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Journal of Pragmatics 40 (2008) 116

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Between semiotics and pragmatics: Opening language

studies to textual agency
Francois Cooren *
Universite de Montreal, Departement de Communication, CP 6127, Succursale Centre-Ville,
Montreal, Que. H3C 3J7, Canada
Received 26 September 2005; received in revised form 6 April 2006; accepted 26 November 2006

Abstract
This paper examines how pragmatics and semiotics intersect by unveiling what I claim to be a blind spot
in language studies, i.e. objects textual agency. By textual agency I mean the capacity to produce speech
acts or, more broadly, discursive acts, a capacity that has traditionally been ascribed solely to human actors.
As shown in this paper, a semiotic approach to communication allows us to open up the traditional speaker
hearer schema by showing how textual entities can also be said to be doing something discursively. In
keeping with the semiotic openness to non-linguistic objects, while acknowledging the incarnated
dimension of communication, as highlighted by pragmaticians, I show that pragmatics could therefore
benefit from opening its perspective to textual agency. Building on Sbisa`s work on speech act theory and
what Descombes identifies as tetravalent structures, I show to what extent a given speech act can be
attributed not only to the person who produced it, but also to the textual entity he or she produced. It is
precisely this logic of imbrication and representation that allows us to open up the traditional speaker/hearer
schema by highlighting the chain of agencies that pervade any interactional situation.
# 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Speech act theory; Diathesis; Marina Sbisa`; Valences; Lucien Tesnie`re; Agency

1. Introduction
This paper investigates the intersection between pragmatics and semiotics by highlighting what
could be called a blind spot in language studies, i.e. objects textual agency. While pragmatic
studies tend to be focused on language use between two or more interlocutors in a given situation,
semiotics does not hesitate to analyze the functioning of various objects paintings, architectural

* Tel.: +1 514 343 6111x2759; fax: +1 514 343 2298.

E-mail address: f.cooren@umontreal.ca.
0378-2166/$ see front matter # 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2006.11.018

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F. Cooren / Journal of Pragmatics 40 (2008) 116

elements, pictures, signs without having recourse to the classical speakerhearer schema. In
keeping with the semiotic openness to non-linguistic objects, while acknowledging the incarnated
dimension of communication, as highlighted by pragmaticians, I will show that pragmatics
could benefit from opening its perspective to non-human agency (Cooren, 2000, 2005a). If, as
Sbisa` (1987, 2002) rightly shows, speech acts can be more generally considered social actions
(see also Geis, 1995), it should be worth exploring how various artifacts can be said to do
something in given situations, especially when this doing implies actions like stating
(assertive), guaranteeing, (commissive), suggesting (directive), sanctioning (declaration)
or rewarding (expressive).
Following Greimas (1983) and Tesnie`re (1959), I contend that any utterance can be analyzed
as a little drama, in which different characters called actants are involved on a scene that
represents the actional circumstances. Of interest for pragmaticians are, of course, trivalent verbs,
since they involve an agent (or prime actant), an object (or second actant) and a recipient (or third
actant), and include what Tesnie`re calls verbs of saying and verbs of giving. But the most
interesting case comes from what Descombes (2004) identifies as tetravalent structures, which
involve four actants. Although no verb in any language seems to correspond to this type of
structure, it actually refers to the phenomenon of factitiveness (Greimas and Courtes, 1982), i.e.
causing to do, when applied to trivalent verbs, as in X makes Y tell W to Z. In this sentence,
what appears to be Ys action (telling) can now be attributed to X, that is, Y is the agent, while X
is the principal.1 It is precisely this logic of imbrication (Taylor and Van Every, 2000) and
representation that allows us to open up the traditional speaker/hearer schema by highlighting the
chain of agencies that pervade any interactional situation.
2. Semiotics and pragmatics
Although pragmatics and semiotics can be said to represent two different theoretical
traditions the first being mostly focused on the functioning of signs, while the second highlights
the practical effects of language use there is a very interesting body of research that currently
explores the intersection of these two approaches. Arguably, this intersection finds its source in
the work of a scholar who has been identified as the founder of these two theoretical movements,
namely Charles Sanders Peirce. Indeed, even if semiotics can be broadly defined as the study of
meaning (Greimas, 1983), some semioticians like Carontini (1984) have pointed out, following
Peirce, that such a study actually consists in analyzing the signs action, i.e. what Peirce calls
semiosis. As will be shown, such a definition immediately parallels the pragmatic project of
studying language from an actional perspective.
For instance, Morris (1938) notes that pragmatics, which he defines as one of the three
branches of semiosis, can be defined as the study of the relation between signs and their
interpreters, i.e. that branch of semiotic which studies the origin, the uses and the effects of
signs (Morris, 1938:365). However, many differences can also be highlighted between the two
disciplines. In terms of object, semioticians do not hesitate to study images, traces or narratives,
while pragmaticians tend to focus primarily on utterances and their meanings in given face to
face contexts. In other words, everything happens as though pragmaticians had co-opted the

Note that the distinction between principal and agent parallels Greimass (1987) distinction between destinateur
(sender) and sujet (subject). In both cases we speak about someone or something (subjectagent) who/that acts in the
name of someone or something else (senderprincipal).

