from the capture and subversion of proverbs to the adherent utterances: a brief genealogy of the discursive study of utterances without text

Abstract

In this article, we present a brief genealogy of the discursive study of some “utterances without text”, developed by the French discourse theorist Dominique Maingueneau over the past four decades. We begin with the author’s first work, co-authored with A. Grésillon, titled Polyphonie, proverbe et détournement: ou un proverbe peut en cacher un autre, published in the journal Langages (n. 73) in 1984, in which the prototypical enunciative framework is questioned about to proverbs. Next, we discuss the discursive theory of aphorization, proposed by Maingueneau in the book Les phrases sans texte, published in France in 2012 and in Brazil in 2014, which consolidates his proposal for another enunciative regime, as opposed to the regime of the text. Finally, we examine the theory of adherent utterances, published in Brazil in 2022 in the book Enunciados aderentes, where the author develops another concept, detached from traditional genre analyses. Our central aim, on the one hand, is to demonstrate the internal epistemological coherence of Maingueneau’s discussion, which elaborates diverse conceptual tools to analyze the multiplicity of phenomena arising from the heterogeneity of discourse, and on the other hand, to show that these conceptual tools constitute a completely innovative way of thinking about enunciation.