Contenu du sommaire : Cadrage des sujets et dérive des mots dans l'enchaînement de l'énoncé

THE PROBLEMATICAL CANADIAN PEOPLE The form and content of the definitions of Canada, Quebec and of the words which are used to define them are presented in a corpus of texts published in the daily Quebec newspapers : Le Devoir, La Presse and Le Soleil during the summer of 1980. The study of the form of the definitions reveals that Quebec is essentially viewed as a whole and Canada as a whole of which it is possible to envisage parts. The Canadians are considered individuals and the Quebeckers as component elements of a whole. The examination of the contents of the definitions shows that Canada and Quebec are both defined by : état, nation, pays, peuple, société, but Canada is described in a rational way whereas Quebec is the subject of numerous affective metaphors. The words used to define both Canada and Quebec are themselves the subjects of numerous definitions, particularly nation and peuple. Those definitions partly overlap and each reflects the other, nevertheless there is a fundamental opposition between état and communauté which corresponds to the Canada/Quebec opposition.

DIDEROT AND THE DESPOTS The aim of this research is to pinpoint Diderot's political vocabulary in two important texts written by Diderot on his return from Russia in 1774: Principes de politique des souverains and Observations sur le Nakaz. It stresses the need to establish very carefully the text, before dealing with theoretical questions on the standards of language (most of the articles are « à voix multiples ») and the relationships between a semantic and a metaphorical network. The indexes of the two texts show how the contexts reveal the cooccurrences of the principal lexical forms (loi and nation, peuple, souverain, autorité, liberté and propriété). The importance of the metaphorical network of the body (metaphors of dependence and interdependence) leads us to relativise the idea of Diderot as a « libertarian ». If the writer is (or thinks he is) the master of his thought in its syntagmatic sequence, he is it less in his lexical choices that a paradigmatic or «stratigraphie» reading allows to better emphasize.

THE STRENGTH OF THE «QUIET REFRAMING» Two televised debates between Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and François Mitterrand (1974 and 1981) are used as supports for this study. The exemples from the 1974 debate illustrate the introduction of a pedagogical pattern of «presentation of self» in a framework dominated by political relationships built on force and the paradoxically polemic use that V.G.E. makes of them. As for the data extracted from a transcription of the 1981 debate (a few days before the presidential elections) they will help us to analyse certain stategies of a reframing of the situation by F.M. in his own favour, showing himself to advantage which allows the socialist candidate to retake his statute.

SOLIDARITY. POLITICAL GOOD FORTUNE, LEXICAL DRIFT Solidarity is clearly one of the words that have been used the most from the spring of 1981 in state speach and in the media. However the use of solidarity in the political and social domain does not date from june 1981 : numerous exemples of it can be found throughout the 19th century. If the dominant meaning of the word solidarity during the first year of the « change » is a sort of synthesis between humanist meaning (solidarity, fraternity) and a socio-economic meaning (associative, mutualist solidarity), its inflation at the same time brings about a change and a multiplication of meanings which go as far as making it a «mot-choc» tending to be no longer anything other than a desired effect.

MARKOVS CHAINS AND LINGUISTIC STATISTICS In this century first years, the russian mathematician A.A. Markov published some papers on probability theory where he presented his models of dependant random variables which we call now Markov's chains. Twice, in his life, .he gave an application where he used the simplest chains of which is given here an elementary description. Twice he choosed the same application : the interchange of vowels and consonnants in a russian litterary text. The ways used to determine what is a vowel and a consonnant have been criticized and these powerful models have been seldom used in linguistic studies. We believe this to be wrong. So two examples are given to show the reader how one may use Markov's chains : in the first one a sole text is analysed but two kinds of segments are considered. The second is a short comparative study of four natural languages through an automatized markovian analyse of the same text.

The use of the specificity program, applied to the general manifestos of the CFTC-CFDT congresses held between 1945 and 1979, has been deliberately restricted to the study of function words and certain discourse phenomena (the role of the speaker as projected with the universe of discourse, certain classes of verbs, determiners, adverbs and conjunctions, the representation of the contextual setting of the utterance and of the hearers) in order to show the usefulness of such an approach. The formal patterns extracted lead to a typology of the texts examined, and to a socio-linguistic enquiry into the role of the text types identified.