Énoncés métalangagiers en contraste :

Abstract

This article considers the purist discourse of French language from a comparative perspective by analyzing the opposition of two discursive genres of metalinguistic interaction. Firstly, the article will be introduced by a discussion of the metalinguistic discourse tradition in France and the field of language planning. Secondly, the folk linguistic research and its interests will be illustrated. Considering the verbalized forms of cognitive representations in linguistic discourse, the focus will be on defining the actor’s opinion of the continuum between an expert and a layperson. The ideologically constructed commonplaces conveyed by purist actors using different communication areas and genres lead to the introduction of discourse linguistics as an appropriate approach within the field of Applied Linguistics. Following this theoretical background, the objective of this paper is to reveal specific topical structures and argumentative layouts in order to gain new insights into the underlying beliefs of purism.

Keywords

• metalanguage – language planning – folk linguistics – discourse analysis – cognitive representation