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F. Cooren / Journal of Pragmatics 40 (2008) 116

study of language use as it takes place between two or more interlocutors, while semioticians had
decided to focus primarily on the functioning of relatively inert objects like tales, paintings, or
pictures, outside any specific communicational situation.
In terms of approach, one could also note that semioticians tend to hold an immanentist
perspective, i.e. the idea that the semiotic functioning of an object is to be found in the object
itself (paralleling the Saussurian project as taken up and elaborated by Hjemslev), whereas
pragmaticians will, on the contrary, insist on the importance of resorting to extra-linguistic
factors to account for utterances meanings and their effects on interpreters (Levinson, 1983; Mey,
1993, 1998). Paradoxically, semioticians can therefore be said to be closer in their approach to
traditional linguistics (see for instance Greimas, 1983, 1987, 1988; Greimas and Courtes, 1982;
Greimas and Fontanille, 1993), while pragmaticians work usually implicitly questions the
immanentist doctrine (see for instance Mey, 1988, 1993).
Having highlighted these differences, we can claim that, far from being incompatible,
semiotics and pragmatics have much to say to each other, as evidenced by the work of renowned
scholars such as Enrico Carontini (1984), Hermann Parret (1983), and especially Marina Sbisa`
(1994, 2001, 2002), as well as some events organized in order to prompt dialogue between these
two traditions (for instance, see Deledalle, 1989). Following Sbisa` (2002), we can contend, for
instance, that the systematic study of speech act sequences could especially benefit from
Greimass (1983, 1987, 1988) narrative theory to the extent that his focus on action and
sequentiality allows us to explain how interaction is temporally organized in specific schematic
forms (see also Cooren, 2000; Cooren and Fairhurst, 2004).
Although such parallels will be mobilized in what follows, this paper will especially highlight
one specific aspect of language use that seems somewhat neglected by pragmatic studies, but can
however benefit from a semiotic approach, i.e. what could be called objects textual agency.
By textual agency I mean the capacity to produce speech acts or, more broadly, discursive acts;
a capacity that has traditionally been ascribed solely to human actors. As I will show, a semiotic
approach to communication allows us to open up the traditional speakerhearer schema by
showing how many different non-humans can also be said to be doing something discursively.
But first, we need to start by reconceptualizing the traditional interactional situation. This
reconceptualization is offered by Sbisa` (1983).
3. Speech acts as social action
Marina Sbisa` has systematically explored the contribution of Greimassian semiotics to
pragmatics for the past 25 years. A specialist of Austins (1975) work (she is co-editor, with
J.O. Urmson, of the second edition of How to do Things with Words published in 1975),
her perspective consists, among other things, in offering an alternative to the intentionalist
approach proposed by John Searle and his followers, which she associates with what she calls the
one-place model of speech acts (Sbisa` and Fabbri, 1980). To this model, mainly focused on
the speakers intention and its recognition by the interlocutor, she opposes what she terms the
two-place model, which amounts to positioning the recipient as an active participant who
(i) select[s] an acceptable interpretation of the speech act, and (ii) . . .either accept[s] the
speech act, under such an interpretation, as a successful act, or . . . completely or partly
reject[s] it as more or less inappropriate and unhappy. (p. 305)
According to this perspective, parallel to the one defended by other pragmaticians like Arundale
(1999, 2005) and Levinson (1981, 1983) or conversation analysts like Schegloff (1988), one

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F. Cooren / Journal of Pragmatics 40 (2008) 116

should rather analyze speech acts as interactional moves (Sbisa` and Fabbri, 1980:312)
by focusing on what people are not only doing but also becoming when interacting with each
other.
This approach therefore consists in highlighting how the hearer/reader appears to interpret
what the speaker/writer did in saying or writing something, an interpretation that can be revealed
by the way the hearer/reader displays her understanding in the next turns, a move that can lead, of
course, to repair sequences (cf. Heritage, 1984; Schegloff, 1988). By focusing on discursive
action, this model also enables us to analyze what kinds of change are brought about in the
relation between the participants, as it tends to highlight the fact that speech acts are social
actions that consist in transforming the interactants identity2 (cf. also Geis, 1995). For Sbisa`
(1994), this perspective is actually close to the one that was, at least implicitly, promoted by
Austin (1975).
As she reminds us repeatedly (Sbisa`, 1984, 1987, 1989, 2001, 2002), Austin points out that the
effect that an illocutionary act brings about should not be reduced, as Searle (1969, 1979) claims,
to the securing of uptake (or illocutionary effect in Searles terminology3), but must also take
into account two other effects: the production of conventional effects as well as the effect of
prompting a response or sequel (see Austin, 1975:116117). She writes:
In this perspective, the hearers understanding of the force is viewed as necessary to the
successful performance of the speakers act, and therefore to the production of its
conventional effects. The addressee has to take the speech act as a promise, an order, a
statement. . ., if it is to count as a promise (and create an obligation), an order (and assign an
obligation), a statement (and formulate a verifiable/falsifiable piece of knowledge). The
interlocutors role is no longer passive, confined to mirroring the speakers intention, but
involves participation in determining the successfulness of the speakers illocutionary act.
(Sbisa`, 1994:162)
In other words, Sbisa`s model consists of highlighting the production of changes in conventional
states of affairs, a production that leads to the transformation of the addressees identity in terms
of rights and obligations if this latter deems the speech act to be felicitous.
To illustrate this position, one could, for instance, take up this excerpt from Schegloff
(1988):

