The intralocutor's diatextual frame

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Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 471-487

The intralocutor's diatextual frame Giuseppe Mininni*, Rodolphe Ghiglione, Edith Sales-Wuillernin 1 Via Passarelli 113, 1-75100 Matera, Italy

Received October 1993; revised version May 1994

Abstract The question investigated in this paper concerns the way humans construct themselves as communicating subjects both by depending on language use and, at the same time, mastering it. When human beings are involved in the necessary attribution of sense, they may be viewed as 'intralocutors'. Such a condition requires adapting the conventional and interpretive scripts to a given interlocutive situation. Diatext is an instrument of pragmatically-oriented Discourse Analysis, which aims at satisfying the needs both of an interactivist (and constructionist) view of communicative meaning and, at the same time, concentrates on the (social) subject. The 'spirit' of an interlocution scene is accounted for by a number of socio-cognitive modules, proposed here to illuminate the relationship between (wo)man and discourse.

Nulla salus extra discursus!

1. Introduction Over the last 25 years, pragmatics has opened up new avenues o f exploration in the social sciences (sociology, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, etc.), which have gained in this way from major reconsiderations in domain knowledge. One o f the main reasons is that pragmatics lets us penetrate the mystery of the 'subject' (endowed with intentions and goals), who does not only use language as a medium to c o n v e y information, but more importantly as an instrument which enables him or her to act, i.e. modify a situation and the relationships formed in this situation. Pragmatics thus allows us to go beyond 'langue/parole' or competence/performance dichotomies as well as mentalist concepts (for an illuminating introduction to pragmatics, see Mey, 1993).

* Corresponding author. Fax: +39 80 5571459 Groupe de Recherche sur la Parole, Universit6 de Paris VIII. 0378-2166/95/$09.50 © 1995 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved SSDI 0378-2166(94)00065-M

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Social psychology, the present authors' field, does not usually view the social subject as a c o m m u n i c a t i n g subject, and there has been some resistance to an approach which in a certain way made this issue its epicenter. Developments in this field of research, and in particular studies on persuasive communication, show that although the subject is viewed as the conveyor of representations, knowledge, and attitudes, the communicative act still tends to be seen in a mechanistic, linear, and unidimensional fashion. 2 For instance, Moscovici (1984: 6-7) describes the subject matter of social psychology as "all the phenomena bearing on ideology and communication, ordered in terms of their origins, structure and function", but he reduces the communicative act to "linguistic or non linguistic messages (pictures, gestures) between individuals or groups. These are means of transmitting information and influencing others". However, to approach communicative phenomena in their entirety, "social psychology should not only focus on the impact of a message on its addressee, but to a greater extent on the markers in speech of the co-presence and co-construction of reality and the cognitive work which underlies co-enunciation" (Ghiglione, 1986: 26). Thus, eliminating the trend to oppose psycho-pragmatics and socio-pragmatics, a truly pragmatic approach incorporates a psychosocial study o f language operations in that it sets speakers in a specific, historical communicative framework. Pragmatics goes beyond a simple descriptive analysis of the information conveyed in and by the message. However, much of current pragmatics needs to be revised. Although traditionally social psychology has not viewed language analysis as a crossroads between individuals, pragmatics - despite the lesson embodied in the question asked by Mey (1985) in his book W h o s e l a n g u a g e ? - has also at times neglected the subject's 'social' component, as the sole means o f determining the orientation of influence, i.e. the socially determined directionality of discursive productions. One of the criticisms of classical pragmatics in this regard has been that it neglects the bases and structure of interaction: what one could call the stakes. Just as there are no games without stakes, there are no speech acts without effects on the addressee: all interaction is aimed at producing a certain effect and fulfilling a certain goal. 3 Ever since Voloshinov (1973) and Bakhtin (1981) introduced the 'translinguistic' concept of the human being as a dialogic pattern (or a shared patternship), many psycho-sociological traditions have started to focus on the interactional aspects of mean-

2 Shannon and Weaver's (1949) theory of information and communication, which accounts for the transmission of a message from a sender to a receiver via a transmission channel, was for many years the model for the analysis of communicative events in social psychology, and gave rise to studies which examined these two poles of communication (speaker and hearer) and the message separately (see Ghiglione, 1986, for a discussion). 3 The second main criticism regards the difficulty of accounting for exchange dynamics and the coconstruction of meaning. Larrue (1989: 26), for example, comments: "In speech act theories, the interlocutor remains in the wings. Everything is conceived, perceived, analyzed exclusively from the point of view of the locutor. It is known that the speaker has a discourse partner, if only because an illocutionary act - a promise or an order for example -- is necessarily oriented towards someone. However, this partner can remain speechless without detracting from the theory. A highly precarious situation".

