Abstract
Robert Lafont. Praxematics, an anthropological linguistics Robert Lafont conceived praxematics as a materialist linguistics of the production of meaning in speech in contrast with the linguistics of language. He developed it over the years as a linguistic anthropology. To this end, he first reworked G. Guillaume's notions of actualization, speech act, and operative time, completing in particular the notion of chronogenesis by that of topogenesis; and replacing the notion of sign by that of praxeme. The latter is a tool for a variable production of meaning, to which both speaker and addressee proceed during actualization in discourse. In a second step, he emphasized, through the notions of arthrôme and prosopème, the corporeal dimension of speech act, which allows us to conceive actualization in its polyorganicity. Taking up again the question of motivation, he developed a theory of schemas from classical Latin, which established praxematics as a linguistic anthropology.