Enunciating with Jacqueline Authier-Revuz
The 2020-2021 academic year has come to an end, although most of it has taken place at a distance. As is customary at the University of Lausanne, it closes with the Dies Academicus ceremony, held under the banner of uncertainty. Among the three honorary doctorates awarded on this occasion, one, proposed by the Faculty of Letters, honors a French linguist of international renown: Jacqueline Authier-Revuz. In her own words, the University of Lausanne is honoring her,
an exceptional contribution to the analysis of enunciation, as part of a profound and original reflection, in dialogue with the whole of the human and social sciences, on the way subjects are constituted in language and discourse.
University of Lausanne, Dies Academicus, 2021.
Professor emeritus at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Jacqueline Authier-Revuz has a special relationship with the Université de Lausanne, in particular with the French Linguistics Unit, which calls on her work and draws on her interdisciplinary approach to language. This attachment took root in the 1980s, when the Department of Public Instruction of the Canton of Vaud asked her to conduct an expert appraisal as part of the pedagogical reform of French language teaching. This mandate provided her with a number of studies, as well as food for thought for her entire body of work, inaugurated by a landmark first work that renewed the sciences of language: Ces mots qui ne vont pas de soi : boucles réflexives et non-coïncidences du dire (1995).
A specialist in the linguistics of enunciation, in recent years she has reformulated the theory of reported discourse. Her work includes the concept of “Representation of the Discourse Other” (RDA), masterfully developed in her latest groundbreaking work: La Représentation du Discours Autre: principes pour une description (2020). Of rare scope and precision, this book attests, according to Claire Doquet, that the RDA
is inscribed in language, in the Saussurian sense of the term, and [is] governed by a specific system of distinctiveness that ensures its operationality at the subjective and enunciative levels. The exhaustive study of RDA forms, apprehended from the triple syntactic, semantic and enunciative point of view, makes visible the strata of enunciation that RDA cuts out.
Claire Doquet,“La Représentation du Discours Autre: principes pour une description, by Jacqueline Authier-Revuz”, Genesis 51, 2021.
In Renouvaud, you’ll find a thematic selection of Jacqueline Authier-Revuz’s multiple enunciations.
