Enunciation

The speaker is not 'speaker' before the act of enunciation. With enunciation, speaker becomes both speaker and subject; the enunciation positions him or her vis-à-vis the language, whilst at the same time that relationship shapes the enunciation.

This passage states Benveniste's central thesis: enunciation is the constitutive act by which a speaker is simultaneously produced as a subject, making it the founding event of subjectivity in language.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis

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care to focus on the specific condition of enunciation: it is the act itself of producing an utterance, and not the text of the utterance, that is our object. This act is the fact of the speaker who mobilises the language on his or her own behalf.

Benveniste defines enunciation categorically as the act of production rather than the product, centering the speaking subject as the primary object of linguistic inquiry.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis

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the semantic, for its part, belongs to a different universe: it is founded on the act of enunciation and thus on 'sentences produced (not given), infinite (not finite) in number and in constant (not inventoriable) variation and transformation'.

This passage grounds the semantic order exclusively in enunciation, establishing an asymmetry with the finite semiotic order of signs and marking enunciation as the site of linguistic infinitude.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis

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The notion of 'enunciation' understood as an 'experience' considerably modifies the object of signifiance and/or of language.

Enunciation, reconceived as phenomenological experience rather than formal procedure, restructures Benveniste's entire theory of signifiance, centering the subjective and situational dimensions of language.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis

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The enunciation is not an accumulation of signs: the sentence is of another order of meaning. Nothing can be constructed with units. They cannot be linked together in these continuities that are sentences.

Benveniste argues that enunciation produces a qualitatively different order of meaning — the sentence — irreducible to the combinatory logic of semiotic units.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis

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the same ambiguity is found in Austin, whom Benveniste cites in a French version in which 'utterance' is translated not as énonciation, but énoncé, which means unambiguously the text produced rather than the act of speaking.

The passage documents the translation and conceptual slippage between énonciation (act) and énoncé (product), showing how Austin's work was misaligned with Benveniste's distinction when rendered in French.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting

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Benveniste's use of the term énonciation appears to have been inspired by the use of the English word 'utterance' in the writings of Bloomfield, which figure significantly in Benveniste's work right up through the Last Lectures.

This passage traces the genealogy of Benveniste's key term to Bloomfield and Malinowski, locating enunciation theory at the intersection of Francophone structuralism and Anglophone anthropological linguistics.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting

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it can be seen as his major practical achievement in the linguistics of enunciation. Yet it shows on every page how deep understanding of the semantic requires detailed examination of the semiotic.

The Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes is positioned as enunciation theory's applied achievement, demonstrating that semantic understanding (enunciative) requires traversal through the semiotic.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting

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There is not a point at which we find just enunciation, without a language. Pure vocal signifiance such as 'natural' cries are not yet enunciation. As soon as enunciation occurs, there is signification, which entails structur—

Benveniste establishes a threshold condition: enunciation is not mere vocalization but the linguistically structured act of meaning, making it inseparable from the system of signs.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting

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enunciation, 7–8, 11–13, 17–19, 29n.19, 31, 35–40, 44–8, 52–5, 58n.13, 61, 67–8, 116, 124–6, 164, 173, 175

The subject index of the Last Lectures confirms the pervasive centrality of enunciation as an organizing concept threading through discourse, experience, writing, and subjectivity across the entire volume.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting

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languages understood as experiences of enunciation 'contain' the referent quite as much as the subjective experiences of speakers in their acts and discursive exchanges.

Languages conceived as enunciative experiences internalize the referent within subjective acts, collapsing the distance between linguistic system and lived reality.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting

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we thus see coexisting very early another way of reading, either by public enunciation (the reader-crier), or by inner language (the written signs are reunited and interpreted).

In analyzing ancient reading practices, Benveniste extends enunciation to cover oral-public and silent-inner modes, showing its applicability across the history of textual practice.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting

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Un verbe quelconque de parole, même le plus commun de tous, le verbe dire, est apte à former un énoncé performatif si la formule : je dis que …, érnose, sous les conditions appropriées, crée une situation nouvelle.

Benveniste demonstrates that any verb of speech, when deployed in first-person enunciation under appropriate conditions, can function performatively — creating new reality rather than describing it.

Benveniste, Émile, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966supporting

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with, in the ring as referee, the ghost of Émile Benveniste, whose life must have been full of such enunciation-haunted dreams.

The translator's personal reflection figures Benveniste's life as itself organized around the problematics of enunciation, marking the term's existential as well as theoretical weight.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012aside

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From that point on his work was received as game-changing at a historical moment when many young French scholars in language and literature were turning their backs on traditional approaches.

This passage contextualizes the reception of Benveniste's work — including his theory of enunciation — within the intellectual revolution of French structuralism and post-structuralism.

Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012aside

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