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Between semiotics and pragmatics: Opening languagestudies to textual agency

Francois Cooren *

Universite de Montreal, Departement de Communication, CP 6127, Succursale Centre-Ville,Montreal, Que. H3C 3J7, Canada

Received 26 September 2005; received in revised form 6 April 2006; accepted 26 November 2006

Abstract

This paper examines how pragmatics and semiotics intersect by unveiling what I claim to be a blind spotin language studies, i.e. objects’ textual agency. By textual agency I mean the capacity to produce speechacts or, more broadly, discursive acts, a capacity that has traditionally been ascribed solely to human actors.As shown in this paper, a semiotic approach to communication allows us to open up the traditional speaker–hearer schema by showing how textual entities can also be said to be doing something discursively. Inkeeping with the semiotic openness to non-linguistic objects, while acknowledging the incarnateddimension of communication, as highlighted by pragmaticians, I show that pragmatics could thereforebenefit from opening its perspective to textual agency. Building on Sbisa’s work on speech act theory andwhat Descombes identifies as tetravalent structures, I show to what extent a given speech act can beattributed not only to the person who produced it, but also to the textual entity he or she produced. It isprecisely this logic of imbrication and representation that allows us to open up the traditional speaker/hearerschema by highlighting the chain of agencies that pervade any interactional situation.# 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Speech act theory; Diathesis; Marina Sbisa; Valences; Lucien Tesniere; Agency

1. Introduction

This paper investigates the intersection between pragmatics and semiotics by highlightingwhatcould be called a blind spot in language studies, i.e. objects’ textual agency. While pragmaticstudies tend to be focused on language use between two or more interlocutors in a given situation,semiotics does not hesitate to analyze the functioning of various objects – paintings, architectural

www.elsevier.com/locate/pragmaJournal of Pragmatics 40 (2008) 1–16

* Tel.: +1 514 343 6111x2759; fax: +1 514 343 2298.

E-mail address: [email protected].

0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2006.11.018


elements, pictures, signs – without having recourse to the classical speaker–hearer schema. Inkeeping with the semiotic openness to non-linguistic objects, while acknowledging the incarnateddimension of communication, as highlighted by pragmaticians, I will show that pragmaticscould benefit from opening its perspective to non-human agency (Cooren, 2000, 2005a). If, asSbisa (1987, 2002) rightly shows, speech acts can be more generally considered social actions(see also Geis, 1995), it should be worth exploring how various artifacts can be said to dosomething in given situations, especially when this doing implies actions like ‘‘stating’’(assertive), ‘‘guaranteeing,’’ (commissive), ‘‘suggesting’’ (directive), ‘‘sanctioning’’ (declaration)or ‘‘rewarding’’ (expressive).

Following Greimas (1983) and Tesniere (1959), I contend that any utterance can be analyzedas a little drama, in which different characters – called actants – are involved on a scene thatrepresents the actional circumstances. Of interest for pragmaticians are, of course, trivalent verbs,since they involve an agent (or prime actant), an object (or second actant) and a recipient (or thirdactant), and include what Tesniere calls ‘‘verbs of saying’’ and ‘‘verbs of giving.’’ But the mostinteresting case comes from what Descombes (2004) identifies as tetravalent structures, whichinvolve four actants. Although no verb in any language seems to correspond to this type ofstructure, it actually refers to the phenomenon of factitiveness (Greimas and Courtes, 1982), i.e.causing to do, when applied to trivalent verbs, as in ‘‘X makes Y tell W to Z.’’ In this sentence,what appears to be Y’s action (telling) can now be attributed to X, that is, Y is the agent, while Xis the principal.1 It is precisely this logic of imbrication (Taylor and Van Every, 2000) andrepresentation that allows us to open up the traditional speaker/hearer schema by highlighting thechain of agencies that pervade any interactional situation.

2. Semiotics and pragmatics

Although pragmatics and semiotics can be said to represent two different theoreticaltraditions – the first being mostly focused on the functioning of signs, while the second highlightsthe practical effects of language use – there is a very interesting body of research that currentlyexplores the intersection of these two approaches. Arguably, this intersection finds its source inthe work of a scholar who has been identified as the founder of these two theoretical movements,namely Charles Sanders Peirce. Indeed, even if semiotics can be broadly defined as the study ofmeaning (Greimas, 1983), some semioticians like Carontini (1984) have pointed out, followingPeirce, that such a study actually consists in analyzing the sign’s action, i.e. what Peirce calls‘‘semiosis.’’ As will be shown, such a definition immediately parallels the pragmatic project ofstudying language from an actional perspective.

For instance, Morris (1938) notes that pragmatics, which he defines as one of the threebranches of semiosis, can be defined as the study of the relation between signs and theirinterpreters, i.e. ‘‘that branch of semiotic which studies the origin, the uses and the effects ofsigns’’ (Morris, 1938:365). However, many differences can also be highlighted between the twodisciplines. In terms of object, semioticians do not hesitate to study images, traces or narratives,while pragmaticians tend to focus primarily on utterances and their meanings in given face toface contexts. In other words, everything happens as though pragmaticians had co-opted the

F. Cooren / Journal of Pragmatics 40 (2008) 1–162

1 Note that the distinction between principal and agent parallels Greimas’s (1987) distinction between ‘‘destinateur’’

(sender) and ‘‘sujet’’ (subject). In both cases we speak about someone or something (subject—agent) who/that acts in the

name of someone or something else (sender—principal).


study of language use as it takes place between two or more interlocutors, while semioticians haddecided to focus primarily on the functioning of relatively inert objects like tales, paintings, orpictures, outside any specific communicational situation.

