Sobre la enseñanza de una gramática del sentido

Abstract

The description of a language, as well as its teaching, is embedded in a social context, and the nature of this context is what makes the practices of one and the other different. With regard to language teaching, one can observe that there are two fields of activity responding to social demands: one based on systems of thought, in which different theories and scholarly explanations about language (e.g. the linguistic, structuralist, generative and semantic theories) compete, and one based on systems of exploitation, in which different educational products, developed according to learning objectives (mother tongue/foreign language/second language) compete. For language teaching, however, the school tradition has favored for a very long time a prescriptive and morphological general grammar, as can be seen in the books devoted to this topic. By writing the Grammaire du sens et de l’expression , my intention was to propose another type of description of the facts of language, starting from meaning towards forms of expression. A movement that is equivalent, in the end, to that of the speaker when trying to express himself both in his mother tongue and in a foreign language. This paper intends to specify what are the conditions for a grammar of meaning, that is, a grammar of the speaker, of its communicative intention and of the forms he has available to express it. I will describe herein the conceptual categories that correspond to as many intentions of meaning (to determine, qualify, describe action, etc.) by comparison with, on the one hand, the language categories that semantically specify these intentions (actualization, quantification, localization, etc.) and, on the other hand, the formal categories that configure them (articles, demonstratives, quantifiers, etc.).