Contenu du sommaire : Qu'est-ce que le vocabulaire spécifique d'un texte politique ?

THE SEMANTIC FIELDS OF UMMA ARABIYYA (ARAB NATION) IN NASSER'S SPEECHES (1952-1970) The notion of umma arabiyya (Arab nation) is central to Nasser's discourse. In order to examine this notion M.N. noted, classified and analysed the contexts in which it was used, according to the system of relations with the words qualifying it, those with which it was associated, those to which it was opposed or equivalent and those which describe the ways in which umma arabiyya establishes itself. A table listing the attributes of the umma arabiyya highlights Nasser's need for unity (wahida,) over and above its divisions (mumazzaquaj. His objectives were also centred on a conception of freedom and of socialism more concerned with ideology than with sociology. Certain usages reinforced this action : Nasser began by referring to the « Arab peoples », then to the « Popular army », and finally to « workers », « masses », « we ». Other forces are in conflict with the umma : « enemies » generally, « British invaders » particularly, but also « colonialism », « Zionism », « Israel ». Nasser clearly favoured a state both non-racist and non- fanatical. The umma arabiyya was never considered as a umma islâmiyya (Islamic nation).

HEINE'S BIBLICAL AND POLITICAL DISCOURSE : TRADITION OR SUBVERSION Starting from Heine's texts, using a corpus of more than 300 biblical occurrences which assume a political value, the following question is asked : What part(s) is (are) played by a dominant discourse formation i.e. religious discourse, within Heine's political discourse which is critical, if not subversive with regard to the political system of his time ? There are three main ways in which the different forms of discourse begin to emerge : using the Bible automatically as a source ; using the Bible to popularise a new political programme, and destroying biblical speech itself through distorted usage. The sum effect of these points leads to two types of results : Heine's political discourse is filled with internal contradictions ; a discourse formation is generally comprised of fundamentally different discursivities.

TOWARDS A GRAMMAR OF THIRD REPUBLIC SOCIO-POLITICAL DENOMINATIONS (1879-1905) When gathering and listing the denominations of socio-political groups born at the beginning of the Third Republic, the pre-eminence given to the following base structure becomes clearly visible : Collective (1st phase) + Qualifying designation (2nd phase) + [Locational reference (3rd phase)]. A few simple rules governing the distribution of the phases and words appear to govern over the variations and their simplifications. These surface manifestations however, seem to imply syntactic type structures. Using this hypothesis it is possible to define more clearly the role of collective played by certain non-collective words (eg « Action », « Defense ») and to resolve the ambiguities of certain denominations where deep structures are not at all apparent from their surface structures. One word does not follow the rules ; the most important one, namely Parti. A study of its semantic and functional development at the beginning of the Third Republic shows that this counter-example can be turned round to support the distributional and generativist hypotheses set out in the text. Consequently, a socio-political denomination can be defined as a result of the combination of historical and linguistic rules, and therefore must be read as a structure which is justified, transformed, simplified and hierarchically ordered.

ANTI-SEMITIC VOCABULARY IN FRANCE DURING THE DREYFUS AFFAIR In the coverage of the Dreyfus Affair in the political press, four registers of anti-semitic terminology are apparent : a religious register (the least important), a social register (largely used up to Colonel Henry's suicide), a nationalist register (both anti-semitic and anti-socialist) and a racist register (ideas of expulsion/destruction could be read into some of the semantic ambiguities). These four registers are largely overlapping, anti-jewish phraseology being used, in the context of the emergent social-nationalist strategy in such a way as to further some surprising ideological similarities.

COMMUNIST SPEECH AND THE « GRAND TOURNANT » : A STUDY OF SPECIFICITIES IN THE COMMUNIST VOCABULARY The change of direction of the French Communist Party (PCF) between 1934 and 1935 has been often studied. Because it was considered unacceptable to recognise a relative autonomy and an internal rate of development of political speech the analysis of the PCF speech, was scarcely touched upon during this period. Using the program written by P. Lafon to analyse lexical specificities, it is possible to determine the variability of the frequency of the forms within a corpus ; this program therefore is particularly suited to such a study. The application of this method to a corpus of leading articles in L'Humanité before and after dates of strong political expression between February 1934 and August 1936, demonstrates the use of two successive registers of vocabularly before and after May-June 1935 : a vocabulary of the « working class » and social struggle, and then a vocabulary of « the people ».

A STUDY OF SPECIFICITIES IN FRENCH TRADE-UNION VOCABULARY (1971-1976) From a corpus of trade-union texts (Congresses and Conferences, 1971-1976) selected from four representative French trade-unions : CFDT, CFTC, CGT and FO, the authors have made a study of the positive and negative ultra-specific forms in the vocabulary (where the frequency is greater than, or equal to, 20). They have established and commented on the comparative tables of these forms, either for each union or in pairs. They have also set up four tables around themes which they judge to be indicative of union practice in particular circumstances : the vocabulary of attack, of unity and of mediation, and performative/declarative verbs. From this study they have drawn the following conclusions : each union has its own system of values ; it is the ideological differences which determine the activity of French trade unions. This does not prevent resemblances, however, between the CGT and CFDT, and especialy between the CFTC and FO. It may be observed that in 1971-1976 a political difference replaced the former religious/secular difference... that is, if the vocabulary is to be believed.

FORMS IN A TEXT : A STATISTICAL STUDY OF POSITION Stating frequencies ignores the fact that the occurrences in a text form and ordered string. To enable the ordered nature of a text to be taken into account and to perceive another aspect of how words function, the usual frequential viewpoint is replaced by a sequential one. The statistical model presented here is suitable for studying the positions of each graphic form in the text. It permits a contrast between cluster forms, i.e. closely grouped occurrences and « regular » forms, i.e. evenly distributed occurrences. Research into four General Resolutions of two trade unions has shown that most of the great number of cluster forms are likely to be the most frequent themes in the text (or to be pronouns), while the fewer « regular » forms are generally functional words which by themselves convey little meaning. This study supplements frequency measures and contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between forms and text.