Contenu du sommaire : Numéro spécial. Discours syndical ouvrier en France

PRESS AND SYNDICALISM In France, journalism became a profession under the influence of syndicalism, which, through a law and a collective agreement managed to codify its functionning. The successes of the syndicalism of journalists were based on the autonomy of the organization which does not resist to the bustle of the years after the second world-war. In their communicative strategy, the French Trades Unions elaborated their own press and claimed access to the radio and TV; they also created together with the development of social information, departments intended to be in close contact with professionals whose is often questionned.

THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION OF FRENCH UNIONISM CONFRONTED WITH THE ACTION OF TIME . COMPARED EVOLUTION BETWEEN CONFEDERAL MANIFESTOS (CFTC, CFDT AND THE " CONTINUING " CFTC). To understand the development of the Christian tradition within the french trade union movement, a factorial analysis has been applied to the manifestos voted and approved during the general congresses of the CFTC from 1945 to 1964 and, after the split between the CFDT and the " continuing " CFTC from 1965 to 1985. This analysis underlines the discrepancy between the CFDT, intent upon perpetuating the trend inaugurated after the war, and whose language undergoes irregular but rapid changes, and the " continuing " CFTC which jalously adheres to the funding discourse at the cost of a lexical standstill and a return to the previous values of the CFTC. This radical opposition stems essentially from the lexical dislocation introduced by the CFDT manifestos after 1970. It was between 1973 and 1976 that the two discourse styles were the most divergent. They have begun to converge since 1979, on the subject of union demands and the recourse to négociation. This convergence is more a result of a lexical reorientation on the part of the CFDT than of a similar change on the part of the " continuing " CFTC.

FROM WORDS TO SYNTAGMS A program for the automatic description of morphosyntactic set expressions is presented here. Its results are analysed as applied to the CGT union resolution of 1978 for the description of which it was set up. It starts wich an automatic grammatical categorisation of minimal written forms. Then, with a dictionary, it builds the set of the compound lexical items in the text, i.e. the set forms which recur (for some of them) in the text. Minimal written forms are in this way disambiguated, lemmatised, grouped into larger units where necessary. Examples are given : treatment of être, and of complex determiners. They show the properties of the program. The various types of set expressions - textual and/or en langae-that can be distinguished are then examined.

COOCCURRENCES AROUND THE WORD TRAVAIL (1971-1976) Travail is a word used by all the french Unions, as frequent as unconspicuous in the unions' texts during the years 1971-1976. Does it generate around itself a web of monotonously recurring words ? A statistical analysis of its main cooccurrents shows that its contexts are often the same. But, if next to the " pole " travail the cooccurrents do not change much from one union to another, and from one year to another in the case of the CFDT, it is not the same for the cooccurrents attracted at a distance. The graphs of these attractions, multiplied from a word to another, show how the meeting networks are varied. Is this a sign of variety of messages underlying the structures ? Is is rather a sign of the variety of unions' memories.

STRUGGLE A AS GAME ON WORDS Examining the speeches of 33 delegates at the 40 th CFDT congress, J.L. studies the rhetorics in trade- union's debates. Whether they speak for or against the majority's line and its change since the previous congress, speakers try to captivate the audience by means of humour, style effects, allusions and puns, evoking folk-tales, using popular expressions, slogans and fashionable words. Although carrying all the weight of internal conflicts and ideological references, the words autogestion, capitalisme, libéralisme, réalité, are also balls bouncing from one speech to another. This intensive usage of formulas and short sentences, of which the media are so fond, is a new phenomenon in CFDTs congresses ; following their leader E. Maire, the militants tend to adapt themselves to the rules of mass communication.

* HOW TO TELL OF A WORKER'S DEATH » The corpus consists of a succession of trade-union leaflets (CGT & CFDT) related to the same event : the death by accident of a worker employed at the Renault factory of Cléon (Seine-Maritime). This analysis is primarily concerned with the wording of the event as well as the designation of the victim and the protagonists ; it takes into account the diachronical dimension of the corpus. At this level, some of the discursivo-linguistic features are analyzed in terms of straining the language, saturation (lexico-semantic) breaking up (symptoms of something that cannot be said and of unresolved contradictions), crash (produced by the irruption of the semiotic into the symbolic). These forms are related to tensions that exist within the trade-union discourse itself and also to « external » tensions (in relation with its social and linguistic external components). The conclusion deals with the heterogeneity of the trade-union discourse as well as with its homogeneity due to its main enunciative mode : claims.

HOW TO TELL OF QUALIFICATION The article studies the linguistic forms which refer to the notion of PROFESSIONAL QUALIFICATION in a corpus of spoken French made up of 40 interviews with steel workers (men and women). The description is based on two hypotheses : (i) syntactic relations play a major role in determining the meaning of utterances (ii) the construction of meaning is socially determined. The study of the semantico-syntactic values of the forms qualifier, qualifié, qualification, enables us to establish the differences in the meaning assigned to this notion by the group of workers and that of the people doing the survey. The workers link the notion with the human semantic category. This is not the case with those carrying out the survey. This is considered as an example of social pluriaccentuation of meaning as defined by Bakhtine.