Linguistic polyphony

Abstract

Placing in the context of studies on polyphony, in which the works by Oswald Ducrot (semantic polyphony), and by Mikhail Bakhtin (intertextual polyphony), the paper aims to deal with it polyphony as proposed by Oswald Ducrot. It discusses if presupposition is really a source of polyphony, concluding that two forms of presupposition exist: argumentative and polyphonic presupposition. The paper also analyzes the notion of “enunciative responsibility”, seeing it as a “multiplicity of responsibilities”, inferring from there the role and the nature of voices mobilized by semantic polyphony. It presents the Theory of Argumentative Polyphony, developed with Oswald Ducrot and Alfredo Lescano, inspired both by Benveniste’s concepts of history and discourse and Ducrot’s polyphony. With this, it distinguishes linguistic polyphony from intertextual polyphony.