Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 364
A complete sentence can hide the owner
Benveniste makes speaker, addressee, time, place, and subject position part of meaning rather than treating consequential language as detachable content
Premise
A grammatically complete sentence can remain operationally ambiguous until the speaking situation is known. Who is making the statement, who is addressed, when “now” occurs, what “this” refers to, and which actor accepts responsibility can all change the force of identical wording. Benveniste’s theory of enunciation makes that event of saying analytically central.
For executives, this shifts communication review from proposition alone to the conditions under which the proposition becomes discourse. Institutional language does not merely describe action; pronouns, tense, deixis, modality, and forms of address distribute agency, responsibility, inclusion, distance, and response.
What the model is: Theory of Enunciation in Knowledge →
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- Risks and limits
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryTheories & Explanatory Models
- DomainMeaning & Clarity
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Theories & Explanatory Models
Explains how or why a communication process works by relating mechanisms, conditions or variables. Its value is an account that can guide inquiry into what produces an outcome, rather than a name for the outcome alone.
- KnowledgeTheory of Enunciation
- Related briefSpeech Acts: Know When Words Create Organizational Action