L’énoncé anaphorique dans la communication ostensive-inférentielle. Etude de cas: le discours politique
Anaphora in ostensive-inferential discourse. Political discourse: a case study

Summary/Abstract: The paper analyzes one of the most frequently used ways of getting one’s message across in political discourse: the repetition of various words or phrases at the beginning of sentences or paragraphs. Known as anaphora in rhetoric, this strategy plays an important role in communication: it draws the addressee’s attention to and focuses on the message the speaker is sending. The paper relies on Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory, according to which any utterance is an ostensive stimulus produced with a view to capturing the addressee’s attention. Anaphoric utterances qualify as excellent ostensive stimuli in president Sarkozy’s discourse, a type a discourse in which the speaker targets various types of addressees, drawing the attention of each type to the message. Moreover, since his discourse has a certain length, in order to arouse the addressee’s interest, Sarkozy resorts to the same set of linguistic formulas which become acts of ostension whereby discourse cohesion is achieved.

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