Inégalité(s) dans le discours de la presse française :usages discursifs et dimensions sémantiques d’un mot

Abstract

Inequality is a common social theme which arises regularly in the press. Using a semantic-discursive approach, we will examine the use of the word inégalité(s) (inequality(s)) in media discourse with the aim to circumscribe the main semantic dimensions of the word through its functioning in co-text. After some semantical and referential considerations, data analysis will show that inégalité(s) functions as lieu of observation, evaluation and political claims. The corpus contains newspaper articles from Le Monde, Libération and Le Figaro. The data analysis also lead to the assumption that the shared and consensual use of the segment lutte contre les inégalités (fight against inequality) shows features of some sort of doublespeak (“langue de bois”).

Keywords

• enonciation
• semantics
• discourse analysis
• media discourse
• inequality