Locating Traces of Subjectivity in Diplomatic Discourse: The Example of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Abstract

Our project, following studies on institutional discourse analysis [3, 6], considers the discourse of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Our corpus (circa 20 million words) gathers a sample of text data from the diplomatic communication outer face, including various monological and dialogical situations of communication and involving Ministers’ or State Secretaries’ speeches, interviews, press releases, etc. Diplomatic discourse is characterized by its normalization, neutrality, and standardization [4, 17]. As a consequence, a Minister of Foreign Affairs’ speech shouldn’t include any subjective unit, may it be affective or evaluative. Yet, subjectivity may show up with the creation of words used to express biases and opinions since prefixes and/or suffixes do change the original root meaning. We focus our interest on the word “Europe” and its derivations. Using NooJ [7], we first built a grammar able to develop all the occurrences derived from the French name “Europe” so as to include single word forms and multi-word units: adjectives (européen, anti(-)européens, europhobe, etc.); nouns or names (européanisation, alter-euroépanisme, eurocratie, etc.); verbs (européiser, déseuropéaniser, etc.). NooJ assisted us in locating each word form in the corpus and determining its context(s) of use thanks to the concordance. It allows us to identify the types of sentences in which each word appears and their syntactic functions and roles. We eventually confront this data with the corpus parameters so as to look at a possible evolution of the institutional discourse driven by, or depending on, among other variables, presidential mandates, ministers and their political party, Government of the day.