Temporalités (Jun 2008)
Temporalité(s) et langage dans l’analyse d’entretiens biographiques
Abstract
Examining the relationship between the pairs time and temporality, langue and language, narration and discourse, this article insists on the importance of taking the material aspects of the language into account when interpreting biographical interviews. Reasserting the fact that language is not “transparent”, the author stresses the need to separate the subject’s parole from his/her exchanges with the interviewer. Verb tenses, often ignored in sociological analysis, permit the analyst to distinguish between the narrative part of the interview (which enters into the construction of the interviewee’s narrative identity) and the discursive part (which situates the latter in his/her rapport to the interviewer in the hic et nunc).After some theoretical considerations (with reference to Benveniste and Bakhtine, among others), on what is understood here by “time” (an objective categorization of the human experience) and “temporality” (subjectively felt and impossible to pin down), two short excerpts in which a couple talk about their own first names are presented, to illustrate how this method can be applied. The socio-linguistic analysis (inspired by Discourse Analysis) is carried out on two levels: grammatical and lexical. Where grammar allows one to distinguish the personal narrative from the social exchange, semantics (the philosophical, political and lexical history of words) dig into the referentially thick dimension of language, calling on all of the analyst’s knowledge.To speak of the Temporality of Language means pointing to the quality of the words being exchanged, which, like music, are constantly passing, already part of the past.
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