By this, I mean that each speech act brings about some change in the way the interlocutors are defined and identified.
For instance, when a sergeant orders a private to clean the latrines, the privates identity and sergeants identity are
changed to the extent that the private is now ordered to clean the latrines and the sergeant has now given an order to the
private. A priori, this does not add much to our comprehension of what is happening, but such changes can, of course,
have very important consequences. In our case, should the private decline to follow this order that he just received, he
could be recriminated and punished for insubordination. Such insubordination only makes sense if we acknowledge that
the privates identity has changed upon receiving this order (for more details, see Cooren, 2000). As we will see later, such
conceptions of identity are perfectly congruent with Peirces (1898/1992) doctrine of internal relations.
3
Speaking of illocutionary effect, Searle (1979) writes, In the case of illocutionary acts, we succeed in doing what we
are trying to do by getting our audience to recognize what we are trying to do. But the effect on the hearer is not a belief or
response, it consists simply in the hearer understanding the utterance of the speaker. It is this effect that I have been calling
the illocutionary effect (p. 47). Illocutionary effects thus have to be distinguished from perlocutionary effects to the
extent that perlocutions involve the persons reaction to what she understood, which ultimately involves her freedom. For
instance, if I ask someone to pass me the salt, the uptake (or illocutionary effect) for Searle consists of my interlocutor
understanding that I am asking her to pass me the salt. If she decides to pass me the salt and does pass it to me, this
qualifies as a perlocutionary effect. This is ultimately based on the fact that comprehension is not a voluntary act.

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F. Cooren / Journal of Pragmatics 40 (2008) 116

(1)
Mother:
Russ:
Mother:
Russ:

Do you know whos going to that meeting?

Who.
I dont kno:w
Oh::. Probly Missiz McOwen (n detsa) en
Probly Missiz Cadry and some of the teachers.
(0.4) and the counselors (pp. 5758)

T1
T2
T3
T4

As we see in this example, Russ initially understood his mothers question at T1 as a request for
information about his state of knowledge, a request that ultimately functions, for him, as a
pre-announcement. His understanding is displayed at T2 when he responds, Who, which
implicitly means that he does not know who would be worth an announcement on his mothers
part. In other words, for Russ, his mothers question at T1 counts as a pre-announcement, that is a
move by which his mother is checking if what she is about to announce at T3 is already known by
her son (Cooren, 2005a).
What is interesting in this excerpt is that his mother actually meant her question at T1 as a
request for information, and not as a pre-announcement. As we understand at T3, she does not
know who is going to that meeting (I dont kno:w), which means that she wonders if her son Russ
would happen to know this information. The confusion comes from the fact that a
pre-announcement and a request for information can be conventionally performed by using
the same type of utterance: Do you know + question. For instance, one could imagine that the
interaction could have evolved as follows:
(2)
Mother:
Russ:
Mother:
Russ

Do you know whos going to that meeting?

Who.
Missiz McOwen (n detsa) en probly
Missiz Cadry and some of the teachers.
Oh great!

T1
T2
T3
T4

As we see in this invented sequence, no repair takes place, since Russ and his mother seem to
implicitly agree on what T1 counts as, i.e. a pre-announcement. What Mother is doing at T1 in (2)
is checking if her son already knows who is going to the meeting, an action she performs by
asking a question about his state of knowledge. Upon hearing her son asking, Who at T2, she
understands that he does not know who is going to be at the meeting and then makes her
announcement at T3.
As shown in excerpts (1) and (2), and as pointed out by Sbisa` (1987, 2002), agreement
(even implicit) is necessary between the interlocutors in order for a speech act to be considered
performed. Because of the conventional dimension of any speech act (including the
non-institutional ones), interlocutors ultimately have to implicitly or explicitly agree on what
was actually done, otherwise misunderstanding and/or sequences of repair take place. As
illustrated in excerpt (1), it is only when Russ realizes that he misunderstood his mothers initial
question that an agreement on what T1 counts as can implicitly take place between the two
participants. It is therefore Russ who ultimately determines the successfulness of his mothers
request for information. As we see, intention is something that is reconstructed a posteriori by the
participants and not something that defines a priori what a given speech act will count as (see also
Arundale, 1999, 2005).

