Patrizia Violi proposes to consider a specific form of the arts du faire: the art du dire.
According to her, semiotics has long neglected this form of meaning production: its textualist tradition has led it to privilege the analysis of already textualized products rather than the practices that generate meaning.
The discipline, in other words, has focused on written and stabilized texts rather than on the enunciative practices through which meaning is produced.
This tendency, Violi notes, also affects classical theories of énonciation, which are based on an initial act of débrayage—a detachment that separates the text from the bodily event of its production.
As a result, a sémiotique de l’oralité has never properly been developed and has often been left to neighboring disciplines such as conversation analysis and linguistic pragmatics.
Contemporary semiotic approaches that emphasize the processuality of sense and enunciation, however, make it possible to rethink orality in a new way.
For Violi, orality shares with artistic practices certain key traits: the role of the producing body, the materiality of the plane of expression, the dynamic unfolding of meaning, the place of the subject, and a reconfiguration of intentionality.
Reflecting on orality, therefore, forces semiotics to question one of its foundational assumptions: the immanence of meaning.
A semiotics of orality obliges us to reformulate our conception of sense and of the modes by which sense is attributed and grasped—modes that go beyond textual immanence toward a more dynamic and intersubjective process.
Meaning here is not something already inscribed in a fixed text but something that emerges from the interaction of embodied practices.
Violi describes orality as a complex semiotic object, defined by three coexisting dimensions:
- the vocalized enunciation itself;
- the strongly syncretic nature of oral texts, where multiple sign systems coexist;
- the interactive and intersubjective nature of meaning construction, grounded in the phenomenological presence of different actors.
Thus, orality involves not only the voice but also bodily, visual, and kinetic forms of signification.
Meaning is transmitted through visual, auditory, somatic, sensory, and motor signifiers.
This makes orality comparable to filmic texts, where one must account simultaneously for textual structures and for the phenomenological dimension of meaning construction.
Traditional disciplines such as conversation analysis and pragmatics have, according to Violi, mostly described the surface mechanisms of discourse—turn-taking, dialogic exchange, inferential reconstruction of speaker intentions—while leaving unexplored key semiotic questions: enunciation, narrativity, affectivity, passion, and the strategic or manipulative dimensions of discourse.
For Violi, these neglected aspects are central.
A sémiotique de l’oralité must address at least two fundamental issues:
first, the relationship between production practices and praxis énonciative, since in orality “meaning is truly in fieri, not already fixed in textualization”;
and second, the central role of the body and corporéité, because “in orality, sense is literally embodied: the body is the material of expression of this semiotics.”
This perspective compels semiotics to “rethink the theory of enunciation in its classical form” and to integrate a phenomenological approach.
Body, voice, and intersubjectivity thus become the very conditions for the production of meaning.
In summary, Violi’s semiotics of orality entails:
- recognizing meaning as sense in act, dynamic rather than stabilized;
- describing enunciation as embodied and vocalized practice;
- treating corporéité as the true plane of expression;
- viewing intersubjectivity as constitutive of sense;
- and challenging textual immanence as the sole locus of meaning.
Bibliographic reference: Patrizia Violi, Énonciation textualisée, énonciation vocalisée: arts du dire et sémiotique de l’oralité, Actes Sémiotiques, 2006 (published online 27 October 2009).