La typographie dans la construction du sens social
Typography in the Construction of Social Meaning

Summary/Abstract: The paper describes typography as one of the mechanisms contributing to the construction of social meanings.According to the French discourse analysis, we assume that social meaning results from the nomination activity, which involves multiple and diverse naming of one element of the real world. Obtaining social meaning is possible by recreating the so-called designational paradigm, i.e. establishing a list of regular reformulations of the initial word introduced by metalanguage (definitional sentences), coordination, diaphors and typography. This work mainly focuses on the latter. The subsequent parts of the article discuss the impact of the comma, colon, parentheses, double dash and quotation marks on meaning construction. The description of each of them is complemented by examples derived from the study on the social meaning of the proper name Pologne (Poland), created and disseminated by the French press. It turns out that the typographic symbols are not a simple visual representation of pauses or intonation. They also have a semantic and pragmatic role. Typography signals the reformulations (comma, colon, parenthesis, dash), introduces the secondary predicates (comma, dash) and allows a journalist to distance him/herself from the created meanings (quotation marks)

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