New research perspectives in post-Guillaumian linguistics: cognematics and interlocutivity.

Colloque : Towards a History Of Sound-Symbolic Theories (THOSST2014), P. Monneret & L. Nobile (org.), Université de Dijon, 20-21 février 2014, à paraîtreOne of the foundations of Gustave Guillaume’s (1883-1960) Psychomechanics is the idea that language is the product of the combination of two indissociable structures, the semiological structure (the signifier1) and the psychic structure (the signified), linked by a “congruency” relation (Guillaume 1971: 170):A principle adhered to by all the languages in their construction is that of congruency or, in other words, the matching between the signifier and the signified. The signifier is an act of speech, the signified an act of thought, and the structure of a language, and its very existence, presuppose a sufficient agreement – which will never be excessive (and which may always grow) between an act of speech and an act of thought.The idea of congruency between the semiological structure and the psychic structure constitutes a breakthrough in its time, while perfectly reproducing the “Saussurean division of the sign”. We shall focus here on the relationship between both: indeed, the problem of the transition from phonation to semantics has provoked a major theoretical evolution in Hispanic linguistics of Guillaumian inspiration, from the 1980s to the 2000s, with the emergence of the field called today the “linguistics of the signifier”. This paper will mainly focus on grammatical signifiers