This volume of edited papers is a reflection of a Symposium held at the University of Lausanne in 2004, marking the first two years of an interdisciplinary research project funded by this university. The key factors in this enterprise are precisely, interdisciplinarity and dialogue amongst closely related disciplines within the human sciences. One fil conducteur of the papers making up the volume is the notion of an indissoluble link between aspects of discourse and the social practices associated with different languages and genres of discourse.

There are nine main chapters, organised into three parts, with an introduction by the editors and an initial, framing chapter by Pierre Zima (‘Le concept de théorie en sciences humaines. La théorie comme discours et sociolecte’), which puts forward the highly significant – theoretically speaking – criterion of the potential ‘ébranlement’ of theories constructed within the human and social sciences: since by definition, these are not falsifiable or refutable unlike those of the natural sciences (see Marc Dominicy's penultimate chapter), they cannot successfully be refuted or validated in this way. However, once the indispensable (according to the authors in this volume) dialogue is properly set up amongst theories of the former kind, then they may be put to the test and thereby ‘ébranlées’ – or not, as the case may be. It is the conditions under which this dialogue may be put in place which are at the heart of the contributions to this volume as a whole.

Part One consists of three chapters which aim to examine critically the relations between philology and modern discourse analysis. The first, by Dominique Maingueneau, entitled ‘Philologie et analyse du discours’, studies the historical evolution of the two fields, while Jean-Marie Viprey's chapter, ‘Philologie numérique et herméneutique intégrative’, assesses the contribution to these disciplines of digital technology, engaging in critical discussion both with François Rastier's ‘cultural semiotics’ approach and with Jean-Michel Adam's theoretical distinction between text and discourse. Adam's own paper, ‘Les sciences de l’établissement des textes et la question de la variation’, is a detailed study of the evolving nature of given texts, underscoring the point that a text is not a fixed, stable material entity but that it may and does undergo variations of different kinds (via editing, through a variety of translations into other languages, and ‘textual genetics’ – an author's sequence of revisions of his or her text over time).

Part Two is a discussion of the potential contribution of comparative and contrastive approaches to textual and discourse analysis. Ute Heidemann's chapter ‘Comparatisme et analyse du discours. La comparaison différentielle comme méthode’ demonstrates the value of a ‘differential’ strategy in comparing texts, rather than one which lays emphasis on their common or supposedly universal features. Applying this approach to two short stories by Charles Perrault and their English translations by the writer Angela Carter, she shows effectively how an original text and its translation operate in terms of what she calls an ‘intertextual dialogue’: the differential comparative approach is precisely designed to lay bare the ways in which this dialogue amongst texts, languages and cultures functions.

Claude Calame's chapter (‘Pragmatique de la fiction. Quelques procédures de deixis narrative et énonciative en comparaison’), further develops this comparative methodology by contrasting the narrative deixis procedures used in certain Ancient Greek texts: in the choral conventions of the kômos in works by Pindar, and in the hymnic compositions of Callimacus. The choice of narrative deixis is intended as a point of departure for a more general reconsideration of the distinction between histoire (where past events are located chronologically relative to one another) and discours (where the locus of orientation is the utterance context). Calame shows how in the earlier texts, narrative deixis had a pure-deictic (situational) value rooted in the utterance context, but that in the later ones, this utterance-level anchoring was redefined in terms of the prior discourse upstream of the act of utterance. Calame's is a highly erudite, difficult chapter to follow, particularly since it tends to assume in the reader a knowledge of ancient Greek (as well as modern German!); however, the effort exerted ultimately yields dividends.

The final chapter in this part, by Emmanuelle Danblon (‘Discours magique, discours rhétorique. Contribution à une réflexion sur les effets de la persuasion’), is more accessible. Her aim is to shed contrastive light on magical (both ‘black’ and ‘white’ varieties), therapeutic and epidiptic (‘display’) discourse – in particular, André Malraux's funeral oration on the transfer of Jean Moulin's ashes to the Panthéon. She applies the theory of argumentation to these types of discourse, contrasting the three polar statuses of the audience (pathos), the orator (ethos) and the discourse itself (logos).

Finally, Part three is centrally concerned with argumentation, the notion of genre, and ‘interdiscursivity’ (Ruth Amossy, ‘Rhétorique et analyse du discours. Pour une approche socio-discursive des textes’), with the rhetorical concepts of ethos and posture d'auteur (Jérôme Meizoz, ‘Ethos et posture d'auteur (Rousseau, Céline, Ajar, Houellebecq)’, and with intertextuality, which is clearly intimately connected with ‘interdiscursivity’ (Jean-Marie Privat, ‘Une ethnocritique des intersignes: Le Retour et ses discours’).