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ing - such as, for example, Slama-Cazacu's (1961) dynamic-contextual and Hymes' (1974) 'ethnographic' approaches to communication; or Gumperz' (1982) interpretive approach to discourse; and others. This form of pragmatics, which both challenges social psychology and is challenged by it, has received support from the Social Constructionists, who, too, pay attention to social psychology (an early, influential perspective was opened up by Berger and Luckmann, 1966). Social Constructionism (Gergen, 1982: 207), or 'socio-rationalism' (Coulter, 1989), while maintaining its ties to the European constructivist tradition, from Bartlett to Piaget, stresses the shortcomings of a social cognition (Gergen, 1985a, 1991) which primarily views the human subject as an information processing system. Social Constructionism takes the radical stance of showing that a de-constructed Self is logically impossible. Instead, Social Constructionism aims at reformulating the metatheoretical (and philosophical) framework of research in psychology, by attempting to go beyond the limits of the antinomies between subject and object (internal vs. external, unfalsifiable vs. falsifiable, etc.). Thus, the radical change preconized by Social Constructionism dissociates the status of knowledge from the status of representation, in order to associate it with action. Knowing is a "form of social performance" (Gergen, 1988: 31), rooted in group history. This change in perspective on the cognitive system has led to a new focus on communicative processes. At times, it has resulted in certain extremist positions, such as that "the reports of one's experiences are nothing else than linguistic constructions" (Gergen, 1985b: 14). Bypassing these debates, the present article will show, first of all, how discursive social psychology can go beyond the opposition between Cognitivism and Constructionism. We then present a theory of the social subject which reintroduces a pragmatic perspective. We place a major stress on the heuristics of the notion of intralocutor. This concept covers two ways that subjects may be exposed to their 'texts', viewed as linguistic components of a communicative event: - as a social Subject, endowed with an autobiographical memory who, on the premise of mutual stakes, attributes a specific meaning to a situation which enables him/her to enter into a schema of potential communication with others (Ghiglione, 1986). - in the spirit of a given communicative interaction emerging from the relationships between its cognitive and discursive processes.

2. D o we really need diatextualism?

Social Constructionism based one of its major criticisms of the cognitive psychologists on their neglect of a small number of mental components which - if taken into account - could have prevented them from reducing the behavior of individuals to the principles of information processing systems. Although cognitivism has been taxed with reductionism, constructionism has been singled out for its heterogeneity and laxism, in particular as regards methodology. Therefore, as Bruner (1990) has suggested, we are still waiting for the 'correct' approach to the problems of the


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diatext, as an instrument of a 'linguistique de la parole', derive from the possibility of considering meanings as argumentative constructions arising from the social forms of interlocutions, as well as from the possibility of consolidating the notions of 'social representation' and 'rhetorical strategy' into a single move, making the subject identifiable through the text. We both organize and understand a text by conjecturing that our textual counterparts are informed by sets of intentions, inferential skills, appraisals, attitudes, etc. The socio-cognitive traces of such attributional procedures outline a level of diatextual interpretation of the intralocutor, namely the instance of sense production, in which each individual text utterer tries to come to terms with this dialectic tension between the poles of the text's dialogical consistence. Each text (oral or written) is thus truly a 'diatext', because it is inspired both by the Principle of Cooperation and by the Principle of Competition, so that it turns out to be permeated by a climate both of support and of control. The texts of our communicative events reveal the struggle of our dialogic will (or desire?) against the (more or less) asymmetrical relationships in which we are entangled.