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Furthermore, by identifying illocutionary acts as social actions yielding results, Sbisa`

also allows us to extend the analysis of speech acts to cases that, by definition, would have
gone unnoticed in Searles (1969, 1979) intentionalist perspective. One such case is, for
instance, what happens when the addressee orients to what was said or written by ascribing
agency to entities that are supra- or infra-individual. Speaking of an interactional situation
involving two participants (P1 being the agent and P2 the patient or recipient), Sbisa` (1987)
writes:
Our P1 can be a human individual, an infra-individual instance (e.g., the Unconscious), a
super-individual construction (class, party, society, church, and the like), and even a
personified natural agent. (p. 259)
While ascribing agency to these entities would be unthinkable from an intentionalist perspective,
Sbisa`s two-place model shows that while P2 must be a human being (or at least a being capable
of identifying and interpreting actions, whether discursive or physical), P1 does NOT have to be
human (see also Cooren, 2000).4
In keeping with the semiotic openness to non-human agency (Greimas, 1983; Greimas and
Courtes, 1982), Sbisa`s conventional perspective thus paves the way to an extended version of
speech act theory in which beings other than humans can be said to do things with words. What
remains crucial in this acknowledgement is how the addressee orients to what is done, that is,
what kind of entity she selects as being the agent. However, before going further into this
controversial question, we need to go back to Greimas (1983) and to one linguist whose work was
decisive in the development of his narrative theory: Lucien Tesnie`re (1959).
4. Dramatism and multivalence
As we know, Sbisa`s reconceptualization of speech act theory stems from Greimass (1987)
semiotic model, which among other things consists in identifying the sequential aspects
of action, especially in narratives, but also in other forms of discourse (for instance, see his
analyses of a recipe (Greimas, 1987) or of legal discourse (Greimas, 1990)). For Greimas,
semiotics should first be considered a theory of how texts produce meaning, i.e. what he
calls a theory of signification, and not strictly a theory of signs. In other words, his goal is
to identify the conditions under which meaning emerges in the sequentiality of action,
which can be identified in narratives and other forms of discourse. Interestingly enough,
Greimass own model partly stems from the work of the French linguist Lucien Tesnie`re (1959),
whose main idea consisted in comparing each sentence he was analyzing to a spectacle or
mini-drama.

Regarding the question of non-human agency, we could establish a parallel with the figure of metonymy, as analyzed,
for instance, by cognitive linguists like Lakoff and Johnson (1980). As we know, metonymy consists of speaking of an
entity to refer to another entity that is considered to be associated with it. These entities can be individual or collective,
human or non-human. For instance, we will say, Washington decided that. . . to speak about the decision made by the
president of the United States and/or his associates. Here, Washington represents or stands for the president and/or his
associates. Even if the question of non-human agency can be associated with this specific trope, it cannot be reduced to it.
For instance, when I say This book moved me, I may mean that it is, in fact, the person who wrote this article who
moved me, but I may also just mean what I said, that it is this specific book that moved me, and not its author, even if I
know who wrote the book. In other words, recognizing non-human agency goes beyond the recognition of a trope, since
sometimes there is no metonymic trope associated with this recognition.

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F. Cooren / Journal of Pragmatics 40 (2008) 116

For Tesnie`re (1959), each sentence that we hear or read involves an action from which
different characters, called actants, can be identified, as well as circumstantial indicators. As he
writes,
The verbal node found in most European languages. . . expresses a small drama in itself.
Like a drama, it indeed necessarily includes a process, and most often actors and
circumstances. Transposed from the plane of dramatic reality to that of structural syntax,
the process, the actors and the circumstances respectively become the verb, the actants, and
the circumstantial indicators. (p. 102, my translation)
Starting from this intuition, Tesnie`re then shows how verbs of action can be differentiated
according to their valence, that is, the number of actants that appear to be attached to them. This
leads him to identify four types of verbs, which he calls avalent, monovalent (or intransitive),
divalent (or transitive), and trivalent (or ditransitive) verbs (see also Cooren, 2000; Fillmore,
1988; Goldberg, 1995; Lakoff, 1987; Taylor and Van Every, 2000).
According to this analysis, raining is an avalent verb, since it describes a process which
takes place by itself (p. 106, my translation), as we can see in It rains or Il pleut.
Concerning monovalent verbs, such as falling down, they describe a process in which only
one person or thing participates (p. 106, my translation), as in Bob fell down or
Bob tomba, where Bob is called a prime actant (or agent), i.e. the one who (or that) is
represented as carrying out the action. As for divalent verbs (e.g. eating), they describe a process
involving two actants, as in Bob ate the apple or Bob mangea la pomme, where Bob and the
apple are, respectively, identified as the prime and second actants, the second actant (or object)
being the one that is represented as supporting the action (cf. also pp. 242255). Finally, trivalent
verbs (like giving) describe a process in which three persons or things participate (p. 107,
my translation), as in Bob gave an apple to George or Bob donna une pomme a` George,
where Bob, the apple and George, respectively, are the prime, second, and third actants, the third
actant (or recipient) being the one to whose advantage or detriment the action is performed
(cf. also pp. 255259).
Since this typology claims to apply to any verb of action, it seems reasonable to think that
speech acts may be analyzed according to this perspective. As Cooren (2000) and Descombes
(1996, 2001, 2004) note, Tesnie`re (1959) indeed points out that the category of trivalent verbs
correspond with what he calls verbes de dire (verbs of saying) and verbes de don (verbs of
giving), which themselves include verbs that Austin (1975) and Searle (1979) identify as
performative. The list of verbs of saying includes:
Say, pronounce, express, describe, report, recount, present, explain, teach, demonstrate,
prove, specify, mark, declare, proclaim, confirm, assert, deny, maintain, assure, certify,
guarantee, swear, mean, order, command, assign, recommend, indicate, mention, insinuate,
suggest, whisper, put forward, concede, confide, allow, ask, . . . answer, hush up, hide,
confess, uncover, reveal, denounce, disclose, announce, communicate, tell, repeat, brood
over, recite, churn out, cite (p. 256, my translation, see also Cooren, 2000:89).
As we see in this list, performative verbs like asking or guaranteeing are considered
trivalent because they describe a process involving three actants: an agent, an object and a
recipient, as in George asked Bob to come here or Martha guaranteed Nancy that this car was
brand new. In both cases, we see that these sentences consist in describing a process (or action)
involving an agent (respectively, George and Martha), an object (respectively, the request to
come here and the guarantee that this car was new) and a recipient (respectively, Bob and Nancy).

