Catégories actionnelles en deçà et au-delà des actes

In the following, we would like to resume the discussion on the pragmatic categorisation of communicative action, looking simultaneously below and beyond the prototypical category of act; and we will do so also by observing names that may or may not exist in natural (“folk” conceptualisation) and “expert” language. Our approach will start from the “classical” notion of “speech acts” as defined by the philosophy of language. We will show that this notion was recategorised as illocutionary acts (dialogic) by the Geneva school of conversation analysis, opposing it to discursive acts (§1.). Then we will study several discursive activities, generally non-categorised as acts – modal markers, false starts, pragmatic connectors, regulators, etc. To study these problematic categories, we adopt the prototype theory, but also an additional approach, the “discursive spaces” (cf. Pop 2000b). We adopt this second approach especially for the definition of the all-purpose category of operation, as a non-linear segmentation of verbal chains, which, with the help of linear segmentations, will allow us to study actional categories as “more or less acts” (§2.). Finally, this observation “below acts” will be followed by an analysis which goes beyond unit-acts, with categories situated at a superior level of discourse, called activities, sequences, periods, movements, macro-acts, etc. (§3.). A gradual structure of discursive “doings” is thus outlined, paving the way for future research.