3. The intralocutor as diatextual potential Work in psychosocial pragmatics (Trognon and Ghiglione, 1993) has partially revived the traditional (mechanistic and correlational) approach to the study of language (Ghiglione, 1990). In response to constructionism, one psychosocial perspective has emerged out of the intersection of different conceptual systems, ranging from symbolic interactionism as developed by Mead (1934), through Vygotsky's (1934) historico-cultural approach, or Moscovici's social representations (1961), to discursive features based on the scrutiny of the linguistic bases for notions such as 'person' and 'self' (Harr6, 1983, 1991), 'belief' (Billig, 1991), 'attitude' (Potter and Wetherell, 1987), or 'emotion' (Averill, 1985; Harr6, 1986). Communicative Contract Theory, as developed by the G.R.P., 4 is aimed at consolidating this new, consolidating approach by placing the subject of a discursive situation (the intralocutor) in the framework of relationships which are necessarily socio-cultural. 5 The intralocutor - each specific 'entity' which is both on the brink of interlocution, and functions as the partial exit of its segments - is not only defined by the activation of encyclopedic knowledge and by the acknowledgment of the

4 The theory of Communicative Contract and Propositional Discourse Analysis (P.D.A.) are the most significant outcomes of the work performed by the Groupe de Recherche sur la Parole (G.R.P.) [Speech Research Group], founded twelve years ago at Paris University VII1, by Rodolphe Ghiglione, its head. The group has stimulated a large number of publications (for example Ghiglione et al., 1985; Ghiglione, 1986; Ghiglione and Blanchet, 1991; Trognon and Ghiglione, 1993). The G.R.P. aims at developing a model of communicative events that can accurately represent the complexity of authentic procedures, and devotes its efforts to consolidating the theoretical framework and streamlining the methodology of the model. 5 Beyond the rules which govern the mechanics of the system, communicative behaviors are 'regulated' by what, to a certain extent, is societally authorized (at least when the accepted point of departure is "the desire to communicate with others or continue to do so" (Ghiglione, 1984: 546).

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stakes inherent in potential interaction, but by the activation of processes directly involved in discourse production. For this reason, the notion of intralocutor is the pivot of a theory of the subject and a theory of communication. As such, it operationalizes the classic concept of logos involving the connection between language (or speech) and mind, realized by a '(dia)logical' entity such as a (wo)man. 6 'Logos' is the Greek word used by the ancient philosophers to label humans' comprehensive pretension to master their external as well as their internal world of reference. It may be viewed as the trace of the 'unknown God', inspiring both one's need of mental coherence and one's yearning after societal justice. Indeed, all cultural products (from the severe procedures of the sciences to the hazardous ardor of the arts) are marked by the tentative, collaborative, and discursive intention of logos. Such a regulating ideal of human life is strictly tied to language use; in this way, it can be fitted into the 'intralocutor' scheme proposed here to account for the human dependence on the multifarious practices of discourse. In fact, communication is "activating an appropriate system into discourse in a space - the interlocutory space - utilized by the co-enunciators. Approximation/utilization, where stabilities and turbulence, 'adjustments' and 'shifts' are played out" (Ghiglione, 1986: 29). To operationalize these connections, and introduce the sociocognitive procedures which govern the interlocutory relationship into the model in the manner of the Palo Alto School (see Watzlawick et al., 1967), the constraints on the conceptual framework which define the social actor as an 'information contextualizing system' need to be located, through pragmatic relevancy criteria, at the interface between different social and linguistic determinisms. No doubt there are many different facets of the interpretant (the co-constructor of meaning) whose psychological specificity derives from the fact that they make the 'cognitive' level relevant (for example, information organizing procedures, teleological representations, analog modeling, etc.). However, the cognitive apparatus can only produce meaning because it is "refined by a whole atmosphere" (Rossi-Landi, 1961: 242). What activity can be ascribed to a 'pragmatic atmosphere'? Do such 'atmospheric' effects leave markers on the surface of discourse, such as are generally defined in vague terms as its 'spirit' or 'style'? One means of reducing this ambiguity is found in the 'Discourse Action Model' (Edwards and Potter, 1992), which aims at penetrating the ways in which cognitive processes (as referred to by psychologists in the field of memory and attribution) are governed by action, interest, and accountability. In later sections, we will develop several cognitive pragmatic criteria to define human 'stand-by' features of communication, namely the ways in which the subject may reveal him/herself as 'ready-to-speak'. Human beings are bound to speech in a double projective process, as the mind is both cause and effect of language use. In fact, on the one hand, it is mainly by speaking that humans can reasonably account for their pretensions to being active producers of sense, i.e. subjects in the world. On the other, as they are involved in the innumerable petty language games of everyday life (from conversation to news, from

