langue* and *parole* are replaced with the concepts of *competence*, the innate ability of speakers to construct and understand well-formed and ambiguous sentences, and *performance*, sentences realized in situations of communication whose interpretation is dependent on context, psychosocial relations, and so on. These principles have occasionally been adopted by literary theoreticians (for example, Jonathan Culler, in a chapter titled "Literary Competence," states that "linguistics offers an attractive methodological anal-

<footnote n="7">7. According to David Herman, "Barthes identifies for the narratologist the same object of inquiry that (*mutatis mutandis*) Ferdinand de Saussure had specified for the linguist: the system (*la langue*) from which the narrative messages (*la parole*) derives and on the basis of which they can be understood as stories in the first place" (2005: 573). This summary overlooks Barthes's call for a translinguistics.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8. Note that Saussure spoke of system, not of structure. It was Roman Jakobson, Serge Karcevsky, and Nicolas Trubetzkoy who were the first, in 1928, to speak of "structural and functional linguistics" (1930 [1928]). The following year, structure, with the sense of internal relations within a system, was integrated into the ten theses of the Prague Linguistic Circle. For a brief historical account, see "'Structure' en linguistique" (Benveniste 1966 [1962]).</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9. Saussurean terminology continues to be influential in more recent narrative theory. In his classification of more than thirty varieties of postclassical narratology, Ansgar Nünning (2003) describes text-centered structural ("classical") narratology as focused on "narrative *langue*" and context-oriented new ("postclassical") narratologies on "narrative *parole*."</footnote>
ogy: a grammar, as Chomsky says, ‘can be regarded as a theory of language,’ and the theory of literature of which Frye speaks can be regarded as the ‘grammar’ or literary competence which readers have assimilated but of which they may not be consciously aware”; Culler 1975: 122). Chomsky’s work has also given rise to text grammars (e.g., van Dijk 1972) as well as to narrative grammars (e.g., van Dijk 1973; Prince 1973; Pavel 1985). However, these attempts were hampered by the fact that Chomsky’s model is based on the sentence and does not readily apply beyond that limit. For this and other reasons, text grammars gave way to text linguistics which, in the French domain, is born out of the observation that beyond the sentence a new dimension is entered, that of discourse, the analysis of which cannot be satisfactorily carried out using the linguistic categories of the sentence.

# 5. THE MEDIATING ROLE OF ENUNCIATION

## 5.1. Benveniste

It was Émile Benveniste who, seizing on the problematic status of the sentence, torn between *langue* and *parole*, advocated a linguistics of discourse or enunciation, separate from a linguistics whose object is *la langue*. As set out in “Les niveaux de l’analyse linguistique” (1966 [1964]), the sentence, whose fundamental property is the predicate, is the upper limit of linguistic analysis. But at the same time it enters a new domain: “The sentence, an infinite creation, variety without limit, is the very life of language. With the sentence, we leave the area of *la langue* as a system of signs and enter another universe, that of language as an instrument of communication, the expression of which is discourse” (Benveniste 1966 [1964]: 129–30). Being a unit of discourse, the sentence is a bearer of sense (it is informed by signification) and reference (it refers to a given situation). With it, the speaker seeks to influence the interlocutor by transmitting information (assertion), requesting information (interrogation), or issuing orders, appeals, and so on (intimation)—none of these three functions being available at the level of *la langue* (130). “L’appareil formel de l’énonciation” (1974 [1970]) develops the argument, stressing that the key to discourse is enunciation, a process in the course of which semanticization of *la langue* takes place within a formal framework. Enunciation involves the act of enunciation itself (which presupposes the implicit or explicit presence of an addressee, a relation to the world, and a pragmatic consensus between the interlocutors); the situation in which the act occurs (each instance of discourse constitutes a center of internal reference); and instruments for realizing enunciation (indices of person, ostension, and temporal forms). Finally, in
"Sémiologie de la langue" (1974 [1969]), Benveniste introduces a third domain, that of *translinguistics*. On the one hand is an intralinguistic analysis comprising, first, a linguistics of system with emphasis on the significance of the sign (semiotics) and, second, a linguistics of enunciation whose focus is the significance of discourse (semantics). On the other hand is the linguistics of discourse, combining the theory of enunciation and the "translinguistics of texts, of works," that is, a metasemantics. This overlapping system, bound together in the middle by the linguistics of enunciation, constitutes a "second-generation" semiology whose methods and instruments may contribute to the development of other branches of general semiology (Benveniste 1974 [1970]: esp. 66). A major reformulation of structuralist doctrine, Benveniste's proposal both departs from Saussure's call for a *linguistique de la parole* and, thanks to the theory of enunciation and translinguistics—a linguistics across sentences—provides a broad outline for the functioning of *parole*, of language, in context. It is also a position that underlies some of the basic features of French discourse analysis.

