Les crises en discours : représentations des mouvements de protestation français dans la presse roumaine
Crises in discourse: representations of French protest movements in the Romanian press

Summary/Abstract: Our work sets out to analyse a phenomenon specific to media discourse, that of naming the events presented. Based on a corpus of articles extracted from the “Adevarul” newspaper on protest movements that took place in France (the Gilets Jaunes movement, the protests against the retirement reform), we identified a series of denominations that are repeated each time an event belonging to the same family is witnessed. These widely used linguistic sequences condense a large amount of information and can be constituted in event-words. In information discourse, they play an essential role in the construction of discursive memory and in the transmission of information and representations about the events evoked. The names given to events contribute to the construction of social reality and, in the long term, to the discursive memory of a community. The names given to the two examples of protest movements identified in the articles in our corpus show that the same event can have several names, often complementary, before one of the names becomes the standard designation for the event. Some of these names may be generic (conflict, revolt, crisis, etc.) and apply to any violent protest movement, while others are specific to a particular event and characterise it in a unique way, thus becoming embedded in readers' memory. Times of crisis can be moments of lexical creativity, when new words and expressions appear or existing linguistic structures acquire new meanings and become widely shared structures, ‘ready-made phrases’ capable of condensing complex information about the event in question.

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