6 For a detailed analysis of such psychopragmaticmatters, see Dascal (1983).


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literary narrative to religious prayer and political calls), humans transfer their 'spirit' to their linguistic performance by charging it with their subjective values. What we need here is a more detailed analysis of the interpretive processes underlying a theory of the intradiscursive Subject. Such an analysis should be directly related to the study of the 'communicating Subject', outlined above as a general programming of discourse by an individual as social actor. Attempts in this direction can be found in notions such as 'key' (Hymes, 1974, 1983), 'style' (Coupland, 1988; Sandig, 1988), or 'translocutionary act' (Duranti, 1991). In the light of the above, Communicative Contract Theory may be a promising alternative for the analysis of the sociocognitive mechanisms underlying attribution of meaning. Communicative Contract Theory presupposes that meaning is negotiated in/by communicative interaction: it is the outcome of a co-construction which continuously leaves markers in a system of negotiated references (Casari et al., 1989; Bromberg, 1990). This constant re-triggering can only take place if the social actors engage in cognitive efforts governed by the activation of inferential procedures, or by (at least partially shared) interpretive practices. Obviously, adopting this position calls for a departure from a theoretical framework in which communication is viewed as an exchange of unadulterated information, and for the acceptance of the assumption that communication is a 'concourse of perspectives'. In other words, it is not sufficient to be willing to give or receive information (or knowledge) in order to take part in a communicative event. Rather, participants must be willing to contribute to the interaction by changing their own perspectives as often as required by the conversational dynamics. This dynamics, this fluctuation in meaning, is examined in the next section, where we define the loci where it originates and is negotiated.

4. Diatextual co-ordinates of sense attribution

"Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the thought" (Peirce, 1931-35: 5.314). To fully understand the sense of Peirce's statement, we need to realize how all the levels of semiosis (from the signal to the symptom, from the index to the symbol) naturally participate in the construction of human reality, in order to produce an 'animal symbolicum' (to borrow Ernst Cassirer's felicitous term). However, the processes of semiosis that circumscribe (wo)man's existence sub specie humanitatis appear mainly through the 'order of discourse' (Foucault, 1970). From a systematic point of view, the end products of speech can be analyzed by disarticulating four tectonic strata, those of 'acting', 'meaning', 'communicating', and 'stating' (or 'wording'). In fact, the dialogics of discourse may be adumbrated by pointing out what the interlocutors are doing, what they are intending, how they are related to each other, and why (and to which effect) they say what they are saying in that particular way. The relationships between these strata may be explained by a 'semiotic square' (Greimas and Court~s, 1979). Elsewhere (Mininni, 1995), it has been demonstrated that 'acting' may be opposed to 'meaning', and that 'communicating' may be

