Dominique Maingueneau
Dominique Maingueneau is a French linguist, emeritus Professor at Sorbonne University. His research focuses on discourse analysis. It associates a pragmatic outlook on discourse with linguistic «enunciation» theories and some aspects of Michel Foucault's line of thought.
Biography
Maingueneau studied linguistics and philosophy at the "École Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud" and at the University of Paris 10. He obtained in 1974 a first PhD in linguistics: Building a discursive semantics; he was awarded a second one in 1979: Semantics of controversy. From discourse to interdiscourse. He became lecturer at the University of Amiens, then professor. In 2000 he moved to the University of Paris XII; from 2012 to 2019 he was professor of French linguistics and discourse analysis at the Sorbonne. He was a member of the Institut Universitaire de France..... His books have been translated into thirteen languages.Research
He has published on French linguistics, and above all on discourse analysis. In the latter area he has written various handbooks: Initiation aux méthodes de l’analyse du discours, Nouvelles tendances en analyse du discours, Analyser les textes de communication, Discours et analyse du discours. He was also the co-editor, with P. Charaudeau, of the Dictionnaire d’analyse du discours. With J. Angermuller and R. Wodak he edited The Reader in Discourse Studies: Main currents in Theory and Analysis.In his view, discourse analysis is only one of the disciplines belonging to discourse studies. Each of these disciplines is based on a specific interest. The interest of discourse analysis is to consider that discourse articulates text and social places. This means that its object is not textual organisation nor communicative situation, but what binds them through a certain genre. Like most French speaking discourse analysts, he draws on enunciative pragmatics.
His research has tackled a great diversity of corpora, apart from ordinary conversation: advertising, handbooks, literature, newspapers, politics, philosophy, religion, the Internet... He justifies the diversity of his corpora by claiming that discourse analysts must study any manifestation of discourse, instead of focusing only on conversation, media and other social areas such as politics, education, business, justice, the health system.
Main topics
• Interdiscourse: building on his research on religious controversies, he has developed a theory of "intermisunderstanding". He assumes that in a given field the relevant unit of analysis is not each discourse in isolation but the ruled interaction between discourses through which the enunciative identities are defined and preserved. According to M.-A Paveau and G.-E. Sarfati, "Maingueneau shows how a discourse is born, how it develops into a consistent whole and a homogeneous space that lasts beyond the individual and temporal variations"• Genres: like many other discourse analysts, he gives a central role to genres of discourse, which are analysed into various components: partners, place, time, etc. A genre is considered as a "scene of enunciation", which is broken down into a) an "enclosing scene" a "generic scene" which assigns roles to actors, prescribes the right place and the right moment, the medium, the text superstructure, etc.; c) a “scenography”: the same generic scene, for instance preaching in a church, may stage different scenographies: prophetic, friendly, meditative... The word scène 'is chosen in order to stress the idea that the act of enunciation, parole, is a mise en scène, a sort of theatrical production that takes place in the form of a self-constituting process occurring within a defined discursive space. By adopting the theatrical metaphor of scène d’énonciation, Maingueneau endeavors to enter discourse “from the inside.”
• Ethos: he contributed to introducing the question of ethos into the field of discourse analysis. He has developed the concept of “embodiment” : the addressee constructs a certain image of the speaker, by giving him/her psychological and somatic properties, based on shared stereotypes
• Self-constituting discourses: in the universe of discourse a specific area can be delimited: that of “self-constituting discourses”. They have a particular relationship with the foundations of society. To found other discourses without being founded by them, they must set themselves up as intimately bound with a legitimising Source and show that they are in accordance with it, owing to the operations by which they structure their texts. Maingueneau has mainly studied literature and philosophy, in this perspective. Tightly connected with self-constituting discourses, the concept of paratopy has been widely used in literary theory, in particular in postcolonial; and gender studies.
• Textless sentences : a multitude of sentences that do not belong to a text, a cohesive sequence of sentences, are in circulation: they can by definition be detached or extracted from texts. Maingueneau assumes that these sentences do not imply the same kind of enunciation as usual utterances: while in “texualizing enunciation” speakers produce texts belonging to genres, for aphorising enunciations the very notions of text and speaker are irrelevant
• Gender: he published two books about the figure of the fatal woman, and various articles about the relationship between woman and sayings and about the "Précieuses" of the French 17th century
• Adhering writings: these are not produced by a speaker, but are written on objects or human beings to which they are appropriated: labels on goods, the artist's name engraved on a sculpture, a plaque indicating the name of a street, a sentence on a T-shirt, the word "Police" on a uniform, etc. The addition of such writings modifies the identity of what they are applied to; they make it part of a new network of uses and actors.
