The study of the discourse functions of antonymy was developed mainly by Steven Jones (Antonymy: a corpus-based perspective. Routledge, London, 2002; Antonyms in english. Construals, constructions and canonicity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012), who classifies antonymic co-occurrences in English into ten categories, based on the different discourse functions they can fulfil. On the basis of a similar study of antonymic discourse functions in French, this paper explores how two opposites used in the same sentence exploit our thought processes to influence the way we conceptualise the world. It focuses on sentences extracted from the newspaper Le Monde (1987-2006 and 2009-2011) in which two antonyms are used in co-presence. Through the analysis of these utterances, this paper describes the discourse functions of antonymy in French and shows how the semantic and syntactic roles of co-present antonyms determine the semantico-referential functions they perform. I then analyse how the two major (groups of) functions, the ancillary function and the coordination functions, identified in English journalistic texts by Steven Jones, produce meaning effects in French texts, and how the mechanisms underlying these functions allow opposites to manipulate us.
Pour ancrer la langue qu’ils enseignent dans un contexte socialement ou géographiquement vraisemblable, les enseignants de français langue étrangère ou seconde ne peuvent s’appuyer sur les manuels, ces derniers persistant à diffuser une norme centralisatrice. Divers sites Internet fournissent du contenu plus authentique, mais sans que les unités linguistiques n’y soient décrites ou leurs usages expliqués, localisés, exemplifiés. Nous présentons ici des pistes de réflexion pour la construction d’un outil numérique collaboratif qui rassemble des contributions selon un protocole scientifiquement validé qui accompagne le contributeur pour décrire le lexique, dans une perspective didactique, d’une façon globale, intégrative, modulaire et multidimensionnelle.
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