Pour une grammaire des notions et de leurs transformations rhétoriques
For a grammar of concepts and their rhetorical transformations

Summary/Abstract: In a 1955 article, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca suggest that their theory of argumentation could provide a foundation for a study that they place under the sign of semantics: the study of notions. In the Treatise on Argumentation, the multiplicity of the examples cited can monopolise the reader’s attention and prevent him from finding the lineaments of this semantic reflection. If a semantic project appears in the Treatise, it is in the manner of a watermark. The analysis that Ducrot proposes of the word But and his commentary on Pascal’s Refutation of the Dominicans could offer a precious means of making the functioning of this study of notions promised by the New Rhetoric more visible. Ducrot’s strictly linguistic approach will allow for a better understanding of the workings of the Perelmanian method, a method that, by contrast, we will call “rhetorico-grammatical”.

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