Parts of speech and sentences

Since the advent of structuralism at the beginning of the 20th century, the science of language has accepted in principle that a language is a symbolic system for evoking experience, where, by definition, everything fits together; and that an adequate method of apprehension should explain its organization and functioning, with a view to advancing intelligence, facilitating comprehension and improving the didactics of its use.

However, after a century in the making, we have to admit that this stance has had only a limited impact on the description of the conceptual system that governs the formulation of discourse: in practice, the analysis often remains mired in a tradition that maintains the historical sedimentation of a pedagogical practice that is sometimes alien to scientific justification.

This précis uses a method of analyzing conceptual structures based on the parameters of the psychosystematics of language to account for the fact that every word is the sign of a concept that belongs to a functional system of representation, and whose value is relative to that of all the other products of this system. It analyzes the concepts and relationships that structure the parts of speech in French - the noun, pronoun, participle, infinitive verb, personal verb, modal adjective (called adverb), coordinator and preposition - and defines their role in the formation of sentences that articulate the natural logic of discourse. The aim is to promote a scientific approach that can feed into a consistent pedagogy.