The consequences resulting from the dual status of the sentence, namely the three domains of analysis identified above, are not a mere technical issue to be noted for the historical record, for they highlight a number of points of broad interest that remain valid for more recent developments in narrative theory. Placing narratology within the parameters of discourse analysis results in a switch of paradigm from the story/discourse pair to text/discourse, as already noted. This is a significant move, for the new frame of reference calls on the resources of text linguistics, on the one hand, and on those of the theory of enunciation, on the other. The system elaborated by Benveniste is centered on the problems of enunciation, not on those of text. And yet, from the standpoint of discourse analysis, the two lines of inquiry are complementary and intersect with one another in various ways. Without going into the detailed inquiry the subject deserves, it can nonetheless be said that intralinguistic analysis provides further specification to the micro-and macro-relations within text-structure, while the analysis of text-product comes within the scope of translinguistics, the semantics of enunciation. This framework marks a fundamental change of emphasis, from *langue* and *parole* to text (as understood by text linguistics) and discourse, the key to which is enunciation, whose traces remain present in the enunciate. One major advantage of the discourse analytical approach to narratology is that this avoids the risks of resolving all types and aspects of discourse into story and thus of nominativizing forms of expression, be they verbal, visual, or auditory, where this may not be warranted or where considerations of another kind may be more germane. Equally important is that with the introduction of enunciation into
the analysis of discourse, it is no longer at the level of *la langue* that “the social part of language” is located, “independent of the individual” (Saussure 1972 [1915]: 31, 37), as opposed to *parole* (an individual and momentary, rule-free act), but at the level of discourse. It is in discourse that language in its inter-personal and sociohistorical dimension takes form, not in *la langue*.

As the example of Benveniste shows, the delicate and multifaceted juncture between sentence and discourse raises a number of crucial questions with numerous implications for research across the disciplines. More to the point for present purposes is that through the introduction of enunciation, the relations between text and context as they are commonly thought of in the literary field are reconfigured. Insisting that there is not a “text” around which a “context” is arranged, Maingueneau argues as follows:

> When a work is studied in relation to its system of enunciation rather than being considered a monument transmitted by tradition, the exteriority of context is obviously misleading. A work cannot be conceived of as an arrangement of “contents” making it possible to “express” ideologies or mentalities in a more or less roundabout way. The “content” of a work is in fact traversed by the conditions of its enunciation. Context is not located outside the work in a series of successive envelopes; rather, *the text is the very management of its context*. Works do in fact speak of the world, but their enunciation forms an integral part of the world they are presumed to represent. ... Literature ... not only discourses on the world but manages its very presence in this world. (2004: 34–35; emphasis added; see also Maingueneau 2014: 77)

That context is not an “add-on” to text and its structures but that the two are closely bound together through the effects of enunciation goes to the heart of French discourse analysis, which, by its very premises, is context-oriented. So much stands out with the above comments on the complementary criteria of text and discourse, on the one hand, and those of sentence and discourse, on the other, bringing in a set of criteria that sets discourse analysis off from structural narratology. Mainstream narratology, largely unaware of this development, has often taxed structural narratology for its neglect of context, inciting some researchers to advocate “contextualism” as an alternative. Under this hypothesis, “a strictly formalist poetics” must be completed by a “contextualist narratology” (Darby 2001; see also Chatman 1990; Shen 2017): Decontextualized narrative structures (modeled after *la langue*) are, as it were, in need of contextually situated interpretive strategies guided by cues at the discourse level. In his essay outlining the principles of postclassical narratology, David Herman states that “in an integrated approach models for narrative grammar
will encompass both a narrative syntax and a narrative pragmatics, both a theory of narrative structure and a theory of narrative processing” (1999: 30, n. 12). Through the lens of discourse analysis, as the arguments above have shown, integration of the various dimensions of discourse, narrative or otherwise, passes through different channels.

