Semantic Niches or a Logic for Historians

Abstract

Historians deal partly, even mostly, with what people said. They primarily ask not whether what people said was true, but whether it is true that they said it. They want to know how people were understood by their listeners, by their contemporaries, by the succeeding generations, including our own. And what responses, verbal or other, their utterances have received. They try to place people’s utterances in a suitable speaker-listener relation within the setting of place and moment. It is required that historians tell us not just the words used by the speaker but also how these words were received and understood. If so, historical reports which deal with verbal activities, must state that a speaker using a form of speech said to someone that so and so. There is a semantic relation between the speaker, the listener, the form, and what is said. How an utterance was heard, understood and reported is historically more important than how it was actually uttered or intended by the speaker. The speaker seldom reports his own speech and, if so, unreliably. Someone else reports his utterance. A major preoccupation of historians is to establish the reporter’s credentials The utterance may be perceived as a statement, a hypothesis, a question, a command, a reproach, a denial, a lie, or as in some other possible mode of saying. The mode of the utterance may be given by the way the speaker said it. Sometimes, the reporter adds his own impression of the mode. If a person A utters a form α to a listener B and if his utterance is in a mode m, then a reporter C may tell us about it in his own mode n. Thus I suggest as a general schema for communication:

Il n’y a que la parole, the rest is linguist’s construction

(Zellig Harris)