In terms of approach, one could also note that semioticians tend to hold an immanentistperspective, i.e. the idea that the semiotic functioning of an object is to be found in the objectitself (paralleling the Saussurian project as taken up and elaborated by Hjemslev), whereaspragmaticians will, on the contrary, insist on the importance of resorting to extra-linguisticfactors to account for utterances meanings and their effects on interpreters (Levinson, 1983; Mey,1993, 1998). Paradoxically, semioticians can therefore be said to be closer in their approach totraditional linguistics (see for instance Greimas, 1983, 1987, 1988; Greimas and Courtes, 1982;Greimas and Fontanille, 1993), while pragmaticians’ work usually implicitly questions theimmanentist doctrine (see for instance Mey, 1988, 1993).

Having highlighted these differences, we can claim that, far from being incompatible,semiotics and pragmatics have much to say to each other, as evidenced by the work of renownedscholars such as Enrico Carontini (1984), Hermann Parret (1983), and especially Marina Sbisa(1994, 2001, 2002), as well as some events organized in order to prompt dialogue between thesetwo traditions (for instance, see Deledalle, 1989). Following Sbisa (2002), we can contend, forinstance, that the systematic study of speech act sequences could especially benefit fromGreimas’s (1983, 1987, 1988) narrative theory to the extent that his focus on action andsequentiality allows us to explain how interaction is temporally organized in specific schematicforms (see also Cooren, 2000; Cooren and Fairhurst, 2004).

Although such parallels will be mobilized in what follows, this paper will especially highlightone specific aspect of language use that seems somewhat neglected by pragmatic studies, but canhowever benefit from a semiotic approach, i.e. what could be called ‘‘objects’ textual agency.’’By textual agency I mean the capacity to produce speech acts or, more broadly, discursive acts;a capacity that has traditionally been ascribed solely to human actors. As I will show, a semioticapproach to communication allows us to open up the traditional speaker–hearer schema byshowing how many different non-humans can also be said to be doing something discursively.But first, we need to start by reconceptualizing the traditional interactional situation. Thisreconceptualization is offered by Sbisa (1983).

3. Speech acts as social action

Marina Sbisa has systematically explored the contribution of Greimassian semiotics topragmatics for the past 25 years. A specialist of Austin’s (1975) work (she is co-editor, withJ.O. Urmson, of the second edition of How to do Things with Words published in 1975),her perspective consists, among other things, in offering an alternative to the intentionalistapproach proposed by John Searle and his followers, which she associates with what she calls the‘‘one-place model’’ of speech acts (Sbisa and Fabbri, 1980). To this model, mainly focused onthe speaker’s intention and its recognition by the interlocutor, she opposes what she terms the‘‘two-place model,’’ which amounts to positioning the recipient as an active participant who

(i) select[s] an acceptable interpretation of the speech act, and (ii) . . .either accept[s] thespeech act, under such an interpretation, as a successful act, or . . . completely or partlyreject[s] it as more or less inappropriate and ‘unhappy.’ (p. 305)

According to this perspective, parallel to the one defended by other pragmaticians like Arundale(1999, 2005) and Levinson (1981, 1983) or conversation analysts like Schegloff (1988), one

F. Cooren / Journal of Pragmatics 40 (2008) 1–16 3


should rather analyze speech acts as ‘‘interactional moves’’ (Sbisa and Fabbri, 1980:312)by focusing on what people are not only doing but also becoming when interacting with eachother.

This approach therefore consists in highlighting how the hearer/reader appears to interpretwhat the speaker/writer did in saying or writing something, an interpretation that can be revealedby the way the hearer/reader displays her understanding in the next turns, a move that can lead, ofcourse, to repair sequences (cf. Heritage, 1984; Schegloff, 1988). By focusing on discursiveaction, this model also enables us to analyze what kinds of change are brought about in therelation between the participants, as it tends to highlight the fact that speech acts are socialactions that consist in transforming the interactants’ identity2 (cf. also Geis, 1995). For Sbisa(1994), this perspective is actually close to the one that was, at least implicitly, promoted byAustin (1975).

As she reminds us repeatedly (Sbisa, 1984, 1987, 1989, 2001, 2002), Austin points out that theeffect that an illocutionary act brings about should not be reduced, as Searle (1969, 1979) claims,to the securing of uptake (or ‘‘illocutionary effect’’ in Searle’s terminology3), but must also takeinto account two other effects: the production of conventional effects as well as the effect ofprompting a response or sequel (see Austin, 1975:116–117). She writes:

In this perspective, the hearer’s understanding of the force is viewed as necessary to thesuccessful performance of the speaker’s act, and therefore to the production of itsconventional effects. The addressee has to take the speech act as a promise, an order, astatement. . ., if it is to count as a promise (and create an obligation), an order (and assign anobligation), a statement (and formulate a verifiable/falsifiable piece of knowledge). Theinterlocutor’s role is no longer passive, confined to mirroring the speaker’s intention, butinvolves participation in determining the successfulness of the speaker’s illocutionary act.(Sbisa, 1994:162)

In other words, Sbisa’s model consists of highlighting the production of changes in conventionalstates of affairs, a production that leads to the transformation of the addressee’s identity in termsof rights and obligations if this latter deems the speech act to be felicitous.