## 5.2. Bakhtin

Another source and important predecessor of French discourse analysis is to be found in Mikhail Bakhtin's contributions to the theory of utterance and speech genres, two subdomains of Bakhtinian dialogism.<fnref n="10" /> These contributions are sometimes seen as an extension of Benveniste's translinguistics or linguistics of discourse (e.g., Todorov 1981: 67–93; Barthes 2002 [1970]). However, this is misleading, for although the two researchers did share some common ground on these matters, Bakhtin adopted a specific meaning of the term *metalingvistika* (translated as “translinguistique” by his French commentators, an expression Bakhtin would probably have balked at) to designate his theory of utterance and speech genres within a line of reasoning that he deliberately located outside the established linguistic, philological, and literary disciplines, thus bypassing the usual sense of metalinguistics, an expression normally related to the distinction between object-language and metalanguage. “Meta-language,” he wrote, “is not simply a code; it always has a dialogic relationship to the language it describes and analyzes. The positions of the experimenter and the observer in quantum theory” (Bakhtin 1986: 136). In the West, Bakhtin is generally regarded as a pioneer of what is now called pragmatics, and for this reason his neologism might best be considered to refer to the pragmatics of discourse. The Russian theoretician represents an essential reference for French discourse analysis.

Bakhtin, like Benveniste, considers the sentence technically to be a linguistic unit, not a unit of communication: “We must provisionally pose the problem of the *sentence* as a *unit of language*, as distinct from the *utterance* as a unit of speech communication” (Bakhtin 1986: 73). Closely bound to the question of speech genres (to which I will return), Bakhtin’s utterance

<footnote n="10">10. The principal source on these questions is Bakhtin's essay "The Problem of Speech Genres" (1952-53). Also to be mentioned are "The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis" (1959-61) and "Notes" (1970-71). All are available in Bakhtin (1986). The basic premises of utterance were originally set forth in the 1920s in Voloshinov (1973 [1929]) and in Medvedev and Bakhtin (1978 [1928]), although with a sociological rather than a pragmatic orientation.</footnote>
is characterized, first, by the change of speakers, forming a link in the chain of communication and thus not coinciding with the sentence. This feature is evidenced by the Russian word for "utterance," *vyskazyvanie*, in which emphasis falls on the beginning and the end of the utterance—a “change of speech subject,” not a change of subject matter. The term does not distinguish enunciation (the saying) from the enunciate (the said), the result of an act of saying. Moreover, where Benveniste defines enunciation as “the putting into operation of *la langue* by an individual act of use” (1974 [1970]: 80), Bakhtin, for whom *la langue* concerns all that is repeatable and reproducible in language and utterance what is unique in context (1986: 105), stresses the centrality of the *active responsive attitude* elicited in the addressee by the utterance: “From the very beginning, the speaker expects a response from [the speech participants], an active responsive understanding. The entire utterance is constructed, as it were, in anticipation of encountering this response” (1986: 94). Thus, he asserts, “Every utterance must be regarded primarily as a *response* to preceding utterances of the given sphere” (91; see 68, 82). In this regard, the sentence is neutral, for it is uttered by no one and addressed to no one. Utterances come fused with their contexts—contexts that are themselves mutable.

With these basic features of the utterance a number of others are to be associated. The possibility of responding to an utterance is dependent on its *finalization*, that is, on the semantic exhaustiveness of the theme or sense of the utterance, the speaker's plan or speech will, and the use of typical and compositional generic forms. Another factor is the *relation of the utterance* to the speaker and to the other participants in speech communication. This relation is bound up with semantic content, of course, but also with the expressive tenor of the utterance and the evaluative attitude of the speaker, and it thus plays into compositional and stylistic choices. At the same time, an utterance may anticipate the discourse of another speaker and in some way allude to it. (This factor ties in with reception theory and questions surrounding the implied author and the implied reader.) A further feature of utterance is its *dialogic overtones*. An utterance reverberates with preceding and subsequent utterances and to some degree conceals traces of the utterances of others, thus weakening the boundaries between them, as illustrated most notably by free indirect discourse. Finally, an utterance is addressed to someone, raising the question of its *addressivity*. The interlocutor may be in the immediate vicinity or at a distant location. This may be an individual or a group, but in any case interlocutors are broken down according to the vast and highly diverse gamut of interpersonal and social relations, once again impacting compositional and stylistic choices. Addressivity, without which there is no utterance, is thus an underlying consideration to be taken into account when examining speech genres.
Overall, Bakhtinian utterance as a concrete unit of language is characterized by its wholeness, independently of whether or not it is grammatically well-formed. The whole utterance comprises a thematic (or semantic) content, style (involving lexical, phraseological, and grammatical choices), and particularly compositional structure, the various combinations of which are dependent on the sphere of activity and communication within which a given utterance occurs and the function it fulfills. These factors—none of which are taken into account by the Saussurean *parole*—underlie the formation of speech genres, defined as relatively stable types of utterance: “We speak only in definite speech genres, that is, all our utterances have definite and relatively typical *forms of construction of the whole*” (Bakhtin 1986: 78). Or to put it another way: Without speech genres, and the principles of utterance underlying them, verbal communication would be nearly impossible. Although speech genres exert a normative influence on discourse, they are extremely diverse and, as the features of utterance outlined above show, permeate all aspects of discourse. Speech genres are heterogeneous and culture-sensitive, and they thus present a challenge for any attempt at classification, particularly in the multifarious and more or less unstable primary (simple) genres of unmediated everyday speech, but also in more developed and organized secondary (complex) genres found in artistic, scientific, and sociopolitical forms of discourse, mainly in writing. Primary genres, when they are incorporated into secondary genres, acquire a new status as their relation to the immediate environment is severed.<fnref n="11" />

