Du projet de discours à l'énoncé phrastique complexe – Analyse de discours ou d'énoncé ? Enjeux, objectifs, obstacles, activités

Résumé (en anglais)

The author adopts the point of view of ideas texts, defined as complex discourses without a prior global conceptual representation and tries to interpret failures in writing and badly formed or « clumsy » utterances. This helps her investigate the connections between certain writing projects, disqualified text segments, the supposed goal of the text and available analysis models. Her assumption is that syntactical failure can be established from the point of view of writing, rhetoric, grammar, semantics and pragmatics. The author illustrates her remarks by two texts written in class by a secondary school student and a university student. The first example seems representative both for the opaque relations between syntax and discourse as well as between the other structuring levels, and for the difficulties the corrector faces when nominating the type of mistake when this exceeds the lower encoding level. It is also representative for the standard level reached in writing skills. The second text allows for a longitudinal reflection on teaching issues connected to complex sentences in discourse. It illustrates a too general standpoint extolling the educational values of dialogue. The syntactical form of utterances is dominated by negative impersonal constructions, verbal synonymy and the deontic future of conclusion. The evaluation of complex texts is considered fastidious by correctors and teachers who think that « the weakest writers cannot write a complex sentence » and that « they write too long sentences ». Borrowing the concept of obstacle-objective from science didactics, the author applies it both to knowledge and to know how and considers that obstacle-objectives refer both to grammar knowledge and to writing know how, also characterizing the students' cognitive posture towards the subject they are taught and the teachers posture towards the strategy adopted in order to solve a writing task or an utterance analysis. Hence, the way traditional grammar defines sentences seems ambiguous: when considering the simple sentence, syntax focuses more on verbs than on the sentence itself, while when considering complex sentences, other criteria than subordination should be taken into account so as to integrate semantic, enunciative and pragmatic parameters which determine the formation of a significant, autonomous and complex sentence.