Current Issues in Linguistic Theory

The objective of this book is to better acquaint English-speaking linguistics with a corpus of texts hitherto untranslated, containing the cognitive-based research in formal linguistics of one of the most important theoreticians in the field: Antoine Culioli (b. 1924). Culioli''s viewpoint is grounded in Emile Benveniste''s (1902-1976) revolutionary answer to Saussure''s opposition between competence (langue) and performance (parole) captured in the idea of énonciation, in which the relationship between an individual and a language is one of appropriation. The translation has been prepared to provide the reader with as obstacle-free a path as one can clear to a theory that requires, and indeed commands, a very close, attentive reading. As an additional aid to understand Culioli''s argument, footnotes throughout the work show similarities and differences with the work of the cognitive linguist Ronald W. Langacker.