To illustrate this position, one could, for instance, take up this excerpt from Schegloff(1988):


2 By this, I mean that each speech act brings about some change in the way the interlocutors are defined and identified.For instance, when a sergeant orders a private to clean the latrines, the private’s identity and sergeant’s identity are

changed to the extent that the private is now ordered to clean the latrines and the sergeant has now given an order to the

private. A priori, this does not add much to our comprehension of what is happening, but such changes can, of course,

have very important consequences. In our case, should the private decline to follow this order that he just received, hecould be recriminated and punished for insubordination. Such insubordination only makes sense if we acknowledge that

the private’s identity has changed upon receiving this order (for more details, see Cooren, 2000). As wewill see later, such

conceptions of identity are perfectly congruent with Peirce’s (1898/1992) doctrine of internal relations.3 Speaking of illocutionary effect, Searle (1979) writes, ‘‘In the case of illocutionary acts, we succeed in doing what we

are trying to do by getting our audience to recognize what we are trying to do. But the effect on the hearer is not a belief or

response, it consists simply in the hearer understanding the utterance of the speaker. It is this effect that I have been calling

the illocutionary effect’’ (p. 47). Illocutionary effects thus have to be distinguished from perlocutionary effects to theextent that perlocutions involve the person’s reaction to what she understood, which ultimately involves her freedom. For

instance, if I ask someone to pass me the salt, the uptake (or illocutionary effect) for Searle consists of my interlocutor

understanding that I am asking her to pass me the salt. If she decides to pass me the salt and does pass it to me, this

qualifies as a perlocutionary effect. This is ultimately based on the fact that comprehension is not a voluntary act.


(1)Mother: Do you know who’s going to that meeting? T1Russ: Who. T2Mother: I don’t kno:w T3Russ: Oh::. Prob’ly Missiz McOwen (‘n detsa) en T4

Prob’ly Missiz Cadry and some of the teachers.(0.4) and the counselors (pp. 57–58)

As we see in this example, Russ initially understood his mother’s question at T1 as a request forinformation about his state of knowledge, a request that ultimately functions, for him, as apre-announcement. His understanding is displayed at T2 when he responds, ‘‘Who,’’ whichimplicitly means that he does not know who would be worth an announcement on his mother’spart. In other words, for Russ, his mother’s question at T1 counts as a pre-announcement, that is amove by which his mother is checking if what she is about to announce at T3 is already known byher son (Cooren, 2005a).

What is interesting in this excerpt is that his mother actually meant her question at T1 as arequest for information, and not as a pre-announcement. As we understand at T3, she does notknow who is going to that meeting (I don’t kno:w), which means that she wonders if her son Russwould happen to know this information. The confusion comes from the fact that apre-announcement and a request for information can be conventionally performed by usingthe same type of utterance: Do you know + question. For instance, one could imagine that theinteraction could have evolved as follows:

(2)Mother: Do you know who’s going to that meeting? T1Russ: Who. T2Mother: Missiz McOwen (‘n detsa) en prob’ly T3

Missiz Cadry and some of the teachers.Russ Oh great! T4

As we see in this invented sequence, no repair takes place, since Russ and his mother seem toimplicitly agree on what T1 counts as, i.e. a pre-announcement.What Mother is doing at T1 in (2)is checking if her son already knows who is going to the meeting, an action she performs byasking a question about his state of knowledge. Upon hearing her son asking, ‘‘Who’’ at T2, sheunderstands that he does not know who is going to be at the meeting and then makes herannouncement at T3.

As shown in excerpts (1) and (2), and as pointed out by Sbisa (1987, 2002), agreement(even implicit) is necessary between the interlocutors in order for a speech act to be consideredperformed. Because of the conventional dimension of any speech act (including thenon-institutional ones), interlocutors ultimately have to implicitly or explicitly agree on whatwas actually done, otherwise misunderstanding and/or sequences of repair take place. Asillustrated in excerpt (1), it is only when Russ realizes that he misunderstood his mother’s initialquestion that an agreement on what T1 counts as can implicitly take place between the twoparticipants. It is therefore Russ who ultimately determines the successfulness of his mother’srequest for information. As we see, intention is something that is reconstructed a posteriori by theparticipants and not something that defines a priori what a given speech act will count as (see alsoArundale, 1999, 2005).



Furthermore, by identifying illocutionary acts as social actions yielding results, Sbisaalso allows us to extend the analysis of speech acts to cases that, by definition, would havegone unnoticed in Searle’s (1969, 1979) intentionalist perspective. One such case is, forinstance, what happens when the addressee orients to what was said or written by ascribingagency to entities that are supra- or infra-individual. Speaking of an interactional situationinvolving two participants (P1 being the agent and P2 the patient or recipient), Sbisa (1987)writes:

Our P1 can be a human individual, an infra-individual instance (e.g., the Unconscious), asuper-individual construction (class, party, society, church, and the like), and even apersonified natural agent. (p. 259)

While ascribing agency to these entities would be unthinkable from an intentionalist perspective,Sbisa’s two-place model shows that while P2 must be a human being (or at least a being capableof identifying and interpreting actions, whether discursive or physical), P1 does NOT have to behuman (see also Cooren, 2000).4

In keeping with the semiotic openness to non-human agency (Greimas, 1983; Greimas andCourtes, 1982), Sbisa’s conventional perspective thus paves the way to an extended version ofspeech act theory in which beings other than humans can be said to do things with words. Whatremains crucial in this acknowledgement is how the addressee orients to what is done, that is,what kind of entity she selects as being the agent. However, before going further into thiscontroversial question, we need to go back to Greimas (1983) and to one linguist whose work wasdecisive in the development of his narrative theory: Lucien Tesniere (1959).