On the whole, it can be seen from the standpoint of French discourse analysis that Benveniste's translinguistics, by extending the properties of enunciation beyond the sentence to cover the domain of discourse, and Bakhtin's theory of utterance and speech genres, by providing a pragmatic framework for discourse, form an essential complement to text linguistics consisting, as explained above, of text-structure and text-product. Both enunciation ("the putting into operation of *la langue* by an individual act of use") and utterance ("a unit of speech communication") are acts that serve to bridge the gap between text and context, between language as system (*langue*) and language in use (*parole*). Again, discourse analysis, by its underlying premises, is context-oriented and represents, when adopted by narrative theory, a consequential readjustment of or alternative to the story/discourse paradigm and its various avatars.

It stands out from the considerations above that two conceptions of enunciative properties prevail, one “linguistic” (with an emphasis on enunciation),

<footnote n="11">11. My thanks go to Caryl Emerson for her helpful comments on Bakhtin.</footnote>
the other “discursive” (whose focus is on utterance).<fnref n="12" /> These lines of reflection are highly relevant for the mapping out of French discourse analysis to the extent that each exists in a “narrow” and a “broad” form. The former, providing a linguistics of enunciative phenomena, studies enunciative traces such as pronouns, shifters, modalization, evaluative expressions, and so on that refer the enunciate back to its enunciation. The broad form, which includes a linguistics of enunciation, seeks to describe the relations between the enunciate and the various elements that contribute to its constitution and thus coincides with one branch of discourse analysis. In its stronger variety, this form of study corresponds to an enunciative linguistics whose underlying premise is that human language is constituted in the act of enunciation. These various tendencies are generally associated with Benveniste and have been the occasion of many finely honed studies, including analyses of literary texts. However, enunciative phenomena can also be approached from the angle of speech genres, the criteria for which, as demonstrated by Bakhtin, are not strictly linguistic. Thus at the local level, enunciative traces may be indicative of an ideological positioning in a political discourse, of social hierarchy in everyday speech, or of certain sentiments in lyrical poetry. At the global level, the overall framework in which a discourse develops can be examined in terms of the scene of enunciation.

## 6. SPEECH GENRES IN DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

We will return to the notion of scene of enunciation shortly. First, however, it is necessary to clarify the role of speech genres in discourse analysis, which differs somewhat from Bakhtin's treatment of the subject. Stressing the socio-historical nature and situational criteria of speech genres that come under the scrutiny of the ethnography of communication and pragmatics, Maingueneau subscribes to many of the characteristics of the Bakhtinian utterance. He also points out the radical expansion of speech genres beyond the traditional triad of lyric, dramatic, and epic and the profound effects of this expansion on how literary genres are perceived (Maingueneau 2004: 178-81).<fnref n="13" /> A clear distinction is drawn between discourse types (Bakhtin's “spheres of activity”) and speech

<footnote n="12">12. The following synthesis is based on Charaudeau and Maingueneau (2002: 230-31), supported by a large body of research in the field.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13. The study of speech genres is in fact a revival of genres in the sense of ancient rhetoric. In modern times, especially starting with Romanticism, genre theory has been largely restricted to the triad as developed by poetics. See Maingueneau (2014: 112). See also Gérard Genette's proposals for a revision of genre theory as handed down from Aristotle (Genette 1992 [1979]).</footnote>
genres (“relatively stable types of utterances”), the latter described as “institutions of *parole*”: A contract is a genre belonging to the legal discourse type, a sermon is a genre belonging to the religious discourse type, and so forth. There are, of course, subgenres (commercial contracts, the Christmas sermon, etc.), but this raises an additional problem, particularly in the area of literature: Over and above the ambiguous status of autofiction, for instance, when is a biography a work of literature rather than a historical document, or an essay a philosophical argument rather than a work of the imagination?

