Le nom propre : arme « anti-personnel ». Analyse linguistique d’un cas et d’un examen de conscience

Abstract

Starting from a literary text, we will work both in semantics (textual and referential), philosophy (of language) and cognitive sciences (for memory issues, among others). We will be interested in a case of designation which is also a “case” properly speaking, at least as presented by the title of the fiction that we are going to study: “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”. At the end of the short story, Dr. Jekyll, in a written “confession”, recounts the whole story of his case. Facing himself, that is to say, facing his alter ego as well, he wants to consider and therefore recount his story in an objective manner. On the textual and referential levels, the choice which is then imposed on the writer-narrator is the designation of the two parts of himself by the proper name – and not by nominal descriptions which would show a distorted point of view on Hyde. That said, the identical repetition of a proper name as a coreferential designation in a chain of reference cannot go beyond two occurrences without infringing the rules of “text grammar”, even if two referents are competing, and their designation must therefore alternate.