4. Dramatism and multivalence

As we know, Sbisa’s reconceptualization of speech act theory stems from Greimas’s (1987)semiotic model, which among other things consists in identifying the sequential aspectsof action, especially in narratives, but also in other forms of discourse (for instance, see hisanalyses of a recipe (Greimas, 1987) or of legal discourse (Greimas, 1990)). For Greimas,semiotics should first be considered a theory of how texts produce meaning, i.e. what hecalls a theory of signification, and not strictly a theory of signs. In other words, his goal isto identify the conditions under which meaning emerges in the sequentiality of action,which can be identified in narratives and other forms of discourse. Interestingly enough,Greimas’s own model partly stems from the work of the French linguist Lucien Tesniere (1959),whose main idea consisted in comparing each sentence he was analyzing to a spectacle ormini-drama.


4 Regarding the question of non-human agency, we could establish a parallel with the figure of metonymy, as analyzed,

for instance, by cognitive linguists like Lakoff and Johnson (1980). As we know, metonymy consists of speaking of anentity to refer to another entity that is considered to be associated with it. These entities can be individual or collective,

human or non-human. For instance, we will say, ‘‘Washington decided that. . .’’ to speak about the decision made by the

president of the United States and/or his associates. Here, Washington represents or stands for the president and/or his

associates. Even if the question of non-human agency can be associated with this specific trope, it cannot be reduced to it.For instance, when I say ‘‘This book moved me,’’ I may mean that it is, in fact, the person who wrote this article who

moved me, but I may also just mean what I said, that it is this specific book that moved me, and not its author, even if I

know who wrote the book. In other words, recognizing non-human agency goes beyond the recognition of a trope, since

sometimes there is no metonymic trope associated with this recognition.


For Tesniere (1959), each sentence that we hear or read involves an action from whichdifferent characters, called actants, can be identified, as well as circumstantial indicators. As hewrites,

The verbal node found in most European languages. . . expresses a small drama in itself.Like a drama, it indeed necessarily includes a process, and most often actors andcircumstances. Transposed from the plane of dramatic reality to that of structural syntax,the process, the actors and the circumstances respectively become the verb, the actants, andthe circumstantial indicators. (p. 102, my translation)

Starting from this intuition, Tesniere then shows how verbs of action can be differentiatedaccording to their valence, that is, the number of actants that appear to be attached to them. Thisleads him to identify four types of verbs, which he calls avalent, monovalent (or intransitive),divalent (or transitive), and trivalent (or ditransitive) verbs (see also Cooren, 2000; Fillmore,1988; Goldberg, 1995; Lakoff, 1987; Taylor and Van Every, 2000).

According to this analysis, ‘‘raining’’ is an avalent verb, since it describes ‘‘a process whichtakes place by itself’’ (p. 106, my translation), as we can see in ‘‘It rains’’ or ‘‘Il pleut.’’Concerning monovalent verbs, such as ‘‘falling down,’’ they describe ‘‘a process in which onlyone person or thing participates’’ (p. 106, my translation), as in ‘‘Bob fell down’’ or‘‘Bob tomba,’’ where Bob is called a prime actant (or agent), i.e. the one who (or that) isrepresented as carrying out the action. As for divalent verbs (e.g. eating), they describe a processinvolving two actants, as in ‘‘Bob ate the apple’’ or ‘‘Bob mangea la pomme,’’ where Bob and theapple are, respectively, identified as the prime and second actants, the second actant (or object)being the one that is represented as supporting the action (cf. also pp. 242–255). Finally, trivalentverbs (like ‘‘giving’’) describe ‘‘a process in which three persons or things participate’’ (p. 107,my translation), as in ‘‘Bob gave an apple to George’’ or ‘‘Bob donna une pomme a George,’’where Bob, the apple and George, respectively, are the prime, second, and third actants, the thirdactant (or recipient) being the one to whose advantage or detriment the action is performed(cf. also pp. 255–259).

Since this typology claims to apply to any verb of action, it seems reasonable to think thatspeech acts may be analyzed according to this perspective. As Cooren (2000) and Descombes(1996, 2001, 2004) note, Tesniere (1959) indeed points out that the category of trivalent verbscorrespond with what he calls ‘‘verbes de dire’’ (verbs of saying) and ‘‘verbes de don’’ (verbs ofgiving), which themselves include verbs that Austin (1975) and Searle (1979) identify asperformative. The list of verbs of saying includes:

Say, pronounce, express, describe, report, recount, present, explain, teach, demonstrate,prove, specify, mark, declare, proclaim, confirm, assert, deny, maintain, assure, certify,guarantee, swear, mean, order, command, assign, recommend, indicate, mention, insinuate,suggest, whisper, put forward, concede, confide, allow, ask, . . . answer, hush up, hide,confess, uncover, reveal, denounce, disclose, announce, communicate, tell, repeat, broodover, recite, churn out, cite (p. 256, my translation, see also Cooren, 2000:89).