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opposed to 'stating', according to the type of intention (more implicit vs. more explicit). Further criteria can organize these structural strata of discourse into relationships of apparent contradiction and complementarity. In any case, these four hierarchized and dynamic layers form a spiral which is both logical and dynamic as Halliday's work in socio-psycho-linguistics shows (1975, 1978). Language acquisition may be viewed as a progressing venture enabling us to act and to mean, to communicate and to state, and leading up to a point where we learn to do all this merely by linking our self-image to our speaking, as we get more and more involved in building the referential world invested by the co-enunciators of our life. From a theoretical point of view, the second and third (inner) layers (meaning and communicating) draw on semiotic pragmatics. The two outer layers (acting and stating) have been analyzed within the framework of pragmalinguistics (Parret, 1984). This movement, an 'Aufhebung' through which pragmalinguistics has an intrinsic interest both in sense and in communication structures, also makes it a cognitive pragmatics. The relationships between signs and their interpreters is related to their 'reciprocal education', as Peirce (1931-1935) originally has pointed out. In other words, the interplay of co-determination which bonds signs and interpreters is primarily identifiable in the cognitive activities and the uses which interpreters make of the potentialities of meaning conveyed by signs. The cognitive pragmatics perspective serves to highlight the morphosyntactic convergence between semiotic knowledge and psychological (social) knowledge. First of all, we know how to identify the nature of the sign as 'interpreting' a function of psychologizing (or mentalizing) processes in the partner; but also, we know how to view systems of signs as 'constructors of reality' (Ghiglione, 1986). This, in particular, goes against the line of argument developed by Caron-Pargue and Caron (1991), which aims at contrasting psychological and sociological matters within pragmatics. From a psycho-socio-pragmatic point of view, discourse is always founded on the activation of cognitive procedures which can be identified in the theoretical space defined by the coordinates of formalization and segmentation. From a procedural point of view, i.e. one that incorporates the contrast between conventional and situational processes, three axes can be defined: the conventional axis, the interpretive axis, and the situational axis. The second axis is directly related to perceiving communication as a 'concourse of perspectives'. These three axes circumscribe the cognitive approach, as they are likely to reveal the psychological mechanisms which correspond to the four structural levels (the 'tectonics') of speech. The overall dynamics which a psycho-socio-pragmatic theory of discourse should account for, is presented in Table 1. The conventional axis covers features that can be segmented and hence formalized by a more or less exhaustive and generative description, since all the linguistic conventions pertain to the domain of norms. The more discourse is conventional (such as for example a diplomatic text (Mininni, 1991)), the more interlocution is governed by predefined agreement. Consequently, what is produced is governed by rules (specific to linguistic acts), by signifiers attested to in dictionaries, by general principles (such as the 'principle of cooperation' or the 'relevance principle'), and by a restricted series of enunciative potentialities. The conventional axis situates what can


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Table 1 The semio-cognitive tectonics of speech Layers of construction

Acting Meaning Communicating Stating

Procedures Conventional

Situational

Interpretive

Rules Denotation Principles Potentials

Strategies Attribution Modalities Versions

Interests Connotation Scenarios Decisions

be 'geometrized' in speech and (hence) reveals what is 'subjected': conventions demonstrate that we are subject to discourse. In contrast, the interpretive axis covers such general discourse features as are difficult to formalize, because they derive from 'style', i.e. idiosyncratic interpretive mechanisms. It is our capacity of identifying specific rules that enables us to make the distinction - which we have internalized in a certain and hence 'conventionalized' way - between the discursive actions of 'requesting someone' and 'ordering'. This highly unpredictable feature stands out in 'literary' registers, which consist of structuring forms of discourse that only disclose their meaning on the interpretive axis. The situational axis covers an intermediary dimension of discourse construction. The identification of a given situation enables us to elaborate action strategies by adapting interests to rules and by developing a plan of meaning attribution through structuring the connotative nuances of the topic. At the communicative stratum, the situational axis highlights the modalities of interaction as a negotiation between the 'consequential' nature of principles and the variable nature of scenarios. In a similar fashion, the enunciative version creates a context-specific synthesis between constraints on potentialities and risks associated with decisions. Evidently, these differences concern all the strata. For example, insofar as the 'acting' stratum is regarded, we may specify rules (as conventional procedures) in a much more formalized and general way than we can do by referring to interests (as interpretive procedures). A middle course is traced out by speech strategies (as situational procedures). Analogously, the meaning stratum may be segmented into denotative units in a much more formalized way than we can do within the widely loose range of connotative nuances. The conflict inherent in the nature of procedures is settled by the attribution powers of a situation defining what a given discourse may mean or not. The remaining strata are ruled out by the same dialectics. In this framework, engaging in discourse is being called upon to handle both the constraints of some definite sets - such as the systems of rules, of denotative units, of principles and of potentials - and the storm of interpretive gusts unleashed by such loosely shaped constellations as interests, connotations, scenarios, and options. When we focus on the conventional axis, we emphasize both the monologic and nomologic features of Discourse Analysis as a set of procedures aiming at account-

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ing for sense attribution. In fact, all the speech conventions may be perceived by individuals as laws of a societal order which are superimposed on their mental framing. By contrast, when we focus on the interpretive axis, we emphasize the hermeneutic and variationistic orientation of Discourse Analysis, since we here try to account for all the largely unforeseeable peculiarities of persons. Bypassing this opposition between the conventional and the interpretive axes, the situational set of procedures can shed light on the psychological operators which make the encounter between the two totally different logics possible.

