Contenu du sommaire : Le silence en politique

Uses of the silent pause in the political televised debates. A study case : François Hollande's discourse. The main task of this article is to analyse pauses in François Hollande's speech. By combining a phonetic analysis with a discourse analysis in an interactional context, this study focuses on the various functions of intra-discursive pause for this speaker during two televised debates: the debates which took place between the two rounds of the 2012 Socialist primary elections and the presidential elections. After having identified hesitation, focalisation and demarcation pauses, analysis of some examples will help to demonstrate how the candidate handled pauses in his campaign speeches.

The silence on the torture committed during the war of Algeria. Analysis of a corpus of the French press (1957 and 2000)The article focuses on two periods during which the debate over torture in Algeria was heavily highlighted in the French press which embarrassed the authorities into taking a stand: 1957 and 2000. Mainly mentioned in the press usually hostile to the government, silence plays a crucial role in the controversy. Once the forms of silence framing the corpus have been defined according to the versatility of the notion, this study aims at taking the word into its lexical context in order to proceed on with a description of the relational circle within which silence turns into a discursive stake.

A chatty digital silence. Controversies over the banning of political propaganda prior to ballot day
The infatuation with the social networks during the French presidential electoral campaign 2012 has compelled the National Watch Committee for electoral campaigns to resort, in a statement issued on April 16th 2012, to the implementation of a new regulation on political propaganda in the « new medias ». Over the couple of weeks preceding the ballot, political parties will be bound to abide by a « digital silence ». This article aims at pondering about the use of the word silence as well as the impact of the strategic stakes related to such call to silence.

Sarkozysm and populism. A Logometric approach to Nicolas Sarkozy's discourse (2007-2012)Populism is a difficult concept to handle: the polemical aspect of the common usage affects its scientific definition. This article aims to reflect on linguistic markers of populist discourses and to establish their presence or lack in the Sarkozy corpus (2007-2012). To guide the socio-linguistic interpretation, the discourse analysis proposed here uses logometry: Nicolas Sarkozy's discourse is compared to those of Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac with the software Hyperbase and textual statistics.

The forward movement of French employers' discourse. CNPF-Medef 1981-2010This article consists in a statistical study of the vocabulary of French employers based on a corpus of speeches delivered at the annual conference of CMPF and MEDEF between 1981 and 2010. The review of the most frequent and/or the most specific forms draws the lexicometric architecture of the speech which exposes the employer's doctrine. Beyond the stability of the major vocabulary following forms nous (us) and entreprises (enterprises), analysis allows us to observe a paradigm shift between the two periods with the virtual disappearance of the words referring to the « boss class » and the rise of France at the same rank as entreprise.

Genesis and transformations of Moroccan Islamism through party names: the case of Justice and Development Party. The Justice and Development Party officially entered the Moroccan House of Representatives for the first time in 1998. It belongs to broad church of parties or movements of the so-called legalist Islamism. Widely influenced by the ideology and teachings of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers and their most influential theorists (mainly Hassan ­al-Banna and Sayyid Qotb), the present day leaders of the PJD have shifted from underground action to legalist activism that takes into account of public order and the institutions embodied by the king, both Head of the State and Commander of the Faithful. The PJD is the outcome of a merging between the Constitutional Democratic and Popular Movement, founded in 1967 by a relative of the royal family, and various Islamist societies among whom the radical Islamic Youth. This article resorts to lexical analysis and semiotics so as to make an account of changes in the agreed on strategy and agenda. The focus on the successive names of the various societies that would give birth to PJD aims at keeping at a distance the discourse of actors.

Beyond the diction of politics. Le-pire-est-à-venir (“the-worst-is-yet-to-come”): a special time marker in Belgian political discourse. What lesson is one to draw from arguments in political science when it comes to the role they play in the discourse? This paper is part of a research work on changes and thus sets out to analyse the Belgian arguments and political discourse related to climate with a focus on the functioning of the marker le-pire-est-à-venir (“the-worse-is-yet-to-come”). The latter is full of teachings in so far as it bear a two fold characteristic: 1) a special temporal marker showing a change of course, 2) a generator of political figures and 3) a hybrid marker that paves the ground for future regimes.

Historians facing the new uses of the word mémoire (memory). Over the last thirty years or so, historians have been faced with the preeminence of not only a notion but also the power of a word, memory, which recovers a growing polysemy. Thus embodying various cognitive referents recalling by the same token events and moral categories to which they are related, the word has become a serious competitor for historians over their discursive authority. Beyond holding positions denouncing the “tyranny of memory” and calling for the “duty of history”, the staging of an antagonistic relation history/memory leads to the appearance of strategic uses of memory by historians who care about their social position as experts of the past.