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F. Cooren / Journal of Pragmatics 40 (2008) 116

Utterances like Come here addressed by George to Bob or This car is brand new! addressed
by Martha to Nancy in specific contexts can thus be analyzed as speech acts that consist in asking
and guaranteeing something.
The list of verbs of giving is also informative:
Give, supply, get, allocate, distribute, relegate, confer, concede, delegate, award, lavish,
administer, grant, design, promise, assign, refuse, yield, sacrifice, leave, abandon, lend
entrust, return, pay, reimburse, bring, pass hand in, deliver, send, mail, remove, take off,
take away, steal (Tesnie`re, 1959:256, cf. also Cooren, 2000:89).
As we see, this list includes trivalent verbs like promising, removing, or awarding, which
correspond with speech acts, as, respectively, expressed in the following utterances: I will
come, You are not sergeant anymore or I hereby award you the Nobel Prize. These three
utterances in given contexts, respectively, function as an agent giving a recipient her word that
she will come, an agent removing the title of sergeant from a recipient (what is also called a
discharge) and an agent awarding the Nobel Prize to a recipient.
Following Sbisa`s (1987, 2002) semiotic approach, it thus appears that if we analyze speech
acts as social actions that bring about context changes, we realize that what ultimately matters is
how a given interpreter translates any situation involving the production of a speech act as a
transformation of state. This transformation involves, as pointed out by Greimas (1987) and
Tesnie`re (1959), an agent giving an object to a recipient or an agent taking an object from
someone. For instance, at T1 in excerpt (1), the utterance Do you know whos going to that
meeting? addressed by the Mother to Russ can be translated into the Mother (agent) making a
request for information (object) to Russ (recipient). As we have seen, a misunderstanding took
place because Russ initially thought that his mothers request for information was about his state
of knowledge (concerning whether or not he knew who was going to be at the meeting), while he
realized in T3 that she actually meant it as a request for information about who was coming to the
meeting.
Had Mother meant it as a request for information about her sons state of knowledge
(as imagined in sequence (2)), she could have also been said to be checking if her son already
knew the information she was about to announce. Upon hearing Who at T2, which
consists of her son (agent) making a request for information (object) to her mother (recipient)
about who is coming, it could have been said that she checked to see if her son indeed
did not know the information. In terms of transformation of states, this would mean that the
fact that Russ did not know the information (recipient) had been checked (object) by her
(agent),5 prompting her (agent), at T3, to make her announcement (object) to her son
(recipient). As we see in this analysis, if we analyze what happens in terms of actions, we

Here, I mean that, semiotically speaking, once a piece of information is said to be checked by X, everything happens
as though this information has received a new property or trait from X. This is a relational property to the extent that it is
the information-checked-by-X, but as Descombes (1996) reminds us, language allows us to produce un-relativized
terms (p. 206, my translation of derelativise), like checked, loved or married, which are relative or relational
terms artificially presented as absolute. These terms are supposed to refer to traits or properties that are both relational
(e.g. if a piece of information has been checked, this implies, by definition, that it was checked by someone) and internal
(checked is a new property of the piece of information). Incidentally, this analysis corresponds with Peirces (1898/
1992) doctrine of internal relations, which contradicts Russells (1911/1992) doctrine of external relations. According to
Peirce, relations can both be internal and real (for more details on this debate, see Cooren, 2005b; Grillo, 2000; Jacques,
1991).