5. ( W o ) M a n as a ' d i a t e x t e r '

In our opinion, one of the most influential contributions of francophone pragmalinguistics - from Ducrot (1989) to R6canati (1981, 1987), and from Roulet (1981) to Moeschler (1985) - is the clarification of the notions of 'force' (and hence, of those of 'valence' and 'value'); that is to say, the typical dimensions of the speech act now become part of the traditional distinction between 'sense' and 'meaning'. The reference to 'values' simultaneously imposes a shift in interpretive focus: pragmatics is no longer a psychophysics, a mechanics, or an energetics of discourse; it has become a 'socio-gen-ethic' of discourse. When conversation analysis states that interpretive dynamics is crucial, it necessarily turns to a description of interaction in a framework of economic, legal, and moral concepts. Speech is no longer viewed as a space which can be filled, but rather as an interaction which integrates the highly socialized external rules with the idiosyncrasies of the communicating individual. When pragmaticians move from the transcendental analysis of discourse as an 'ideal linguistic situation' (Habermas, 1973) to the study of competing communicative events, they attempt to show in what ways these idiosyncrasies become shared interpretive practices, which then are concretized in a 'reversibility of inferential schemata' (Trognon, 1988). However, this analysis can only be conducted in reference to an external conventionality, thrust into the individual's assessment of a situation as potentially communicative, a situation which from this point of view is built as an exterior scaffolding providing the frame where interpretive interplay will take place. This encounter between the conventional, the situational, and the interpretive can be analyzed in the light of the above-mentioned notion of diatext, which accounts for the anchoring of the situational subject - both individual and social, hence also comprising cultural or ideological organizations and groups - in a 'discourse universe'. The intralocutor, understood both as the socially determined individual who is to become the interlocutor through his or her text, and as the self-image one is building diatextually, has to refer to all the discursive strata. Indeed, he or she is permeated by these strata exactly because he or she interprets the conventions of acting-meaning-vommunicating-stating as manifesting his or her identification with the values inherent in a given situation. Hence, text output necessarily calls for a genuine dialogic, i.e. a mutual confrontation and agreement between the two meaning producing agents: the Subject and the (enunciative) Situation. These agents dialogue with each


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other in and through text inasmuch as they make each other visible and acceptable through discourse cues. This is the effect produced by the textual dia-logic. The notion of diatext is a categorial tool suited to capture the following idealized dialogue: "Are you a subject?" - "Yes, because you are my enunciative context". This imaginary dialogue is an a priori condition of discourse and therefore, we find in any text certain markers recalling its original, generative core; such markers can be summarized in an idealized enunciation of the kind: "In this situation, I have to say that ...". In short, the situational order (as a regulatory criterion) enables the encounter to take place between the conventional schemes and the interpretive ones, because it serves to clarify the cognitive format of 'style', i.e. that 'atmospheric effect' of speech where the individual succeeds in patterning what his or her interlocutor is trying to discover, i.e. his or her Iogos: 'I am here and this is my intention'. Diatext aims at accounting for this process of internalization of both context and identity, which each individual takes on as enunciator, by revealing the transition from the position of intralocutor to that of interlocutor. This is why "the cognitive activity of communicating individuals (...) makes the individual an actor who can 'act on' and not only 'be in' " (Ghiglione, 1990: 222). The intralocutor is affected by the activation of four socio-cognitive modules, which set up the interpretive framework required in all discourse building. The pragmatic mechanisms emerge as psychological operators, since each cognitive model contributes to defining the conditions of the subject in an enunciative situation. Table 2 illustrates these features. It details the socio-cognitive modules which a theory of discourse events should account for. Table 2 Intralocutor diatextual structure Layers

Socio-cognitive modules

Situational values

Acting Meaning Communicating Stating

praxeme ideologeme texteme metaphoreme

motivational value usage value exchange value rhetorical value

These socio-cognitive modules are organized hierarchically, since they are nested from the maximum generality of the praxeme to the maximum specificity of the metaphoreme. They are primarily action-oriented. Above all, discourse is organized around a small number of p r a x e m e s . 7 A praxeme refers to general praxis (the interlocutor's knowledge set). Praxemes thus define discourse as an entity in terms of its motivational values. Motivational values correspond to the assessment an interlocutor can activate at any time in the sequence. In fact, the interpretation of what s/he 7 We borrow this term from Robert Lafont's (1978) concept of "materialistic linguistics', without however adopting the implications or even the presuppositions it entails.

