Discourse Community Analysis: Sense Construction vs Non-Sense Construction
Résumé
The proposal examines the nature of the political discourse of international organizations
(IMF , world Bank , the UN , European Union , African Union , The Arab League, etc.). The
study originates from a fundamental paradox: how can we use the same descriptive linguistic
tools which we use in analyzing the production of sense for the production of non-sense
characterizing this type of discourse? The corpus analyzed is a collection of texts produced
by the African Union. The high frequency of words and terms occurring in this type of
production contributes in loosing their meaning which is contrary to the appreciation of terms
occurring in an expert discourse for information retrieval or lexical resources purposes where
the high frequency of a term consolidates its belonging to a specific field of knowledge. How
can this paradox be explained? The full paper will report on the results of our analysis.