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realize how each move consists of transforming the situation, a transformation that, of course,
always depends on an agreement about what was actually accomplished (as illustrated in
sequence 1).
As we see, the problem of the speakers intentions does not disappear. It is rather one part of
the picture, as pointed out by the two-place model proposed by Sbisa` and Fabbri (1980) and
Arundales (1999, 2005) co-constituted model of communication. By focusing on how
interlocutors interpret what is happening and agree or disagree on what is accomplished, we end
up adopting an actional and conventional perspective, mainly focused on what people appear to
be doing according to the conventional effects of language use. For instance, if we are to
announce something to someone, it is conventionally implied that what is about to be announced
should be newsworthy to the interlocutor, otherwise the announcement could be considered
performed but infelicitous. By definition, an announcement is what it is because the interlocutor
does not a priori know its content.
This is precisely how Russ initially understands what is happening, in excerpt (1), upon
hearing his mother ask him a question about his state of knowledge. For him, the way to make
sense of his mothers question is to insert this action into the larger project of checking his state of
knowledge, which is itself inserted into the larger project of announcing something. This is how
he implicitly reconstructs what is happening, which certainly leads him to attribute specific
intentions to his mother (she is about to announce something to me). But as we see, intention is
something that is reconstructed by the interlocutors rather than determining a priori how speech
acts are to be understood. Sure, since they have to agree on what was accomplished, one could say
that the mothers intention plays a role in the ultimate determination of what she did, but it is just
one part of the interpretive puzzle.
The semiotic approach advocated by Cooren (2000) and Sbisa` (2002) thus allows us to
analyze speech acts as transformations of state operated through the giving or taking of an
object between an agent and a recipient. Interestingly, this approach also enables us to see how
these social actions articulate with one another, how the identification of a given speech act
participates in the definition of larger sequences (also called schemas by Greimas and Courtes
(1982)), as illustrated in the Mother-Russ interaction. Although these phenomena have already
been addressed through the study of indirectness (Cooren, 1997, 2000; Cooren and Sanders,
2002) and sequentiality (Cooren, 2000; Cooren and Fairhurst, 2004; Sbisa`, 2002), there
remains to be shown how this approach to language use allows to address what has been
identified, in the previous section, as non-humans textual agency. This is what I propose to do
in the next section.
5. Tetravalence and agency
So far, we have seen how it is possible to reinterpret speech acts as actions involving
three actants, what Tesnie`re (1959) and others like Cooren (2000) and Goldberg (1995) identify
as the prime actant (also called agent), the second actant (or object) and the third actant
(or recipient). At first sight, one could therefore think that speech act theory is circumscribable
through the identification of trivalent verbs. After all, doing things with words can consist of (1)
an agent giving a directive (object) to a recipient (what Searle (1979) calls directives), (2) an
agent giving her word (object) to a recipient (what Searle calls commissives), (3) an agent
giving permission (object) to a recipient (what Cooren (2000) calls accreditives), (4) an agent
giving information (object) to a recipient (what Cooren calls informatives), (5) an agent
giving (or removing) a status or identity to (or from) a recipient (what Searle calls

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declarations), and (6) an agent giving (or removing) value to (or from) a recipient (what
Searle calls expressives).
As nicely pointed out by Descombes (2004), Tesnie`re (1959) notes, however, that it is possible
to construct sentences involving more than three actants, what he identifies as tetravalent
constructions (cf. p. 258). What is a tetravalent construction? In order to answer this question, we
first have to introduce what Descombes calls a scale of actional degrees (echelle des degres de
lagir (p. 87)), which involves the application of causative auxiliary verbs like causing to, or
making to other verbs. As noticed by Tesnie`re, actional verbs constitute semantic systems
(p. 299), which means that they can convert into one another. For instance, Tesnie`re notes that it is
possible to convert a transitive (or divalent) verb into a ditranstive verb by applying a causative
auxiliary verb like making or causing to. Teaching something to someone consists, for
example, in making someone learn something. In other words, teaching (a trivalent verb) is
causing to learn, learning being a divalent verb.
The same operation applies to monovalent (or intransitive) verbs, which can be converted
into divalent (or transitive) ones by applying a causative auxiliary verb. For instance,
knocking over something (a divalent verb) is causing something to fall, and falling is
a monovalent verb. As we see, each verb can thus be located in a scale of actional degrees,
which is made of a causative series of verbal forms (Descombes, 2004, p. 87, my
translation). What is even more interesting is that this operation, called causative diathesis,
can also be applied to convert a trivalent verb into a tetravalent construction. As noted by
Tesnie`re,
The growing complexity of the actantial system of the verb is likely to be a function of the
progress of the human mind, which gives birth to more and more complex actantial
structures. One is therefore led to wonder if there is not also, after trivalent verbs,
tetravalent verbs. If we put aside the periphrastic forms with tetravalent values. . ., it seems
that there does not exist in any language simple verbal forms that comprise more than three
valences. (p. 258, my translation)
So even if there are no simple verbal forms that correspond to this construction, Tesnie`re notes
that trivalent verbs, by becoming causative, are converted into tetravalent forms. As an example,
Charles gave the book to Alfred can be converted into Daniel made Charles give the book to
Alfred. (cf. p. 266).6
As we see in this case, making somebody give something can be called a tetravalent
construction to the extent that it involves four actants: the principal, the agent, the object, and the
recipient, where the principal is positioned as the instigator of the process (cf. Tesnie`re, 1959:260).
WhileinthesentenceCharlesgavethebooktoAlfredCharleswaspositionedastheinstigatorofthe
process, the causative diathesis converts him into an immediate agent, and Daniel becomes the
principal (or mediate) agent. As noted by Descombes (2004), the transition to causative allows
us to describe what A (the immediate agent) is doing in terms of what B (the principal agent) is
doing (p. 94, my translation). This does not mean that the immediate agent is not doing things
anymore;itsimplymeansthatsomethingorsomeoneisnowpositionedasmakingherorcausingherto
do something.

As noted by one of the anonymous reviewers, the trivalent description could be true both of a situation in which
Charles decides himself to give Alfred the book and of one in which he is urged to do so by Daniel. This means that the
tetravalent construction is more specific in terms of content.