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believes or wants to do through discourse (the praxeme) has a 'thrust' value for the interlocutor because s/he can identify a triggering capacity in a given situation. Here, speakers identify a ' p r a x e m e ' because they identify a situation as potentially triggering an action. For example, when two friends meet, not having seen each other for some time, their interpretation of the context prompts them to 'recount' their experiences (in a more or less detailed, and more or less accurate fashion). The praxeme is the socio-cognitive module which enables the interlocutor to engender discourse as a linguistic macro-act. Signifiers occurring by or in discourse are composed of ideologemes, since they are assigned a certain usage value by the situational subject. When friends provide an account, the exchange serves to strengthen the friendship status in their cultural system. The cognitive module of the ideologeme thus reflects the sociological value of discourse. The texteme module defines the interpretive framework speakers use to assign an exchange value to a situation which is perceived as meaningful (and hence potentially communicative). More precisely, in terms of our socio-cognitive modules, the texteme corresponds to an act which is manifest through different texts. The texteme updates the notion of 'genre' by using, on the basis of the morphological model of the phoneme, cognitive references to 'types of text' that can occur in different 'communicative action games' (Schmidt, 1973). Lastly, the cognitive module of the 'metaphoreme '~ corresponds to the necessity for the discourse subject to assign a potentially felicitous rhetorical value to what s/he says. This is how Biihler's statement (1934) "At the roots of verbal language is metaphor" should be interpreted. (In fact, Btihler has been considered by Caussat (1992) as a psycho-semiotician 'ante litteram'.) This leads us to the well-known conclusion that metaphor is a figure of speech, seen as 'logos' (both 'thought' and 'speech'), since it reveals the need for inference as its operational basis. In addition, this type of utterance corresponds to a category of implicit pragmatics, 'shared knowledge' (Sales-Wuillemin, 1991), founded on the encyclopedic knowledge of the discourse partners. A metaphoric utterance places in the foreground what normally is in the background of exchanges: shared knowledge and the activation of abductive procedures (Mininni, 1989).

The relevance of 'metaphor' as a cognitive module characterizing discourse can be seen in the paradoxical intersection of approaches highlighted by contributions in psycholinguistics and 'metaphorology'. Recently, linguists and semiologists have tended to stress that the production of metaphors does not really depend on the fact that they produce 'figures of speech', but rather that they embody thought - both as the interweaving of conceptual fields and as reasoning processes (see Lakoff, 1986; Diller, 1991). In contrast, although psychologists see the same class inclusion mechanism operating in metaphors, they nevertheless refer to a number of laws of linguistic pragmatics to account for the argumentative effects due to analogical thought.

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6. An illustration An interesting illustration of the argument proposed here can be found in what may be called 'Cossiga Discourse '9 (il Cossighese). Francesco Cossiga played the role of a 'mute and grey' President of the Republic of Italy for five years. In contrast, the last two years of his seven-year term were replete with speeches: almost every day, the mass media were 'required' to report what Cossiga had to say. This radical change in behavior was primarily caused by a judge's suspicions concerning his involvement in the N A T O defense system (the 'Gladio affair'), which in fact turned out to be an entire counter-insurgency scheme directed by the CIA. From this point on, Cossiga felt obliged to talk. Cossiga on the verge of speaking is an intralocutor - a subject on the threshold of the discourse he will produce for two years - and can be described as such by the sociocognitive modules. Cossiga is a praxeme because his new situation forces him to defend himself. His speeches are designed to attack the judiciary, make the army squirm, ridicule lawmakers; however, it is clear that he is doing this in order to defend himself (or better even, to pretend to be defending himself). Once the discursive action schema (the praxeme) has been activated by the motivational value assigned to the situation, the next move to be completed by the intralocutor is to render it meaning-ful. By discovering the utility value of a given content, the intralocutor identifies the information that can be used for his goals (the ideologeme). Hence, 'Cossiga Discourse' can only make reference (and does this practically inevitably) to the judicial sovereignty of the Head of State, to the shortcomings of the Constitution, to a world divided into factions, the heated debate of the dog years, etc. Naturally, the assignment of meaning which gives rise to Cossiga's efforts to avoid possible impeachment is adapted to various textemes, since the textual connection procedures used by Cossiga are adapted to his various functions: whether he is defending himself while presiding over the Supreme Court or when writing to the National Assembly, while talking to reporters or educating the young. In all these cases, the ideologemes are negotiated by the intralocutor, at least inasmuch as they take the presumed exchange value of the context into account. Once the interpretation of the situation values has activated a discourse action schema and has filled it with a certain ideological content that can be employed in the appropriate texture, the intralocutor reaches the enunciative target by linking his or her speech to an image (the metaphoreme) or better still, by embodying his or her own view of society into the (external) speech. This is how the President of the Republic could insist on the pressing need for radical institutional reforms, forcing him (as he said) to 'take the pickaxe' to knock

