Construction langagière de la figure de l’aidant du malade d’Alzheimer : dénominations et mise en mots interdiscursive dans les pratiques

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on the status of caregivers in non-professional care of Alzheimer sufferers. We consider the role of the disease and the function of relatives involved in a helping relationship, as well as their social, political and health building from a language sciences standpoint. Our aim, alongside health professionals, is to help understand an urgent issue related to the end-of-life care through one of its manifestations in different discursive spaces. We first define the assistance issue to investigate, at the interface between a semantic analysis of words (Semantics of argumentative possibilities) and a linguistic analysis of discourse, how lexicographic, legal and media discourses say and construct the care activity. The purpose is a better understanding of how caregivers live this experience in their relation with the Alzheimer sufferers, with organizations involved in health and social care and the close or distant social space. By questioning what words do in the stakeholders’ lives from the choice of names imposed by legal discourse to the strategies to talk about caregivers in media discourses, we also question their suitability to recognize a henceforth unavoidable social role.

Keywords

• Discourse analysis
• denomination
• Alzheimer’s
• caregiver
• doxa