This is a vast topic that has been written about extensively and that will not be discussed here. Suffice it to say for present purposes that discourse analysis brings in a number of distinctions aimed at refining the category of speech genre. This is done by distinguishing between the different ways speech genres can be viewed. The first has to do with how speech genres relate to spheres of activity. The naturalist novels of Émile Zola are read as a literary genre, but they have also acted as a genre encroaching on the journalistic sphere of activity that produced an impact on social legislation. A second consideration is that some genres are subject to the forces of discursive fields. This is the case of political discourses and religious discourses characterized by different positionings (competing ideologies, doctrines, etc.) marked by shifting enunciative identities. Other areas where enunciative positioning can be observed are the polyphonic novel and in some aspects of implied authorship. Finally, speech genres are closely associated with places of activity: “the office, the schoolroom, the hospital, the street . . . each with numerous genres and subgenres—written/spoken, official/unofficial, work-related or not” (Maingueneau 2014: 64–68). This dimension of genre serves as a reminder of a fundamental tenet of discourse analysis, namely that genre “does not apprehend places independently of the words these places authorize (against sociological reductionism), nor words independently of the places of which they are an integral part (against linguistic reduction)” (Maingueneau 2004: 178).

The centrality of genre in French discourse analysis has resulted in yet further pertinent distinctions.<fnref n="14" /> Similarly to Bakhtin’s primary and secondary speech genres but taking account of additional factors, Maingueneau differentiates two complementary and asymmetrical “regimes” or “systems,” one conversational, the other instituted. In the former, relatively unorganized system, identities and situations remain open-ended and unstable, their contours difficult to circumscribe due to the large number and variety of genres, but also to the perpetually renegotiated relations between discourse and the activities

<footnote n="14">14. The following comments draw mainly on Maingueneau (2004: 181–84, 2014: 114–21). Maingueneau’s work in this area dates back to his *Genèses du discours* (1984).</footnote>
of the immediate environment.<fnref n="15" /> In the instituted system of genres, including those of oral discourse (lectures, political speeches, etc.), roles are more narrowly assigned, although there are varying degrees of tension and slippage between these genres and those of the conversational system.

The instituted system of genericity further breaks down into two varieties: routine and auctorial. Routine genres (reports, medical consultations, minutes of the board meeting, etc.) are associated with sociohistorically determined forms of communication in particular situations in which the roles of the participants remain relatively unchanged and the format goes unchallenged. Unlike the genres of the conversational system, whose constraints are local, routine genres tend to deploy global constraints that regulate the entire discourse in a top-down fashion. Some allow for minimal or no deviation from the norm (legal and administrative documents), others for some degree of personal variation (travel guide, televised news broadcast), and yet others are ritualized (television talk shows). For many discourse analysts, routine genres are the preferred object of study, an area in which research of this variety has made significant contributions to the analysis of documents used in the social sciences. Auctorial genres, as the name suggests, emanate from an author or possibly an editor. They are present in works of literature, philosophy, religion, science, journalism, politics, and so on and are often accompanied by a paratext or some other indication as to how they are to be received or negotiated by the public.<fnref n="16" /> One of the distinguishing features of auctorial genres, setting them off from the routine genres, is that they are manifested in the form of self-constituting discourses (*discours constituants*). In what does the constitution of such discourses consist?

## 7. CONSTITUENCE AND SCENE OF ENUNCIATION

In all societies, Maingueneau observes, there exist discourses that lend authority, discourses for “bestowing sense on the acts of the entire community” (2014: 151). In Western societies, such discourses originate in the domains of religion, philosophy, science, and literature, regarded (notwithstanding their historically shifting relations and hierarchies) as “ultimate.” Self-constituting, they are “validated by a scene of enunciation which authorizes itself” (Maingueneau

<footnote n="15">15. In the conversational regime, there is no close correlation between genre and given situations of discourse. This is even truer in the context of the rapidly changing environment of today's burgeoning communications technologies.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16. On paratextuality—the “undecided zone” between the inside and the outside of the text—see Genette (1997 [1987]) and Lane (1992).</footnote>
neau 2004: 47); in this way such discourses act as a legitimizing source, the guarantor of numerous auctorial genres. Self-constituting discourses are performative in nature to the extent that they combine the process of *foundation* in and by their enunciation, the determination of *place* associated with a *body of recognized enunciators*, and *memory*.<fnref n="17" /> They are constitutive in the sense that they both regulate their own emergence and organize the elements of a given discourse into a textual whole. At the same time, however, the social inscription of these self-constituting discourses is paradoxical, a situation described by Maingueneau as “paratopy.” On the one hand, a self-constituting discourse appeals to something beyond itself (religion to the otherworldly, science to reason, etc.), while on the other hand the speaker is faced with the dilemma of managing forms that mark his or her simultaneously belonging and not belonging (Marcel in *À la recherche du temps perdu*). Paratopy indicates not an absence of place (atopy) but rather a difficult negotiation between place and nonplace, a delocalization that forestalls any true constituence.<fnref n="18" />

