Faire intervenir des êtres collectifs dans et par le discours. De l’usage des syntagmes nominaux à valeur collective dans les discours conservateurs allemand et britannique

• Main Author: Naomi Truan
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: ENS Éditions 2015-12-01
• Series: Tracés
• Subjects: political discourse; government; state; collective nouns; address; utterer-centred approach (enunciative linguistics)
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/traces/6331

Based on a corpus of British and German Conservative speeches from David Cameron and Angela Merkel, this article deals with the discursively constructed meaning of the words “government”, “politics” and “state”. A comparative close-reading analysis of these words shows that the use of these Nominal Phrases (NP) does not only convey depersonalisation or generalisation. These NP can also draw a demarcation line between the speaker and his/her opponents or include the audience. Therefore, these expressions can be seen as disguised forms of address. Although these forms belong, linguistically speaking, to the pole of reference (third person), the “government”, “politics” and the “state” can refer to the speaker or to some of the recipients of political discourse (e.g. the opposition). The “government”, “politics” and the “state” correspond subsequently to an I, a we or a you.