par De Brabanter, Philippe 
Référence BELL. Belgian essays on language and literature, 2001, page (53-66)
Publication Publié, 2001
Référence BELL. Belgian essays on language and literature, 2001, page (53-66)
Publication Publié, 2001
Article sans comité de lecture
| Résumé : | My interest in Harris stems from a concern with the analysis of the metalinguistic dimension of discourse. A fairly large body of literature has been devoted to metalanguage, especially in logic and the philosophy of language. Most of it is to do with artificial metalanguages for the description of formalised symbolic systems (e.g. Carnap 1937; Tarski 1944), or with the use/mention distinction (see Saka 1998 for a bibliography). Very little has been written about the syntax of metalinguistic use in natural language; even linguists seem not to have been too taken with the subject. In this respect, Harris constitutes a welcome exception. In this paper, we shall see how Harris builds a full-fledged grammar of a natural language (henceforth often ‘Ln’). First, he provides means of identifying what are the basic units of Ln, i.e. its phonemes and morphemes. Then, he shows how these units can combine to form larger units, i.e. phrases and sentences, all of which is achieved on the basis of a single principle. When that has been done, it is useful to put the scheme to the test. To that end, I have chosen to examine to what extent it is capable of accounting for some of the notorious difficulties that stem from metalinguistic use. |
