Activité définitoire folk et argumentation en contexte polémique

• Main Author: Anne-Charlotte Husson
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cercle linguistique du Centre et de l'Ouest - CerLICO 2020-06-01
• Series: Corela
• Subjects: heterogeneity – folk definitory activities – argumentation – meaning and conflict – controversy about gender in France
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/corela/11106

This article analyses folk definitory activities, understood as a set of utterances with a definitory dimension. These utterances manifest a relationship to language, others, and the world which is specific to folk speakers. The article sets itself apart from those analyses which, while looking mostly at the forms assumed by such activity, only consider them in terms of deficiency compared to their learned relatives, lexicographic definitions. This work puts forward some formal, textual, discursive, pragmatic, and enunciative features of folk definitions, and considers such definitions as a vantage point for heterogeneity in polemical contexts, more precisely in the context of the controversy about gender which takes place in the French public sphere between 2011 and 2014. By analysing the processes by which meanings become conflictual within this controversy, the author emphasises a key paradox, thus interrogating dialogal conceptions of discourse: although polemical discourse requires to maintain a relationship (albeit a very tenuous one) with the adversary, this fragile tether is also a way to establish the difference, and even incommensurability, between both sides of a controversy.