Verbaliser les situations de bifurcation : les noms propres évènementiels dans les discours médiatiques
Verbalizing bifurcation situations : proper names referring to events in media discourse

Author(s): Nuria Rodríguez Pedreira, Agnieszka Konowska
Subject(s): Language studies, Language and Literature Studies, Foreign languages learning, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
Keywords: event; proper name of event; discourse; media; euphemization; dysphemization; point of view
Summary/Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has created a situation of bifurcation within societies:we are talking about a world before and after the coronavirus. The name of the city ofWuhan, its “cradle”, has become a fatal symbol. This contribution examines the discursivefunctioning of proper names referring to events of this type (Wuhan, Chernobyl, 9/11) and how they meet certain needs of speakers at times of “rupture”. We speak about themas about proper denominations (Bosredon and Tamba 1995), words-events (Moirand 2007) orproper names referring to events (Krieg-Planque 2009) because they cover both some typicalfeatures of common names and proper names. We first ask about the activity of nominationthrough the designations used, often concurrent, and on their functioning in their relationto the co(n)text, but also to previous discourses (Moirand and Reboul-Touré 2015). Toname something from an enunciative point of view is to select a designation among othersavailable, and this with an essentially intentional aim. This is what we focus on in a secondstep, by identifying the role of the proper names of events in argumentative euphemizationand dysphemization, through the analysis of a few examples from our corpus.

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