ABSTRACT
People like to say that poor novelists experience the need to alternate their dialogic markers and to replace he said with he murmured, he stumbled, etc. It seems, in fact, that the writer, faced with such modulations, has only two possibilities: either to do it; or else to say it without doing it. It seems, however, that there is a third possibility: the performative. Language is subject to a double process of choices to be made and sequences to be established: disjunctions or selection of similars; connection or sequel of combinables. There are many ways to grow from the middle and to stutter. The new language is not external to the language system, the asyntactic limit is not external to language either: it is the outside of language, not outside of it. Each state of a variable is a position on a crest line which bifurcates and prolongs itself in other lines. Style is the parsimony of language.
