On Antoine Culioliʹs theory of enunciative operations

Antoine Culioli began elaborating his Theory of Enunciative Operations in the sixties and has never stopped improving and extending it ever since. He appears as the follower of those European linguists like Roman Jakobson and Emile Benveniste among others who considered linguistics could not be anything else than the search for meaning through forms. Central elements in the theory are, first, the topological model of the notion and notional domain as constructed round the organizing centre or typical occurrence, second, the operation of location as the basic operation at all stages of the construction of utterances, third, the part played in the construction of the referential values of utterances by the abstract coordinates of the Situation of uttering i.e. the enunciator, co-enunciator and moment of uttering. Culioliʹs theory has a cognitive dimension and his formalization uses concepts adapted from logics and mathematics but he has always been particularly anxious to stress the irreducible specificity and autonomy as a science of linguistics which should not be taken for an extension either of cognitive psychology or of mathematics.