As we see in this list, performative verbs like ‘‘asking’’ or ‘‘guaranteeing’’ are consideredtrivalent because they describe a process involving three actants: an agent, an object and arecipient, as in ‘‘George asked Bob to come here’’ or ‘‘Martha guaranteed Nancy that this car wasbrand new.’’ In both cases, we see that these sentences consist in describing a process (or action)involving an agent (respectively, George and Martha), an object (respectively, the request tocome here and the guarantee that this car was new) and a recipient (respectively, Bob and Nancy).



Utterances like ‘‘Come here’’ addressed by George to Bob or ‘‘This car is brand new!’’ addressedby Martha to Nancy in specific contexts can thus be analyzed as speech acts that consist in askingand guaranteeing something.

The list of verbs of giving is also informative:Give, supply, get, allocate, distribute, relegate, confer, concede, delegate, award, lavish,administer, grant, design, promise, assign, refuse, yield, sacrifice, leave, abandon, lendentrust, return, pay, reimburse, bring, pass hand in, deliver, send, mail, remove, take off,take away, steal (Tesniere, 1959:256, cf. also Cooren, 2000:89).

As we see, this list includes trivalent verbs like ‘‘promising,’’ ‘‘removing,’’ or ‘‘awarding,’’ whichcorrespond with speech acts, as, respectively, expressed in the following utterances: ‘‘I willcome,’’ ‘‘You are not sergeant anymore’’ or ‘‘I hereby award you the Nobel Prize.’’ These threeutterances in given contexts, respectively, function as an agent giving a recipient her word thatshe will come, an agent removing the title of sergeant from a recipient (what is also called adischarge) and an agent awarding the Nobel Prize to a recipient.

Following Sbisa’s (1987, 2002) semiotic approach, it thus appears that if we analyze speechacts as social actions that bring about context changes, we realize that what ultimately matters ishow a given interpreter translates any situation involving the production of a speech act as atransformation of state. This transformation involves, as pointed out by Greimas (1987) andTesniere (1959), an agent giving an object to a recipient or an agent taking an object fromsomeone. For instance, at T1 in excerpt (1), the utterance ‘‘Do you know who’s going to thatmeeting?’’ addressed by the Mother to Russ can be translated into the Mother (agent) making arequest for information (object) to Russ (recipient). As we have seen, a misunderstanding tookplace because Russ initially thought that his mother’s request for information was about his stateof knowledge (concerning whether or not he knew who was going to be at the meeting), while herealized in T3 that she actually meant it as a request for information about whowas coming to themeeting.

Had Mother meant it as a request for information about her son’s state of knowledge(as imagined in sequence (2)), she could have also been said to be checking if her son alreadyknew the information she was about to announce. Upon hearing ‘‘Who’’ at T2, whichconsists of her son (agent) making a request for information (object) to her mother (recipient)about who is coming, it could have been said that she checked to see if her son indeeddid not know the information. In terms of transformation of states, this would mean that thefact that Russ did not know the information (recipient) had been checked (object) by her(agent),5 prompting her (agent), at T3, to make her announcement (object) to her son(recipient). As we see in this analysis, if we analyze what happens in terms of actions, we


5 Here, I mean that, semiotically speaking, once a piece of information is said to be checked by X, everything happens

as though this information has received a new property or trait from X. This is a relational property to the extent that it isthe information-checked-by-X, but as Descombes (1996) reminds us, language allows us to produce ‘‘un-relativized

terms’’ (p. 206, my translation of ‘‘derelativise’’), like ‘‘checked,’’ ‘‘loved’’ or ‘‘married,’’ which are relative or relational

terms artificially presented as absolute. These terms are supposed to refer to traits or properties that are both relational

(e.g. if a piece of information has been checked, this implies, by definition, that it was checked by someone) and internal(‘‘checked’’ is a new property of the piece of information). Incidentally, this analysis corresponds with Peirce’s (1898/

1992) doctrine of internal relations, which contradicts Russell’s (1911/1992) doctrine of external relations. According to

Peirce, relations can both be internal and real (for more details on this debate, see Cooren, 2005b; Grillo, 2000; Jacques,

1991).


realize how each move consists of transforming the situation, a transformation that, of course,always depends on an agreement about what was actually accomplished (as illustrated insequence 1).

As we see, the problem of the speaker’s intentions does not disappear. It is rather one part ofthe picture, as pointed out by the two-place model proposed by Sbisa and Fabbri (1980) andArundale’s (1999, 2005) co-constituted model of communication. By focusing on howinterlocutors interpret what is happening and agree or disagree on what is accomplished, we endup adopting an actional and conventional perspective, mainly focused on what people appear tobe doing according to the conventional effects of language use. For instance, if we are toannounce something to someone, it is conventionally implied that what is about to be announcedshould be newsworthy to the interlocutor, otherwise the announcement could be consideredperformed but infelicitous. By definition, an announcement is what it is because the interlocutordoes not a priori know its content.

This is precisely how Russ initially understands what is happening, in excerpt (1), uponhearing his mother ask him a question about his state of knowledge. For him, the way to makesense of his mother’s question is to insert this action into the larger project of checking his state ofknowledge, which is itself inserted into the larger project of announcing something. This is howhe implicitly reconstructs what is happening, which certainly leads him to attribute specificintentions to his mother (‘‘she is about to announce something to me’’). But as we see, intention issomething that is reconstructed by the interlocutors rather than determining a priori how speechacts are to be understood. Sure, since they have to agree on what was accomplished, one could saythat the mother’s intention plays a role in the ultimate determination of what she did, but it is justone part of the interpretive puzzle.

