Logos and ethos in collective enunciation: the argumentative role of chengyu

Abstract

The forms of collective enunciation –such as proverbs, sayings, jokes, mottos, group identity slogans, etc.– present a certain resemblance or “kinship”. This is basically due to its polyphonic essence (Ducrot, 1986), which in many cases is recognizable only from the characteristics themselves of the discourse genre in which they are expressed. In the social enunciation, the enunciator refers to a discourse community, thereby allowing the empirical subject a relative distancing from his statement, while the statement acquires a degree of transparency and evidentiality. Among the forms of collective enunciation, paremiae often play an argumentative role, synthesize ideological stances and aim at building consensus. They can operate as forms of ideological and cultural cohesion. While proverbs or sententious statements with similar characteristics can be found in most languages, some speech communities produce specific forms of collective enunciation. This is for instance the case of the hain tenys studied by Jean Paulhan, and referred by Émile Benveniste in Problems in General Linguistics. In the Chinese language there is a discursive form related to sayings, proverbs and other judgmental statements, with very specific characteristics. It is called chengyu (成 语). In the context of Chinese culture, the use of chengyu has an effective persuasive value. They have a strong indexicality (Reyes, 2009). They operate as “ideologems” in Marc Angenot's sense, (1977) and reflect the speaker's “linguistic capital” (Bourdieu, 1990), contributing this way to shape the ethos of the speaker. Hence the interest in their study from the perspective of rhetoric. The study of this discursive genre also allows to enrich the discussion on the notions of “hyperénonciateur” and “particitation” proposed by Maingueneau.