French discourse analysis has been concerned with the question of viewpoints (Rabatel 2005) since it started taking into account studies in enunciation (Benveniste) and argumentation (Ducrot). Although viewpoints may be expressed by various modalities, they also manifest by the very act of choosing a term to refer to a certain referent in the public debate. To account for the fact that selecting a noun or noun phrase may be considered a speech act, the concept of "nomination" was introduced in praxematic studies (Barbéris et al. 1984).
In this paper, we aim to analyse the use of several potentially polemical nominations during the 2022 French presidential election campaign; more precisely, we will investigate the argumentative and pragmatic value of these nominations by interrogating how they contribute to the reproaches expressed towards the previous government. We will address the following questions:
How do the nominations [noun] + liberticide, féminicide, écocide or violence policière mark the candidates' ideologies through an implicit or explicit enunciative positioning, and to what extent do they constitute a form of political positioning?
Through the use of these nominations and the enunciative comments which accompany them, to what extent do the candidates construct their political orientation as well as their ethos as candidates opposed to the outgoing president?
To this end, we propose a computer-based, enunciative, argumentative, and pragmatic analysis of two complementary corpora. Firstly, we will look into the candidates' programmes, grouped by campaign themes and segmented so as to highlight the issues identified by the candidates and their proposals in order to remedy them. Secondly, we will analyse the candidates' tweets, which feature an individual and interactive expression throughout the campaign. Based on the analysis of these two corpora, a third section will reflect on the different "regimes of meaning" (Sarfati 2008) to which programmes and tweets belong: in the electoral context, a programme corresponds a party's "canonical" discourse, even though it is the product and the result of partisan struggles (Fertikh et al., 2016); tweets may be more polemical (Djemili et al. 2014). Ultimately, we ask whether or not a candidate's ethos diverges from their online ethos.
References
Barbéris, J. M., Gardès-Madray, F., Lafont, R., & Siblot, P. (1984). Terminologie praxématique. Présentation, Index, Corps de définitions théorique. Cahiers de praxématique, (3), 2-100.
Fertikh, K., Hauchecorne, M., & Bué, N. (Eds.) (2016), Les programmes politiques : Genèses et usages. Presses universitaires de Rennes.
Djemili, S., Longhi, J., Marinica, C., Kotzinos, D., & Sarfati, G. E. (2014, October). What does Twitter have to say about ideology?. In NLP 4 CMC: Natural Language Processing for Computer-Mediated Communication/Social Media-Pre-conference workshop at Konvens 2014 (Vol. 1). Universitätsverlag Hildesheim.
Jackiewicz, A. et Pengam, M. (2020) Un modèle pour l'étude des nominations émergentes. Notion de repérage pour saisir les modalités d'ajustement sémantique et discursif, CMLF 2020.
Rabatel, A. (2005). Le point de vue, une catégorie transversale. Le Français aujourd'hui, 151(4), 57-68.
Sarfati, G. E. (2008). Pragmatique linguistique et normativité: remarques sur les modalités discursives du sens commun. Langages, 170(2), 92-108.
