an interlocutory, subjective position which I do not want to occupy can not
only be returned, but taken up, taken on, and revalued.
The fifth thesissummarises the positions formulated in the first four. It
maintains that the structure of utterances is social and is only realised in the
interaction of concrete speakers. Unlike in most research programmes in
linguistics, it is no longer a question of making phonology, morphology or
syntax the heart of the study of language. The heart of linguistics is prag-
matics – a pragmatics which, unlike Anglo-American pragmatics, is not
individualist, but socialised – that is, conscious of the historical and political
nature of language. The following chapter will be devoted to the systematic
development of this thesis.
Turning from these general theses to the concrete study of language,
Voloshinov has recourse to two new concepts: the concept of theme, by which
he refers to the global meaning of the utterance – that is, a singularity bound
up with the concrete situation of enunciation; and the concept of signification,
by which he means repeated elements of meaning, which are transmitted
from one situation to the next. Here, we once again encounter the difference
between pragmatic meaning and semantic meaning – the difference between
the multiplicity of meanings of the exclamation ‘Good!’ in concrete situations
and its sedimented meaning in a dictionary. But this conceptual distinction
goes a little further: the transition from signification to the theme involves
an active process of meaning (we return here to the previous meaning of
‘signification’ as the active forging of meaning), an active understanding
which takes not only the words, but also the intonation, of the utterance, into
account. Voloshinov is, in fact, one of the few linguists or philosophers to
take an interest in the phenomenon of intonation, which is largely neglected
and yet whose contribution to the meaning of an utterance is of the first
importance. The same utterance can assume totally different – even opposed –
meanings when the intonation changes (irony, irritation, seductiveness,
weariness: all these emotions can be sensed by means of the intonation of
the utterance as much as by the actual words employed – and sometimes
rather more so than by the latter).^14 And this concept of language leads
Voloshinov to interest himself in another linguistic phenomenon in a
Continuations • 115(^14) See Voloshinov 1983.