Publications
Discourse Analysis
Books
Initiation aux méthodes de l’analyse du discours, Paris, Hachette, 1976.Les livres d’école de la République, 1870-1914. Discours et idéologie, Paris, Le Sycomore, 1979.
Sémantique de la polémique, Lausanne, l’Age d'Homme, 1983.
Genèses du discours, Bruxelles-Liège, P. Mardaga, 1984.
Nouvelles tendances en analyse du discours, Paris, Hachette, 1987.
L'Analyse du discours, Introduction aux lectures de l’archive, Paris, Hachette, 1991.
Les termes clés de l’analyse du discours, Paris, Seuil, 1996 translation: Lisbon, Gradiva, 1997; Portuguese. Expanded and revised edition: collection « Points-Essais », Paris, Seuil, 2009.
Analyser les textes de communication, Paris, Dunod, 1998. Expanded and revised edition: Paris, A. Colin, 2007.
Le Rapport de soutenance de thèse. Un genre universitaire, Lille, Presses du Septentrion, 2002.
Cenas de enunciação, Curitiba, Criar, 2006.
La littérature pornographique, Paris, Armand Colin, 2007.
Doze conceitos da Analise do Discurso, São Paulo, Parabola, 2010.
Les phrases sans texte, Paris, Armand Colin, 2012.
Discours et analyse du discours, Paris, A. Colin, 2014.
Variaçōes sobre o ethos, São Paulo, Parábola, 2020.
Enunciados aderentes, São Paulo, Parábola, 2022.
L’ethos en analyse du discours, Academia, Louvain-la Neuve, 2022.
As margens do discurso, São Paulo, Contexto, 2025.
Edited books
Dictionnaire d’Analyse du Discours, Paris, Seuil, 2002. L’Analyse du discours dans les études littéraires, Toulouse, Presses du Mirail, 2004. The Discourse Studies Reader. Main currents in theory and analysis, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2014.Linguistics and discourse analysis applied to literature
Éléments de linguistique pour le texte littéraire, Paris, Bordas, 1986, Tandem 1995; Portuguese. New edition: Linguistique pour le texte littéraire, Paris, Nathan, 2003.Pragmatique pour le discours littéraire, Paris, Bordas, 1990.
Le Contexte de l’œuvre littéraire, Paris, Dunod, 1993.
Exercices de linguistique pour le texte littéraire, Paris, Dunod, 1997.
Le Discours littéraire. Paratopie et scène d’énonciation, Paris, A. Colin, 2004.
Manuel de linguistique pour le texte littéraire, Paris, A. Colin, 2010.
Trouver sa place dans le champ littéraire. Paratopie et création, Louvain-la-neuve, Academia, 2016.
Paratopia. Literature as Discourse, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.
Handbooks in linguistics
Linguistique française, Initiation à la problématique structurale I, Paris, Hachette, 1977. Revised edition: Introduction à la linguistique française. ''Notions fondamentales, Phonétique, Lexique, Paris, Hachette, 2001. Linguistique française. Initiation à la problématique structurale II, Paris, Hachette, 1978. Approche de l'énonciation en linguistique française, Paris, Hachette, 1981. New édition: L'énonciation en linguistique française, 1991. Syntaxe du français, Paris, Hachette Supérieur, 1994. Précis de grammaire pour les concours, Paris, Bordas, 1991. Revised édition: Paris, Armand Colin, 2015. Aborder la linguistique'', Paris, Seuil, 1996. Expanded and revised edition: collection « Points-Essais », Paris, Seuil, 2009.Essays
Carmen, les racines d'un mythe, Paris, Le Sorbier, 1984. Féminin fatal, Paris, Descartes, 1999. Contre Saint Proust, ou la fin de la Littérature, Paris, Belin, 2006.Books about his research
Contribuições de Dominique Maingueneau para Análise do Discurso do Brasil, S. Possenti and R. Leiser Baronas, São Carlos, Pedro & João, 2008.Analyse du discours et dispositifs d'énonciation. Autour des travaux de Dominique Maingueneau, J. Angermuller and G. Philippe, Limoges, Lambert-Lucas, 2015.
Les défis de l'analyse du discours. Entretien avec Dominique Maingueneau. Propos recueillis par Mhamed Dahi, Tanger, Virgule Editions, 2021.