The divided subject in enunciation: evidences from the observation of unconventional uses of commas

Abstract

Based on the notions of dialogism, constitutive heterogeneity and heterogeneity of writing, this article presents a qualitative analysis of unconventional uses of comma in four texts written at school by a fourteen years old student. The analysis demonstrates how the uses of commas is characterized by copies of institutionalized discourses and of pre-established ideas about writing, about the reader and about the writer itself. Changed into subject because of the language, the writer marks himself/herself in different ways in the texts, allowing the language researcher to verify the separations of the subject in the enunciation and his/her heterogeneity.