Contenu du sommaire : Les insultes : approches sémantiques et pragmatiques, sous la direction de Dominique Lagorgette et Pierre Larrivée

In each and every culture, the popular language is a privileged linguistic field of création as far as insults are concemed. The popular French of Ivory Coast ("nouchi") is no exception and the stock of insults are renewed by a permanent dynamics in urban communication, where quarrels are fréquent and where nouchi is vividly in use. The practice of verbal insuit in the Ivory Coast urban context is presented and set within the larger perspective of (Socio)Linguistics (/.e. Labov, Lagorgette, Ruwet). The mechanisms of this continuous création (lexical items, périphrases used as direct vocative insults) are then established. Insistence is placed on linguistic processes (borrowing from local languages; lexical hybridisation or paraphrase between French and local languages; reactivation or reanalysis of French idioms) as well as stylistic and rhetorical processes (formulaic speech figures, motivation by the immediate environment of the metaphoric création: news, manufactured products, TV soaps, etc.). This is followed by a consideration of the main themes of the corpus and of their contextual meaning. Finally, hypotheses are formulated on the reasons for the dominance of certain themes in the urban, popular community of Ivory Coast.

In this study, we consider a specifie category of insults that we defmed in a previous work as "ontotypical" (Ernotte et Rosier 2001). In parallel to sociotypes (Lafont) and ethnotypes (Bres) which classify the individual on a scale of ideological values based on supra-individual and extra-linguistic criteria (this scale being evaluated as such by the very speakers), ontotypical insults target the addressee's own self (ontologically). The typically linguistic forms of ontotypical insults call into question the addressee in two main, nominative ways: either in relating to a part of his being allegedly linked to a specifie situation (situational insuit: Feignasse !) or in referring to fundamental membership in a class, not limited to the praxeological context motivating the insuit (essentialist insuit: Pédale !). The line between thèse two catégories is examined here in order to establish whether phonetic, semantic and pragmatic différences supports or defeats such a distinction; we'll evaluate as well the mechanism of ideological bleaching involved in ontotypes.

It is the title of Leroy-Gourhan's work in this inverted order that will lead our path: insults are not limited to screams or vocatives - they are very often expressed by gestures, whether or not thèse are accompanied by words. The recent example of the "anarchist- entarteur" who targeted the French politician Chevènement clearly shows the link between an act and an interpretation by its victim. Thus, insults are not necessarily some abuse or a swearword; they may be a punctual act. Such an act further supposes in an enunciative analysis the recognition of the central role of the enunciator in action interprétation. This is evidenced by a corpus based on Sobrino's Spanish-French grammar as well as Argentinean, Brazilian, Spanish and French data. This study concentrâtes on the notions of injunction, exclamation and onomatopoeia, which belong to the borders of the structured systems studied by grammars.

Most of the Linguiste who have recently studied insuit recognise (more or less explicitly) that it cannot be dealt with in a strictly semantic fashion, as pragmatic factors are central to the issue (see for instance Fisher, 1995; Siblot 1995; Lagorgette 2002, 2003; Rosier et Ernotte 2001, etc.). This study focuses on the sociopragmatic, interactional dimension of insults. Our reflection covers on the one hand a very social point of view aiming at spelling out the perception of insults by speakers of Quebec French; our corpus shows that utterances containing either form "insulter" and "insultant" refer more often to actions than to words. On the other hand, a more pragmatic point of view is developed, showing how insulting fomns function within conversational contexts. The absence of an answer when axiological forms are used in family interactions (the items belonging therefore to an interzone between ritual and personal insults) leads to reconsider the status of such exchanges. We propose that it would be theoretically productive to think of insults as a zone within a continuum going from mockery to reproach and accusation (Laforest 2002), which would enable one to understand the different meanings associated by speakers to the feeling of "being insulted". A further advantage would be that threats (as perceived) as a social act could be measured on a scale of intentions rather than on that of vulgarity.

This article focuses on the empirical domain of the solidarity uses of certain insults in different varieties of French (standard, Quebec, Burgundy) from diachronic and synchronie points of view. "Solidarity uses" refers to the usage of axiological terms as terms of endearment to mark social proximity between subjects. This value is signalled by morpho- syntactic, prosodie and mimeo-gestural features indicating the speakers disposition towards the addressee. These psychological and social parameters conspire to attenuate the axiological term's argumentative program, which however can never be entirely evacuated. This argumentative program is nevertheless subordinated to pragmatics, which remains necessary in order to evaluate the extent to which the conventional lexical meaning is maintained in these uses. The attenuation of conventional meaning under solidarity uses shows the relevance of relational and attitudinal notions for the negotiation of meaning. It further establishes that at least in some cases, the analysis of linguistic interpretation require a multidisciplinary approach, most specifically where the relation between Semantics and Pragmatics is concemed.

Insults belong to an intimate speech register which relates to emotional exchanges. More than any other, this speech register involves attitudes and corporal expression. The status of corporal expression is a cause of frequent misinterpretations in the analysis of French Sign Language (FSL) System, as FSL makes the body both the substance and the form of its expression (after Hjemslev 1971, following Saussure), and the situational context and enunciation marks may hardly be compared to those of oral languages. The examples quoted in this study corne from field observation, elicited syntactic constructions from sign games and the lexicon. Their analysis presented here insists on some of the defining characteristics of FSL as opposed to those found in oral languages. These characteristics comprise structural variations in the vocabulary of insults; the function of movement function in the dynamics of meaning organisation calls for a different approach with respect to grammatical catégorisation as belonging solely to oral languages (in the opposition for instance of nouns and verbs). The issue ofthe function of movement in FSL is related to that of the verb's dynamic in oral language. From a general point of view, the opposition between nouns and verbs are conveyed by movement alone; and movement is central to the communication of such a dynamic phenomenon as insults. The criteria for the identification of pragmatic distinctions in FSL are still vague as they are again borrowed from oral languages. The analysis of the enunciation marks characterising insults in FSL is bound to shed a new light on the division between pragmatic markers and purely linguistic ones. Contributing to the topology of relationships posed by insults in a three-dimensional language space, these markers are different from the oral language markers (i.e. intonation, behaviour, etc.) in that they do not use the canonical forms of the linguistic units.