Ripensare la grammatica a partire dal soggetto parlante. L’attualità della grammaire des fautes di Henri Frei

The present study intends to reconsider the theoretical and methodological assumption of Henri Frei’s Grammaire des fautes whose originality has been oftentimes criticised. This paper will mostly focus on Frei’s innovative idea of the role of the speaker in establishing grammar. With an extraordinarily innovative spirit, the author provides a functional explica- tion of the nature of errors: they are far away from being idiosyncratic but in fact they respond to those speaker’s ‘needs’ that grammar is unable to satisfy. As a consequence, Frei seems to be one of the best interpreter of the Saussurian theory regarding the concept of parole and of the absolutely subjective character of the speech act, by effectively creating, well before the so–called ‘pragmatic turn’, a functional grammar based on the pragmatic aspects of language.