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What are the implications of this analysis for a reflection on (social) action in general and
speech act theory in particular? They are, we think, crucial. Interestingly enough, one could first
note that what Tesnie`re (1959) and Descombes (2004) highlight parallels in many respects what
other scholars like Callon (1986, 1991; Callon and Latour, 1981) and Latour (1996, 1999) have
been saying for more than 20 years about socio-technical action, i.e. that to do is causing to do. As
Latour (1996) notes,
to act is to be perpetually overtaken by what one does. Faire cest faire [faire]. To do is to
make happen. . . .We are exceeded by what we create. To act is to mediate anothers
action. . . Thus it is not the case that there are actors on the one side and fields of forces on
the other. There are only actors actants any one of which can only proceed to action by
association with others who may surprise or exceed him/her/it. (p. 178, my underlining)
Not surprisingly, Callon and Latour (1981) explicitly acknowledge having been influenced by
Greimas (1987, Greimas and Courtes, 1982), an influence that can be felt up to the latest essays
written by Latour (2004).
Indeed, if we follow what Callon, Descombes, Latour, and Tesnie`re are saying, we end up
realizing that action is something that, analytically speaking, can always be either broken down
into smaller units of action (by a conversion that Tesnie`re (1959) would call recessive diathesis)
or, on the contrary, included into larger units of action (by a conversion that Tesnie`re would call
causative diathesis). For instance, your informing someone of something (where informing is a
trivalent verb) can be broken down into your making somebody know something (where knowing
is a divalent verb). Reversely, your informing someone of something can actually be included
into a larger episode where somebody or something actually made you inform someone of
something. For instance, X asked you to inform Yof something, which is the tetravalent structure
that positions X as the principal, you as the agent, Y as the recipient, and the information as the
object.
Using another illustration, we could note that mailing a letter to a friend ultimately consists in
making the post office bring this letter to this person. Pushing this exercise further down the
recessive diathesis, we realize that saying that the post office brings this letter to the friend
consists in an agent acting in the name of the post office (it could be a machine or a human) that
makes a mailman bring the letter to the person. If we again further this analysis, we see a mailman
putting a letter in the friends mailbox and the friend ultimately getting the letter from this box.
As this analysis shows, everything happens as though the recognition of tetravalent structures
enables us to open up the traditional speaker/hearer schema by highlighting not only what makes
people do what they do, but also what these people are using as intermediary to perform their
actions (whether discursive or physical).
As illustrated by Cooren (2004), we can therefore point out that people tend to have no
problem ascribing some form of agency to textual or discursive entities when they use ordinary
language. For instance, one can easily say This article claims that global warming is a fact
(assertive); This signature commits you to payment (commissive); This recipe suggests
that we use this kind of flour (directive); This new law revokes the governments decision
(declaration); or even The review compliments the actor on his performance in the film
(expressive). Intentionalists would argue that claims are statements people make, that
signatures are flourishes that people produce to make documents official, that recipes are texts
that chefs write, that laws are documents that representatives vote, or that reviews are articles
journalists write. I am not, of course, challenging this point. On the contrary, it is precisely

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because human beings produce such texts that people can then orient to these by ascribing
them agency.
In keeping with the externalist thesis7 advocated by Peirce (1931), Ryle (1949) and
Wittgenstein (1953), I therefore contend that intentions and agency are not dispositions that
should just be ascribed to humans, but can also be extended to the things humans produce,
whether these things are texts or artifacts, or to the entities they represent or act on behalf,
whether these entities are individual or collective. As Descombes (1996, 2001) and Robichaud
(2006) remind us, agency and intention can be ultimately located neither in the human beings nor
in the things they produce because these phenomena are inherently relational, and not substantial.
For instance, when we say, This recipe suggests that we use this kind of flour, we indeed
attribute some form of agency to a recipe, but doing so does not consist in completely severing the
recipe from the person who wrote and conceived of it. On the contrary, it is only because we know
that recipes are texts that people write that we can attribute agency to these texts by singularizing
their contribution. In other words, it is because we are able to recognize institutional practices,
what Sbisa` (1987, 2002) recognizes as conventions, like the writing of recipes, the signature of
documents, or the voting of laws, that the attribution of agency to texts and other technical
artifacts is possible.
6. Conclusion
What are the consequences of this analysis? Simply that analysts should not hesitate to take
into account that we live in a world full of various agencies and that the structuring of this world is
only possible through the active contribution of the discursive and physical artifacts that humans
produce. By focusing mainly on what humans do when they speak to each other, everything
happens as though pragmaticians were, in fact, neglecting something that semioticians have
already pointed out for some time, that is, that we live in a plenum of agencies where many
different things can be said to be doing things: companies, technologies, societies, machines,
texts, paintings, architectural elements, artifacts, etc. What Tesnie`re and others are pointing to is
that people continually and unknowingly perform causative and recessive diatheses; they
singularize, for various reasons (argumentative, aesthetic, educational, etc.), agents in a chain of
potential agencies when they come to identify actions. As pointed out by Taylor and Van Every
(2000), we just need to open our daily newspapers to see that companies decide to invest in
various products, new laws enforce specific behaviors, or treaties seal international agreements.
What this means is that not only humans produce things (e.g. treaties) that are going to literally
act on their behalf, in their name, but they also act on behalf of other entities whom or which they
are supposed to represent (e.g. companies, laws).
What or who is acting is not something the analyst can decide by arbitrarily looking at a
given situation, since ascribing agency is a judgment that people (consciously or
unconsciously) make when they evaluate and speak of a situation. It is this act of judgment
that we witness when we, as analysts, study texts and interactions. Adopting a relational
approach to agency thus consist in recognizing that agency is not a disposition that should be
7

According to the externalist thesis, intentionality is a relational phenomenon, that is, there is as much intentionality in
a document, a machine or an instrument as there is in the human brain. This position can be contrasted with the internalist
thesis, as defended for instance by Searle (1980a,b, 1984). According to this philosophical position, intentionality is a
characteristic that should be restricted to human beings (and other animals) and not to the artifacts they produce or design
in order to fulfill specific objectives (see Castor and Cooren, 2006, as well as Robichaud, 2006).