The problem of self-constituting discourse, characteristic mainly of auctorial genres, is closely related to what Maingueneau calls “scene of enunciation.” This term is chosen over “situation of enunciation” (a strictly linguistic concept) and “situation of communication” (employed by sociologists and sociolinguists), since the former is restricted to interaction between the enunciator, the co-enunciator and the non-enunciator, and the latter to factors that are external to enunciation or utterance as act. Scene of enunciation evokes the world of theater (scène means “stage”; cf. *mettre en scène*—“to stage”) and implies a sort of dramaturgy inherent in language use, thus highlighting the “internal space” of discourse.<fnref n="19" /> It is within this space, an instituted space delimited by speech genre, that enunciation occurs and unfolds as a sequence of verbal and nonverbal actions. This opens up a panoply of questions that bear on the pragmatics of discourse. In order to better frame these questions, the scene of enunciation is broken down into three interdependent types of scene.

<footnote n="17">17. Maingueneau relates this triad to the Greek *archeion* of human communities, bringing together the seat of power, a body of magistrates, and public archives (2004: 47). The implicit reference here is to Michel Foucault’s *L’archéologie du savoir* (1969), a work often referred to by French discourse analysts, particularly with regard to the notion of discursive formations. For further discussion, see Maingueneau (2014: 81–95).</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18. See Maingueneau and Cossutta (1995) and Maingueneau (2004: 46–55, 2014: 149–54); a presentation in English can be found in Maingueneau (1999). For further discussion of atopy, see Maingueneau (2004: 70–105, 2006: 68–73).</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19. See Bakhtin’s “unique internal dramatism . . . in the utterance” (1986: 96).</footnote>
## 7.1. Three Scenes

The first, *global scene*, corresponds to text type or discourse type. Recognizing a book as a literary fiction, a collection of historical studies or a treatise on nuclear physics will trigger different kinds of presuppositions in the reader. Some works are characterized by a dual global scene (e.g., the King James translation of the Bible as both a religious and a literary text). On the other hand, mistaken identity of the global scene can have a considerable impact on how a work is understood and interpreted. This can be seen in Wolfgang Hildesheimer's *Marbot. Eine Biografie* (1981), initially acclaimed as the biography of a forgotten figure of the Romantic era, only to be exposed some years later as a literary fiction (see Cohn 1999).

*Generic scene* pertains to the sociohistorical conditions of enunciation. This includes, inter alia, the finality of a given genre (the aim of a student research paper in an academic setting is not that of a talk show for late-night television viewers); the linguistic and stylistic resources employed (the lexical choices peculiar to administrative documents as compared to those of popular magazines); and the medium or material support (digital technology has given rise to previously unknown genres such as blogs, chats, and forums, not to mention the hypertext novel inaugurated by Michael Joyce's *afternoon, a story*, in 1987). On being handed a tract in the street, one will need to know whether the global scene is politics or religion before reading further. Sometimes, however, it is a generic choice that must be made: Are Jules Vernes's novels to be read as children's literature or as science fiction?

There are instances in which the scene of enunciation is limited to these two scenes. This is the case mostly of some routine genres such as the publication of acts of parliament (generic scene) that come under the broader text type of law (global scene). The telephone book presents a more extreme example. In such cases, however, the singularity of the text or discourse and its interlocutors is not an issue.

