Le conte soumis aux règles du discours
The tale subject to the rules of discourse

Summary/Abstract: In his Grammaire du Décaméron, Tzvetan Todorov suggested studying the narration as a universe of representations; therefore, its object of study would be the universe evoked by the discourse and not the discourse in its literality, accepting the idea of the existence of a universal grammar. Just as Todorov, first we will establish the three general aspects of the tale: semantic, syntactic and verbal. The first aspect includes what represents and evokes the history, the content more or less specific that it brings. The syntactic aspect means the combination of units, the relations established between them. The verbal aspect signifies the concrete sentences from which the history is received, the modality through which a semantic content is transmitted to us: for example, by which words we understand an undecomposable action such as “he kills the ogre”, or “he goes on a trip”.Secondly, we will analyze the narrative roles in the tales, especially the patient and the agent, according to the taxonomy established by Claude Bremond. In conclusion, we have considered necessary to study the meaning as a whole and the comprehension of the tale, its perception beyond the written text that a speaker has before his eyes.

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