Perspective fonctionnelle de la phrase et linguistique du texte française. L’École de Prague… passant par la Lorraine

Abstract

In this paper, I want to present the personality of Robert Martin, whose works are not well known outside France, and analyse the important role he played in the early eighties for the revival of linguistics – considering at the same time the rising influence of his colleagues Bernard Combettes, Jean-Michel Adam and Michel Charolles, that is to say the influence they had on the introduction of text linguistics in France, specifically thanks to the creation in Metz of a new journal in the second part of the seventies: Pratiques. If Robert Martin first wanted to introduce natural logics in formal semantics, he was not insensible to the Prague School’s legacy either; but for him, the manner to introduce a discursive dimension or level in his linguistic model, that is to say a textual one between sentence and utterance, finally was a way to affirm and preserve the independence of semantics from pragmatics – the growing part of pragmatics in linguistics or the so called “language sciences” at the beginning of the same decade.

Keywords

• Natural logic
• text linguistics
• logical subject
• topic
• presupposition