The situation is different with discourses coming within the scope of the auctorial genres. Here, and more emphatically so with literary works, the notion of scenography can be spoken of.<fnref n="20" /> This term, normally used in relation to the design of the stage set, refers both to the conditions that make discourse possible and legitimize it and to the product of discourse: To the theatricality of the *scène* (the spatiotemporal framework within which the discourse occurs) is added the dimension of *-graphie* (the process of the dis-

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Also concerned are advertising, political communication, and numerous forms of mass communication.</footnote>
course's occurrence). In this schema (and in accordance with the idea of the embeddedness of enunciation in context encountered at other points in this chapter), scenography is indissociable from topography and chronography. Scenography, located both upstream and downstream of the work, is not a mere scaffolding or décor for contents, the form of a content, but a true "pivot of enunciation" of discourse (Maingueneau 2004: 201). "To enunciate," writes Maingueneau, "is not only to activate the norms of a pre-existing institution of speech; it is also to construct, on this basis, a singular *mise en scène* of enunciation: a *scenography*" (2014: 129). It is important as well to note that whereas routine genres such as contracts or depositions generally remain unambiguously attached to their global and generic scenes, this is not the case of discourses in which scenography plays a prominent role and acts as the element most likely to retain the reader's or the listener's attention. A realist novel does not require a specific scenography but is free to take the form of a collection of documents and letters, an eyewitness account, a diary, a biography, and so on, with the global and generic scenes forming the background of this enunciation. Scenography is self-constituting in the sense that its emergence, by postulating its own conditions, entails a scene of enunciation that validates itself in the course of this enunciation. To put it another way, "scenography is ... what comes from discourse and what engenders discourse; it legitimizes an enunciate which, in turn, must legitimize [that scenography] and establish that this scenography from which the word comes is precisely *the* scenography required in order to enunciate as appropriate" (Maingueneau 2004: 193).

## 7.2 A Scenography

As one of many possible examples of the scene of enunciation with its relations between the global and generic scenes and scenography, we can consider Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel *Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded* (1740). The letters were originally intended by the author to serve as a compendium of model letters for young people to follow in response to the particular, often practical, circumstances of everyday life; as such, they can be reckoned as a specific type of sample texts among the routine genres.<fnref n="21" /> However, in the course of the writing, Richardson decided to introduce an element of morality by turning the letters into a sort of manual for ethical education, one of a

<footnote n="21">21. This characteristic remains in the published work. In one of the prefatory notes to the editor, the letters are praised for "the beautiful Simplicity of Style, and a happy Propriety of Clearness of Expression. . . . This little Book will infallibly be looked upon as the hitherto much-wanted Standard or Pattern for this Kind of Writing" (Richardson 1971 [1740]: 4).</footnote>
number of distinct generic scenes of this type that prospered in eighteenth-century Protestant England: The heroine's letters to her parents were meant to illustrate how young working class women should resist the wicked designs of their upper-class masters.<fnref n="22" /> As for the global scene of *Pamela*, it is a hybrid of religion and ethical philosophy.

Now, the book as we have it is neither a treatise on religion and ethics aimed at ordering a set of concepts nor a code of moral conduct laying down a set of instructions. Rather, it is a collection of letters (together with a number of diary entries) that creates a scenography, complete with a storyline and a cast of characters. There is a palpable disparity between the global and generic scenes and the scenography, which is due in no small part to the fact that the letters are intended for private communication between Pamela and her parents, not for public consumption.<fnref n="23" /> In this way, the epistolary scenography adopted by Richardson is also at odds with the ground rules of treatises and codes of conduct (neither of which are narrative genres), for in being withdrawn from public discourse, they lose all raison-d'être. As a consequence, Pamela's letters take on a life of their own and weave a narrative that performatively legitimizes its own enunciation. Upstream, the letters reframe and somewhat subvert the global and generic scenes pertaining to them; downstream, Pamela's private discourse, a "writing to the minute" (in Richardson's phrase), acquires something of the interior dramatic monologue by dint of the reader's intrusion into the communication chain. The term "scenography" seems singularly appropriate here as the controlling voice of an extradiegetic narrator recedes and Pamela's voice takes the stage in a process that foreshadows narrative techniques for the portrayal of consciousness that were to become some of the hallmarks of nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative fiction.

## 7.3 Modes of Genericity

From this brief review of Richardson's novel, it can be seen that the relations between generic scene and scenography are multifaceted and have a considerable potential for variety. For the discourse analyst, it is important to situate

<footnote n="22">22. Another prefatory note states: "As to *Instruction* and *Morality*, the Piece is full of both" (Richardson 1971 [1740]: 6). The original title page reads as follows: "*Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded*. In a series of familiar letters from a beautiful young damsel, to her parents. Now first published in order to cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the minds of the youth of both sexes" (1). As is well known, the moral message of *Pamela* has long been diversely appreciated. The book remained on the Vatican's *Index* until 1900.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23. On the notion of "overhearing narrative," see García Landa (2004).</footnote>
these phenomena within the broader context of discourse in all its manifestations. To do so, Maingueneau identifies four modes of genericity characteristic of the instituted genres.<fnref n="24" />

**Mode 1 Instituted Genres.** Business letters, notarized deeds, and other such routine genres follow an established format that allows for only minimal variation, including in the roles of the participants. The scenographies employed are thus nonindividuated and endogenous. However, documents of this kind can be refunctionalized, as is the case of the official Weekly Bills of Diseases and Deaths incorporated into Daniel Defoe's *A Journal of the Plague Year* (1722).

