Les affichettes d’animaux perdus. Discursivité, agentivité, anthroponymie

Abstract

This paper, written by a collector and a linguist, assembles a secular ethnographic description of a collection of lost animal placards and its discursive analysis. The work focuses on a data set of 32 elements selected from a collection of 194 lost animal placards collected in an urban context, in French and foreign cities, between 2015 and 2018. This work first provides a subjective description of the collection, then an analysis of the placards as material objects, and finally its discursive analysis, from both an enunciative and a pragmatic perspective. The objective is to show that animals have a form of communicative competence and above all an agency, which makes them subjects in their own right in social life.

Keywords

• animal agency
• animal discursivity
• anthropodenial
• anthropomorphism
• collection
• compound statement