Concept and Form:
The Cahiers pour l’Analyse
and Contemporary French Thought

This project is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) research grant and is supported by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) and Kingston University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

A student of Émile Benveniste, Antoine Culioli remains one of the most accomplished linguists in contemporary French academia. After pursuing his studies in English at the École Normale Supérieure between 1944 and 1948, Culioli studied Germanic philology at the Sorbonne from 1948 to 1952. In 1960 he defended his doctoral thesis on the subjunctive in medieval English, and taught English philology from 1961 to 1969. In 1971, Culioli became Professor of Linguistics at Université de Paris VII (formerly Jussieu, now Denis Diderot), where he taught until his retirement in 1992. Over the years, Culioli also taught a seminar at the ENS wherein he developed his own Théorie des Opérations Enconciatives (Theory of Enunciative Operations), an approach to linguistics that considered the breadth of natural language and sought out connections with other philosophical approaches to the subject, from Edmund Husserl’s to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s. Culioli was the main doctoral adviser for many contemporary French linguists, chief among them Jean-Claude Milner, a key figure in the Cahiers pour l’Analyse. He also had a close relationship with Michel Pêcheux, who republishedCulioli’s own contribution to volume nine of the Cahiers, an investigation into the meaning and extent of formalisation in the field of linguistics, in a later work he co-edited with Catherine Fuchs and Culioli himself.