The semiotic approach advocated by Cooren (2000) and Sbisa (2002) thus allows us toanalyze speech acts as transformations of state operated through the giving or taking of anobject between an agent and a recipient. Interestingly, this approach also enables us to see howthese social actions articulate with one another, how the identification of a given speech actparticipates in the definition of larger sequences (also called schemas by Greimas and Courtes(1982)), as illustrated in the Mother-Russ interaction. Although these phenomena have alreadybeen addressed through the study of indirectness (Cooren, 1997, 2000; Cooren and Sanders,2002) and sequentiality (Cooren, 2000; Cooren and Fairhurst, 2004; Sbisa, 2002), thereremains to be shown how this approach to language use allows to address what has beenidentified, in the previous section, as non-humans’ textual agency. This is what I propose to doin the next section.

5. Tetravalence and agency

So far, we have seen how it is possible to reinterpret speech acts as actions involvingthree actants, what Tesniere (1959) and others like Cooren (2000) and Goldberg (1995) identifyas the prime actant (also called agent), the second actant (or object) and the third actant(or recipient). At first sight, one could therefore think that speech act theory is circumscribablethrough the identification of trivalent verbs. After all, doing things with words can consist of (1)an agent giving a directive (object) to a recipient (what Searle (1979) calls ‘‘directives’’), (2) anagent giving her word (object) to a recipient (what Searle calls ‘‘commissives’’), (3) an agentgiving permission (object) to a recipient (what Cooren (2000) calls ‘‘accreditives’’), (4) an agentgiving information (object) to a recipient (what Cooren calls ‘‘informatives’’), (5) an agentgiving (or removing) a status or identity to (or from) a recipient (what Searle calls



‘‘declarations’’), and (6) an agent giving (or removing) value to (or from) a recipient (whatSearle calls ‘‘expressives’’).

As nicely pointed out by Descombes (2004), Tesniere (1959) notes, however, that it is possibleto construct sentences involving more than three actants, what he identifies as tetravalentconstructions (cf. p. 258). What is a tetravalent construction? In order to answer this question, wefirst have to introduce what Descombes calls a scale of actional degrees (‘‘echelle des degres del’agir’’ (p. 87)), which involves the application of causative auxiliary verbs like ‘‘causing to,’’ or‘‘making’’ to other verbs. As noticed by Tesniere, actional verbs constitute ‘‘semantic systems’’(p. 299), which means that they can convert into one another. For instance, Tesniere notes that it ispossible to convert a transitive (or divalent) verb into a ditranstive verb by applying a causativeauxiliary verb like ‘‘making’’ or ‘‘causing to.’’ ‘‘Teaching something to someone’’ consists, forexample, in ‘‘making someone learn something.’’ In other words, ‘‘teaching’’ (a trivalent verb) is‘‘causing to learn,’’ ‘‘learning’’ being a divalent verb.

The same operation applies to monovalent (or intransitive) verbs, which can be convertedinto divalent (or transitive) ones by applying a causative auxiliary verb. For instance,‘‘knocking over something’’ (a divalent verb) is ‘‘causing something to fall,’’ and ‘‘falling’’ isa monovalent verb. As we see, each verb can thus be located ‘‘in a scale of actional degrees,which is made of a causative series of verbal forms’’ (Descombes, 2004, p. 87, mytranslation). What is even more interesting is that this operation, called ‘‘causative diathesis,’’can also be applied to convert a trivalent verb into a tetravalent construction. As noted byTesniere,

The growing complexity of the actantial system of the verb is likely to be a function of theprogress of the human mind, which gives birth to more and more complex actantialstructures. One is therefore led to wonder if there is not also, after trivalent verbs,tetravalent verbs. If we put aside the periphrastic forms with tetravalent values. . ., it seemsthat there does not exist in any language simple verbal forms that comprise more than threevalences. (p. 258, my translation)

So even if there are no simple verbal forms that correspond to this construction, Tesniere notesthat trivalent verbs, by becoming causative, are converted into tetravalent forms. As an example,‘‘Charles gave the book to Alfred’’ can be converted into ‘‘Daniel made Charles give the book toAlfred.’’ (cf. p. 266).6

As we see in this case, ‘‘making somebody give something’’ can be called a tetravalentconstruction to the extent that it involves four actants: the principal, the agent, the object, and therecipient, where the principal is positioned as the instigator of the process (cf. Tesniere, 1959:260).Whileinthesentence‘‘CharlesgavethebooktoAlfred’’Charleswaspositionedastheinstigatoroftheprocess, the causative diathesis converts him into an immediate agent, and Daniel becomes theprincipal (or mediate) agent. As noted by Descombes (2004), ‘‘the transition to causative allowsus to describe what A (the immediate agent) is doing in terms of what B (the principal agent) isdoing’’ (p. 94, my translation). This does not mean that the immediate agent is not doing thingsanymore;itsimplymeansthatsomethingorsomeoneisnowpositionedasmakingherorcausinghertodo something.


6 As noted by one of the anonymous reviewers, the trivalent description could be true both of a situation in which

Charles decides himself to give Alfred the book and of one in which he is urged to do so by Daniel. This means that the

tetravalent construction is more specific in terms of content.


