HÉLAS, UN MOT POUR DIRE LE CONFINEMENT, LA CRISE ET LE PARTAGE
HÉLAS, A WORD TO SAY CONTAINMENT, CRISIS AND SHARING

Summary/Abstract: The article proposes particular linguistic means to describe the discursive representations of what makes the ordinariness of a crisis: the French interjection word hélas is shown as serving to identify the continued presence of the crisis in the minds and words of people. While establishing an emotional relation to the crisis (regrets, pain), the enunciation of this word in fact immediately signals the crisis’ presence: the crisis is evoked as preconstructed and presumed to be shared (cf. Swiatkowska, 2006; Paveau, 2006; Pêcheux, 1975), so as to make the discourse a “ritual activity whose stake is the confirmation and maintenance of the social communication” (Mastacan, 2020). An examination of a corpus extracted from the press (Le Monde, Le Figaro) and social media (Twitter) during the lock down period in France (from March 17 to May 11, 2020) shows the evolution of contexts of evocations in accordance to the progression of the crisis. As the crisis evolves, statements containing the word hélas indicate facts of the society to be discussed, and regrets referring to concrete actions in the past also give rise to regrets concerning the future. In the syntax, commas and other punctuation marks help to distinguish these different functions of the evocation of the word hélas (cf. Halté, 2020).

• Details
• Contents