Amossy's chapter highlights the continuity between the approaches of rhetoric and argumentation theory, on the one hand, and the démarche adopted by discourse analysis (DA), on the other. Yet the differences are important: traditional rhetoric limits itself to text types of a clearly persuasive nature, and posits speakers and addressees with intentionality and who are in full command of the linguistic and other means at their disposal, whereas DA is concerned to study a much wider range of discourses, even those where no persuasive goal is overtly pursued or is even in evidence at all, and where the audience is not necessarily explicitly addressed or delineated (cf. the author's useful distinction between ‘la visée’ and ‘la dimension argumentative’). Amossy's brand of DA is rooted in the utterance situation, where discourse is fundamentally a social act in that it is inherently recipient-designed; but its social character also, of necessity, involves a recognition of the prevailing doxa and more generally of the ‘interdiscours’ into which all language use enters. She applies these interdisciplinary notions and methods to a single sub-genre of texts: the testimony of nurses tending wounded soldiers on the battlefield in the First World War.

Jérôme Meizoz’ chapter shows how the related notions of ethos inherited from traditional rhetoric but redefined in the context of DA and the linguistics of ‘énonciation’, and Pierre Bourdieu's more recent one of posture d'auteur may illuminate each other within an interdisciplinary dialogue. And Jean-Marie Privat's fascinating chapter is an attempt to place readings of a classic work of literature (Maupassant's short story Le Retour (1884)) within the ‘interdiscours’ which its author assumed.

A chapter by Marc Dominicy, ‘Langage, interprétation, théorie. Fondements d'une épistémologie moniste et faillibiliste’ fills a ‘Discussion’ slot in the volume. The relevance of Dominicy's chapter, a close examination of Karl Popper's hypothesis of the falsifiability but non-verifiability of scientific theories, in connection with Tarskian and Carnapian truth-conditional semantics and symbolic logic, is not immediately evident in this volume – though it does of course have epistemological import. It is almost exclusively devoted to an assessment of invented sentential examples and syllogisms familiar from symbolic logic and formal truth-conditional semantics and evidently ties in with Pierre Zima's second chapter in this volume. But this is not made apparent (apart from by the juxtaposition on pp. 13–14 of the editors’ presentation of these two articles in their introductory chapter)). In fact there is no reference at all to Zima's notion in Dominicy's article, nor vice versa. Popper's hypothesis of ‘falsifiability’ is applied to supposedly homogeneous theories one at a time, whereas the notion of ‘ébranlement’ is said by Zima to be the outcome of a confrontation of several theories (within the human and social sciences). It is ironic that the strong plea made throughout the volume for the exchange of ideas and for dialogue between related disciplines should be so completely ignored in relation to these two chapters.

Silvana Borutti's final chapter, ‘Perspectives épistémologiques et concepts opératoires pour l'analyse du discours’, provides an ‘Épilogue’. The author evokes three contrasting sets of epistemological positions, namely a positivist vs. anti-positivist attitude and a reductionist vs. anti-reductionist one, on the one hand, and an idealist vs. anti-idealist stance, on the other, claiming the second members of each contrasting pair as the more valid. She applies this frame of reference to anthropological discourse, but the – very abstract and sometimes abstruse – discussion is developed too succinctly for the reader unfamiliar with the relevant methodology and scientific objectives, no textual examples being provided in illustration.

The volume as a whole is a testimony to the vitality and richness of the current state of discourse analysis in the French-speaking domain, and its pleas for openness, dialogue and interdisciplinarity, not rejecting older forms of analysis of texts (classical rhetorical theory and philology, in particular) but revising and reshaping both their tools of investigation and their assumptions in assimilating them into DA, are timely and appropriate. However, there is little in the way of cross-reference or internal discussion evident within the chapters that make up the volume, even though most invoke quasi-identical concepts and methodologies (e.g. the notions of intertextuality and interdiscursivity, ‘mise en discours’, ethos, pathos and logos, socio-discursivity, the linguistics of ‘énonciation’ and differential comparatism). It is really only the editors’ introductory chapter which points up the links amongst the articles that constitute the volume (Dominicy's being the exception here). What is sorely lacking is a final overview chapter highlighting the essential results of the investigations reported in the nine main chapters and restating the consensus of methodological as well as theoretical conclusions reached by this group of authors.

There are a number of misprints, incorrect references to authors, allusions to works not listed in the References for each chapter, page numbers of chapters and articles in journals sometimes omitted in the latter, and a handful of specialised terms left unexplained for the non-initiated reader (for example, ‘affiliation benzecriste’ (p. 62), ‘croilantés’ (p. 147)).