What are the implications of this analysis for a reflection on (social) action in general andspeech act theory in particular? They are, we think, crucial. Interestingly enough, one could firstnote that what Tesniere (1959) and Descombes (2004) highlight parallels in many respects whatother scholars like Callon (1986, 1991; Callon and Latour, 1981) and Latour (1996, 1999) havebeen saying for more than 20 years about socio-technical action, i.e. that to do is causing to do. AsLatour (1996) notes,

to act is to be perpetually overtaken by what one does. ‘‘Faire c’est faire [faire].’’ To do is tomake happen. . . .We are exceeded by what we create. To act is to mediate another’saction. . . Thus it is not the case that there are actors on the one side and fields of forces onthe other. There are only actors – actants – any one of which can only ‘proceed to action’ byassociation with others who may surprise or exceed him/her/it. (p. 178, my underlining)

Not surprisingly, Callon and Latour (1981) explicitly acknowledge having been influenced byGreimas (1987, Greimas and Courtes, 1982), an influence that can be felt up to the latest essayswritten by Latour (2004).

Indeed, if we follow what Callon, Descombes, Latour, and Tesniere are saying, we end uprealizing that action is something that, analytically speaking, can always be either broken downinto smaller units of action (by a conversion that Tesniere (1959) would call recessive diathesis)or, on the contrary, included into larger units of action (by a conversion that Tesniere would callcausative diathesis). For instance, your informing someone of something (where informing is atrivalent verb) can be broken down into your making somebody know something (where knowingis a divalent verb). Reversely, your informing someone of something can actually be includedinto a larger episode where somebody or something actually made you inform someone ofsomething. For instance, X asked you to inform Yof something, which is the tetravalent structurethat positions X as the principal, you as the agent, Y as the recipient, and the information as theobject.

Using another illustration, we could note that mailing a letter to a friend ultimately consists inmaking the post office bring this letter to this person. Pushing this exercise further down therecessive diathesis, we realize that saying that the post office brings this letter to the friendconsists in an agent acting in the name of the post office (it could be a machine or a human) thatmakes a mailman bring the letter to the person. If we again further this analysis, we see a mailmanputting a letter in the friend’s mailbox and the friend ultimately getting the letter from this box.As this analysis shows, everything happens as though the recognition of tetravalent structuresenables us to open up the traditional speaker/hearer schema by highlighting not only what makespeople do what they do, but also what these people are using as intermediary to perform theiractions (whether discursive or physical).

As illustrated by Cooren (2004), we can therefore point out that people tend to have noproblem ascribing some form of agency to textual or discursive entities when they use ordinarylanguage. For instance, one can easily say ‘‘This article claims that global warming is a fact’’(assertive); ‘‘This signature commits you to payment’’ (commissive); ‘‘This recipe suggeststhat we use this kind of flour’’ (directive); ‘‘This new law revokes the government’s decision’’(declaration); or even ‘‘The review compliments the actor on his performance in the film’’(expressive). Intentionalists would argue that claims are statements people make, thatsignatures are flourishes that people produce to make documents official, that recipes are textsthat chefs write, that laws are documents that representatives vote, or that reviews are articlesjournalists write. I am not, of course, challenging this point. On the contrary, it is precisely



because human beings produce such texts that people can then orient to these by ascribingthem agency.

In keeping with the externalist thesis7 advocated by Peirce (1931), Ryle (1949) andWittgenstein (1953), I therefore contend that intentions and agency are not dispositions thatshould just be ascribed to humans, but can also be extended to the things humans produce,whether these things are texts or artifacts, or to the entities they represent or act on behalf,whether these entities are individual or collective. As Descombes (1996, 2001) and Robichaud(2006) remind us, agency and intention can be ultimately located neither in the human beings norin the things they produce because these phenomena are inherently relational, and not substantial.For instance, when we say, ‘‘This recipe suggests that we use this kind of flour,’’ we indeedattribute some form of agency to a recipe, but doing so does not consist in completely severing therecipe from the person whowrote and conceived of it. On the contrary, it is only becausewe knowthat recipes are texts that people write that we can attribute agency to these texts by singularizingtheir contribution. In other words, it is because we are able to recognize institutional practices,what Sbisa (1987, 2002) recognizes as conventions, like the writing of recipes, the signature ofdocuments, or the voting of laws, that the attribution of agency to texts and other technicalartifacts is possible.

6. Conclusion

What are the consequences of this analysis? Simply that analysts should not hesitate to takeinto account that we live in a world full of various agencies and that the structuring of this world isonly possible through the active contribution of the discursive and physical artifacts that humansproduce. By focusing mainly on what humans do when they speak to each other, everythinghappens as though pragmaticians were, in fact, neglecting something that semioticians havealready pointed out for some time, that is, that we live in a plenum of agencies where manydifferent ‘‘things’’ can be said to be doing things: companies, technologies, societies, machines,texts, paintings, architectural elements, artifacts, etc. What Tesniere and others are pointing to isthat people continually and unknowingly perform causative and recessive diatheses; theysingularize, for various reasons (argumentative, aesthetic, educational, etc.), agents in a chain ofpotential agencies when they come to identify actions. As pointed out by Taylor and Van Every(2000), we just need to open our daily newspapers to see that companies decide to invest invarious products, new laws enforce specific behaviors, or treaties seal international agreements.What this means is that not only humans produce things (e.g. treaties) that are going to literallyact on their behalf, in their name, but they also act on behalf of other entities whom or which theyare supposed to represent (e.g. companies, laws).

