Hacer (cosas con) palabras: la discursividad como universal genérico-esencial del lenguaje

Abstract

Doing (things with) words: discursivity as a generic-essential language universal. The present paper highlights the need to stress the fact that languages are in principle discourse building or formulation techniques; or expressed differently, techniques which have as their aim to make words; and it also suggests that doing things and doing things with those words should be seen as secondary functions with regard to the formulating or discursive function of language, which in turn is postulated as a generic-essential universal. The consideration of discursivity as a generic-essential language universal can be firstly justified via the rational a priori path of its deduction from the actual definition of the concept of language and, secondly, in inductive terms, through the examination of several phenomena (linguistic units, strategies and positions) the study of which requires the adoption of a perspective based on the process (enérgeia) and not exclusively on the product (érgon), amongst them the research into the mimesis of orality in writing, the analysis of interruption and reformulation mechanisms, and the examination of what some formalist and functionalist syntactic schoolsusually refer to as ‘left periphery’ of the utterance.