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13

reduced to humans and only humans, but that it should be extended to the (physical and
discursive) entities they mobilize in their action, whether by representing them (speaking,
writing or, more generally, acting in their name) or by making them do things. As analysts, we
therefore have to realize, following Latour (1996), that there is no origin to action. Yes, indeed
people do things (physically or discursively), but we must always wonder, as analysts, what
make them do things and what they mobilize in their action. In other words, action is always
caught in a chain of agencies.
As an illustration, we can again go back to the RussMother interaction.
(1)
Mother:
Russ:
Mother:
Russ:

Do you know whos going to that meeting?

Who.
I dont kno:w
Oh::. Probly Missiz McOwen (n detsa) en
Probly Missiz Cadry and some of the teachers.
(0.4) and the counselors (pp. 5758)

T1
T2
T3
T4

As we saw previously, it is his mothers question that made Russ believe that she was checking
whether or not he knew who was going to that meeting. In other words, he initially oriented to her
question as a way to check his state of knowledge so that she could make an announcement about
what he presumably did not know, which explains why he answered Who as a way to prompt
her to make her announcement. As we see in this analysis, his mothers question initially
functions for him as a request for information about his state of knowledge. Using Descombes
point, it could also be noted that a transition to causative is possible to the extent that what this
question (the immediate agent) is doing then becomes what his mother (the principal) is doing.
Upon hearing T1, he understands that she is making a request for information about his state of
knowledge because she is checking if she can make an announcement.
Interestingly, we know that this causative diathesis proved to be wrong. Upon hearing T3,
Russ then realized that his mother actually did not know who was coming to the meeting and
that she meant her request for information about his state of knowledge as a request for
information about the content of his knowledge. In other words, this example perfectly
illustrates my point, to the extent that we see that the utterances people produce make them
do things that they do not always control. To communicate verbally, interactants produce
utterances that will literally act on their behalf, in their name. These utterances (agents) can
of course translate more or less correctly what their instigators (principals) mean, but they
can also, as we saw in this example, betray them. Traduttore, traditore! as the Italians
nicely say. A pragmatic approach to language is indeed about the role contexts play in the
meanings of utterances and their effects on interpreters, but these effects must then be
recognized as a form of agency. Again, this does not mean that human beings and their
intentions disappear. On the contrary, these effects are only possible because we know that
utterances (and texts in general) are things people tend to produce in order to express
themselves and communicate.
Recognizing textual or discursive agency, as semiotics indirectly invites us to do, is therefore a
way to strengthen the ultimate pragmatic project, which in my view consists in accounting for
how communication works. For instance, explaining how misunderstanding functions is another
way to account for how the utterances interactants produce make them say things that they did not
necessarily mean (although Freud, of course, has showed us that we do not always control this

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aspect either!). Most of the time, interactants manage to find out what was actually meant (as
illustrated in the RussMother interaction), but it must yet be explained how misunderstanding
was still possible from the outset. It is possible, according to Descombes, Peirce, Sbisa` and
others, precisely because we live in a world of conventions (what Descombes also calls
Institutions of meaning or Institutions du sens) where the utterances (and signs in general)
we produce acquire, to a certain extent, a life of their own. This aspect is, of course, more obvious
in situations where written texts are produced (laws, invitations, contracts, books, articles), but
we have just seen how the analysis proposed can also account for how oral communication
works.8
Instead of separating the paradigm of representation from the paradigm of action, as some
pragmatists like Rorty (1979) advocate, I contend that we need to bring them back together.
Recognizing the phenomenon of representation precisely consists in showing how agents are
always caught in a chain of agencies and how their very action can always be attributed to other
agents, whether upstream (the entities of whom or which they are positioned as acting on behalf
or incarnating) or downstream (the entity they are mobilizing to interact). Effects of
representation are always potentially at stake in interaction, since they are the very effects by
which interlocutors and interpreters end up attributing agency, whether it is to things as
diverse as the unconscious, passion, madness, racism, a company, an individual or anything that
is deemed being acting at that specific moment. Recognizing the link between the two paradigms
thus is another way to go back to the etymological root of the term representation, i.e. the
action that consists in making an entity present through the mediation of another entity
(which incidentally is the very definition of a sign).
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Further reading
Sbisa`, Marina, 1985. Manipulation et sanction dans la dynamique des actes de langage. In: Parret, H., Ruprecht, H.-G.
(Eds.), Exigences et Perspectives de la Semiotique. Recueil dhommages pour Algirdas Julien Greimas. John Benjamins,
Amsterdam, pp. 529538.