Subversion of Language Structure in Heterogeneous Speech Communities: the Work of Discourse and the Part of Contact

International audienceFor a long time (and in some way it is still the case) the scholastic tradition considered languagechange as an ungraceful deformation of the existing patterns. Indeed, change represented the dangerof compromising the social order established by the standard norm; that is what Manessy (1989)expressed by the term of "subversion" in one of his articles about French in Africa. In another way,contact and interference phenomena still imply ‘subversion’ in Weinreich’s point of view, as far asbilingual proficiency is the ability to keep the two languages apart (Weinreich 1953:3).The underlying assumption is the structuralist dogma that human languages are stable sets ofunits and combination rules. Contact involves subversion in the sense that the encounter with analien system leaves traces in the language under consideration. Essentially, the problem is to provewhat seems to be an evident observation: as languages do not exist by themselves, they cannot be incontact. Only speakers and speech communities are effectively in contact, by interacting in concretesituations. If the so-called ‘language contact’ takes place in interactions, it would be impossible toobserve language contact directly, and the concept could even less explain directly what is going on.The aim of our contribution is to render the assumption explicit that change is an ongoingprocess constitutive of human language to which we will refer by the term of dynamics. We willdiscuss how the general tendency of grammatical ‘systems’ to autonomize by promoting their own,‘self-contained’ (Croft 1995) logic is counter-balanced through the subversion that occurs ineveryday’s elaboration of discourse. We will work out how mere interaction conditions thelanguage dynamics and how the disposable structural resources will be coordinated in microsystemsthat can be traced back to different typological sources. Our purpose will be illustrated by anexample from the contact between French and Manding languages in Ivory Coast