**Mode 2 Instituted Genres.** Televised variety shows are routine genres that employ endogenous scenographies allowing a certain leeway for singularizing and original variations, but without calling into question or otherwise violating the norms of the generic scene. Nevertheless, exogenous forms of scenography are possible here, as in Blaise Pascal's *Provinciales* (1656-1657), a religious pamphlet devoted to the disputes between the Jansenists and the Jesuits presented as a series of letters to a Parisian by a provincial author ignorant of the intricacies of the theological debate (see Maingueneau 1998).

**Mode 3 Instituted Genres.** A radio advertisement can take the form of a song, a dialogue between two customers, or an act of storytelling, its various possible scenographies thus necessarily being exogenous in relation to the relevant generic scene. By contrast, the collage technique employed by John Dos Passos in his trilogy *U. S. A.* (1930-1936), which consists of introducing newspaper clippings into an otherwise conventionally printed text, reproduces an exogenous scenography in the book as a matter of choice.

**Mode 4 Instituted Genres.** Works such as *Pamela* emerge in a relative generic flux because, at the time of its publication, the English novel was in its formative stage. Due to the tentative and novel relationship between generic scene and scenography, the originality of the scene of enunciation stands out and reinforces the self-constitutive quality of the work's discourse. At the same time, the "Familiar Letters" (a routine genre), whose aim is "to cultivate the principles of virtue and religion," paint a picture that is somewhat at odds with the avowed didactic purpose, for the heroine's moral resistance culminates with the conversion of Mr. B, her social superior, to more noble ways and, in the end, with Pamela's social ascension through marriage. Unlike the instituted genres of modes 1 and 2, those of mode 4 are less bound to the more or less codified discursive activities of the social space, or at any rate take liberties that are not available to those modes.

<footnote n="24">24. The following comments are based on Maingueneau (2004: 181-84, 2014: 133-36).</footnote>
## 8. CONCLUSION

The task of narratology is to identify and explore the *differentia specificae* of
narrative in all its forms and manifestations. With it, however, this undertak-
ing brings the risk of either isolating narrative from other forms of expression
in an attempt to single out what is characteristic of narrative and narrative
alone or, in the effort to discern elements of narrative that underlie cultural
artefacts generally, to inflate narrative to the point of robbing it of its spec-
ificity. With the reminder that all discourse, despite its narrative potential,
cannot be framed in terms of narrative or construed as a form of storytelling,
discourse analysis offers a way out of this quandary. By broadening its
scope to include text and discourse, verbal or otherwise, rather than focusing
on story and discourse, discourse analysis provides a means to situate narr-
ative within the varied and fluctuating array of forms of discourse that perme-
ate all domains of social life and cultural and disciplinary pursuits. A crucial
step in the elaboration of this framework comes with the shift of emphasis
from underlying structure to enunciation, the contextually situated act of lan-
guage. This not only results in requalification of the relation between *langue*
and *parole* but also provides for a transition between sentence and discourse,
thus opening the way to translinguistics and at the same time narrowing the
gap between text and context. It is in this way that discourse analysis takes
account of the linguistic markers of enunciation (translinguistics) as well as
of textual organization (text linguistics). Further taken into consideration are
speech genres. These are the built-in regulators of enunciation, or utterance as
act, that serve to organize discourse compositionally according to the social
sphere at hand and thus form a pragmatic condition by which linguistic units
are integrated into units of communication.

The configuration of discourse, as it emerges from these perspectives, calls
into question positions that have long been entertained, explicitly or implic-
itly, in the study of discourse in its innumerable varieties. This is the case most
notably, for present concerns, of narrative discourse, for within this configura-
tion the opposition between action and representation, between content and
form, between text and context, between production and reception, no lon-
ger seems tenable. Rather than isolating contents from their modes of trans-
mission, discourse analysis underscores the inextricable interaction of these
dimensions (see Maingueneau 2004: 49).

Indeed, when narrative is viewed through the lens of discourse analysis,
the intersection of constituence, auctoriality, and scene of enunciation takes
on particular salience. The convergence of these three dimensions of discourse
coincides to no negligible degree with world-building, authorship, and sce-
nography of narrative in its prolific manifestations.
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