Semantics of enunciation, metasemantics and writing acquisition

Abstract

This article aims to present the relationship between the author's reading of Benveniste's theory of language and his analyses of writing acquisition from a semiological-enunciative perspective. To this end, it first outlines a retrospective analysis of two fronts of significance research, termed by Émile Benveniste the semantics of enunciation and metasemantics. Next, we propose a prospective reading of these two fronts with a view to analyzing children's writing. After that, we proceed to an empirical demonstration of the proposal partially outlined in the previous section. The results allow us to methodologically characterize this proposed understanding of becoming a writer in terms of theoretical perspective, object of study, methodological approach, and unit of analysis. This is a metasemantic perspective whose object of study is the establishment, in language, of the child as writer and reader and the establishment, in the child, of language as a system of signs and written discourse that semiologically remodels this system. The methodological approach is a translinguistic analysis of enunciative fragments as complex forms of discourse unfolding on two levels: one linked to the process of written enunciation (which includes the child-other dialogue) and the other linked to the written utterance resulting from this process. This analysis begins with the formal framework of enunciation in discourse (act, situation, instruments) but goes beyond, aiming to produce knowledge about humankind, more specifically, a new explanation for its constitution as homo loquens scriptor.