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39 | 2013
L'agentivité, vol. II

Interactions, grammaire et narrativité
Agency: Interactions, Grammar and Narrativity
Edited by Valentina Vapnarsky, Aurore Monod Becquelin and Michel de Fornel

The first volume, entitled L’agentivité : ethnologie et linguistique à la poursuite du sens (Agency: Ethnology and Linguistics in Pursuit of Meaning, Ateliers d’anthropologie, 34|2010), offered materials mainly from Amerindian cultures in order to incorporate into an ethnolinguistics project the study of relations between human beings and all of the other entities with which they engage in linguistic, sound and gestural interactions, in the context of rituals and everyday life. Ethnosyntax provided a theoretical perspective conducive to these studies, which were the product of discussions at an LESC seminar that brought together ethnologists and linguists “in pursuit of meaning”.
In the second volume, the contributors delve deeper into the study of actions and transactions among humans as well as between humans and non-humans, while endeavouring to clarify what defines the relations of agency in each case analysed. The approach aims to free itself from an intentionalist and subjectivist model of action, by exploring other aspects of the game (type of causality, control, induction, engagement, responsibility…). It is a relational and contextual perspective that gives a central role to language.
The contributions, which concern Amazonian and Mesoamerican societies, examine these transactions in their significative materiality, focusing on the semantic and paradigmatic characteristics of communication (ritual, narrative and conversational) as well as on the grammatical properties of agency, which bring to light textual, dialogical and interactional studies of specific communication contexts. The articles analyse forms of causality involved in various types of narration or ritual interaction; they examine terms and grammatical constructions—varying according to the language—that, on a semantic level, could encode social and cultural significations; they highlight the sharing between that which belongs strictly to the syntax and that which can be attributed to discursive and enunciative strategies; they scrutinise the links between actions, gestures and words (from explicit gestural and ritual pragmatics to unconscious routines, from lexicons to syntactic structures); they search for what constitutes and develops illocutionary acts. The diverse authors consider how and at what levels of cognitive depth linguistic analysis can connect with anthropological analysis.
 
Contributors: Cédric Becquey, Éliane Camargo, Patrick Deshayes, Laurent Fontaine, Michel de Fornel, Aurore Monod Becquelin, Perig Pitrou, Valentina Vapnarsky

Editor's notes

En raison de problèmes de formatage des exemples, nous vous conseillons de lire les articles à l'écran, en version html, plutôt que de les télécharger en pdf.

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