The Formal Apparatus of the Enunciation

Résumé

This is the first complete English translation of Émile Benveniste’s 1970 article “L’appareil formel de l’énonciation” (Problèmes de linguistique générale II, Gallimard, 1974).

Émile Benveniste (1902–1976) was one the most eminent French structural linguists and comparative grammarians of his generation. This article occupies a unique and important position in his work: at once a culmination point and an attempt at a new beginning. Here Benveniste introduces, in its full generality, not so much the notion of the enunciation per se but the way in which the enunciation—as the necessary and constant horizon of all language use—is formally inscribed in the structure of language itself. In other words, certain essential structural features of language necessarily involve an internal reference to their instance in use.