Top
French thinkers, such as Lacan, Althusser, Foucault and Derrida, have been widely perceived as theorists of the linguistic turn. Yet, the linguistic and semiotic traditions which informed the theoretical imagination of these theorists so decisively have hardly been accounted for outside French linguistics. This book presents past and present developments in French discourse analysis, while also paying special attention to the development of enunciative pragmatics, which hinges on the discursive construction of subjectivity. Five textual fragments by these theorists, all written around 1966 when the controversy over structuralism was at its height, are analysed in detail in relation to the question of how theoretical texts are used in discourse where one constantly needs to define one's position vis-à-vis others. The book will be valuable to students, researchers and practitioners within discourse analysis, pragmatics, linguistics and semiotics, as well as all those interested in the analysis of the social production of meaning.