What or who is acting is not something the analyst can decide by arbitrarily looking at agiven situation, since ascribing agency is a judgment that people (consciously orunconsciously) make when they evaluate and speak of a situation. It is this act of judgmentthat we witness when we, as analysts, study texts and interactions. Adopting a relationalapproach to agency thus consist in recognizing that agency is not a disposition that should be


7 According to the externalist thesis, intentionality is a relational phenomenon, that is, there is as much intentionality ina document, a machine or an instrument as there is in the human brain. This position can be contrasted with the internalist

thesis, as defended for instance by Searle (1980a,b, 1984). According to this philosophical position, intentionality is a

characteristic that should be restricted to human beings (and other animals) and not to the artifacts they produce or design

in order to fulfill specific objectives (see Castor and Cooren, 2006, as well as Robichaud, 2006).


reduced to humans and only humans, but that it should be extended to the (physical anddiscursive) entities they mobilize in their action, whether by representing them (speaking,writing or, more generally, acting in their name) or by making them do things. As analysts, wetherefore have to realize, following Latour (1996), that there is no origin to action. Yes, indeedpeople do things (physically or discursively), but we must always wonder, as analysts, whatmake them do things and what they mobilize in their action. In other words, action is alwayscaught in a chain of agencies.

As an illustration, we can again go back to the Russ–Mother interaction.

(1)Mother: Do you know who’s going to that meeting? T1Russ: Who. T2Mother: I don’t kno:w T3Russ: Oh::. Prob’ly Missiz McOwen (‘n detsa) en T4

Prob’ly Missiz Cadry and some of the teachers.(0.4) and the counselors (pp. 57–58)

As we saw previously, it is his mother’s question that made Russ believe that she was checkingwhether or not he knew whowas going to that meeting. In other words, he initially oriented to herquestion as a way to check his state of knowledge so that she could make an announcement aboutwhat he presumably did not know, which explains why he answered ‘‘Who’’ as a way to prompther to make her announcement. As we see in this analysis, his mother’s question initiallyfunctions for him as a request for information about his state of knowledge. Using Descombes’point, it could also be noted that a transition to causative is possible to the extent that what thisquestion (the immediate agent) is doing then becomes what his mother (the principal) is doing.Upon hearing T1, he understands that she is making a request for information about his state ofknowledge because she is checking if she can make an announcement.

Interestingly, we know that this causative diathesis proved to be wrong. Upon hearing T3,Russ then realized that his mother actually did not know who was coming to the meeting andthat she meant her request for information about his state of knowledge as a request forinformation about the content of his knowledge. In other words, this example perfectlyillustrates my point, to the extent that we see that the utterances people produce make themdo things that they do not always control. To communicate verbally, interactants produceutterances that will literally act on their behalf, in their name. These utterances (agents) canof course translate more or less correctly what their instigators (principals) mean, but theycan also, as we saw in this example, betray them. ‘‘Traduttore, traditore!’’ as the Italiansnicely say. A pragmatic approach to language is indeed about the role contexts play in themeanings of utterances and their effects on interpreters, but these effects must then berecognized as a form of agency. Again, this does not mean that human beings and theirintentions disappear. On the contrary, these effects are only possible because we know thatutterances (and texts in general) are things people tend to produce in order to expressthemselves and communicate.

Recognizing textual or discursive agency, as semiotics indirectly invites us to do, is therefore away to strengthen the ultimate pragmatic project, which in my view consists in accounting forhow communication works. For instance, explaining how misunderstanding functions is anotherway to account for how the utterances interactants producemake them say things that they did notnecessarily mean (although Freud, of course, has showed us that we do not always control this



aspect either!). Most of the time, interactants manage to find out what was actually meant (asillustrated in the Russ–Mother interaction), but it must yet be explained how misunderstandingwas still possible from the outset. It is possible, according to Descombes, Peirce, Sbisa andothers, precisely because we live in a world of conventions (what Descombes also calls‘‘Institutions of meaning’’ or ‘‘Institutions du sens’’) where the utterances (and signs in general)we produce acquire, to a certain extent, a life of their own. This aspect is, of course, more obviousin situations where written texts are produced (laws, invitations, contracts, books, articles), butwe have just seen how the analysis proposed can also account for how oral communicationworks.8

Instead of separating the paradigm of representation from the paradigm of action, as somepragmatists like Rorty (1979) advocate, I contend that we need to bring them back together.Recognizing the phenomenon of representation precisely consists in showing how agents arealways caught in a chain of agencies and how their very action can always be attributed to otheragents, whether upstream (the entities of whom or which they are positioned as acting on behalfor incarnating) or downstream (the entity they are mobilizing to interact). Effects ofrepresentation are always potentially at stake in interaction, since they are the very effects bywhich interlocutors and interpreters end up attributing agency, whether it is to ‘‘things’’ asdiverse as the unconscious, passion, madness, racism, a company, an individual or anything thatis deemed being acting at that specificmoment. Recognizing the link between the two paradigmsthus is another way to go back to the etymological root of the term ‘‘representation,’’ i.e. theaction that consists in making an entity present through the mediation of another entity(which incidentally is the very definition of a sign).

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Further reading

Sbisa, Marina, 1985. Manipulation et sanction dans la dynamique des actes de langage. In: Parret, H., Ruprecht, H.-G.(Eds.), Exigences et Perspectives de la Semiotique. Recueil d’hommages pourAlgirdas JulienGreimas. JohnBenjamins,

Amsterdam, pp. 529–538.


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