9 A similar expression, Takeshita-go ('Takeshita speech'), is found in the case of the former Prime Minister of Japan (see Maynard, 1994). This reference has been brought to our attention by Jacob Mey, who helped me to greatly improve the writing of this article. He accepted to become involved in a diatextual working-out of our ideas, and I owe him many important suggestions. Obviously, it is only due to my stubborn trust in the self-referential nature of pragmatic venture that I (intentionally?) allowed the text to appear charged by a few over-loaded metaphors or even some dark allusions, in order to spur a similar diatextual contribution from other, equally friendly readers. (G.M.)

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down certain restrictions imposed by the Constitution, restrictions which no longer responded to the current needs of the people. After this utterance, all of his speeches were qualified as 'blows of the pickaxe' and since Cossiga's speeches were wont to increase considerably in frequence whenever he went abroad, he became known as the 'carrier pigeon'.l°

7. Conclusion

The production of meaning is the outcome of a collective, joint activity based on tacit agreement, renewable negotiations, and validatable contracts. Nevertheless, in this confrontation there is always some unpredictability, owing to the intralocutor's diatextual organization - a feature we have stressed in the exposition above. Attempts at analyzing discourse are efforts to raise issues as to the loci and prime moments when the Subject makes the connection between him/herself and his/her 'meaning plan', and that locus where he/she wishes to encounter the other's inner self. These intra- and inter-locutor ties arise from certain cognitive procedures of holistic elaboration. The 'atmosphere effects' that emerge throughout speech can be characterized in traditional terms by statements as vague as "Style is the person", or "The key to understanding his/her discourse is its apodictic (or uncertain, aggressive, evasive, persuasive ...) character". Such statements not only claim that there are instances of meaning production which are un-determined, but also that we can identify the quality of being an intralocutor as the action of instilling the 'spirit' in his or her discourse. To bridge over the traditional, referentialist view of context, we have put forward the notion of 'diatext' which, in line with the constructionist view, attempts to trace the contours of a dynamic spectrum of dialogic forces, enabling a given shared situation to be cognitively translated, while an enunciative interaction is running its course. The intralocutor projects a series of general procedures for text programming onto a series of contextual mechanisms for auto-evaluating the enunciation. A number of psychological notions (such as that of 'script') aim at clarifying - as much as possible - what, in the opacity of enunciation, can only appear as the 'subtlety' of speech. Since the concept of 'intralocutor' is the means by which we can exhibit the connection between the social subject and his/her speech, an exhaustive analysis of content should ideally pinpoint the linguistic markers which show or demonstrate - how the enunciation situation has been internalized by the interlocutors; - which images of Self and Other have been instituted in and by speech. In conclusion, unusual though it may seem, the pragmatic approach developed here requires that language production and comprehension be framed by interpretive computation procedures. The interlocutory mechanism enables us to cope with the 'co-construction of reference worlds' (Charaudeau, 1989), since the string of inter-

m In italian, the pair 'piccone/piccione"(pickaxe/pigeon)forms a pun.


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pretants which can be activated in the unlimited semiosis of speech is open to a not fully predictable situation. By identifying some diatextual markers (such as praxemes, ideologemes, textemes, and metaphoremes), we are able to penetrate the logos of the intralocutor.

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