PhD Defense - Tess FEYEN. “Ideology and Language”

Date/time : Monday, January 6th, 4 p.m.

Location : Salle de Réunion Pavillon Jardin, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 29. rue d’Ulm

Jury :

• Louis de Saussure (Université de Neuchâtel), Président du jury et Rapporteur
• David Beaver (Texas University at Austin), Examinateur
• Anouch Bourmayan (Sorbonne Université), Examinatrice
• Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde (Institut Jean Nicod ENS-PSL/CNRS), Examinateur
• Bridget Copley (Université Paris 8/CNRS), Examinatrice
• Paola Pietrandrea (Université de Lille), Rapporteuse
• Alda Mari (Institut Jean Nicod ENS-PSL/CNRS), Directrice de thèse
• Paul Portner (Georgetown University), Invité

Abstract

The George Floyd case brought back the question of police violence in the public debate, both in the United States and in France, where the Adama Traoré case gained more interest as well. These cases got massive media attention during the summer 2020, from all sides of the political spectrum. This thesis interrogates the place of language in discussing those cases, especially in their use of a set list of moral adjectives in context. Moral adjectives are argued to be deontic modal expressions, and this dissertation defends a precise division of deontic readings in two categories : moral and conventional. By gathering a corpus of 420 articles in French and in English, the thesis establishes an ontology of police brutality composed of 11 thematic categories.

By crossing the semantic annotation and thematic annotation, the thesis establishes a series of new results that make emerge a complex picture whereby political opposites actually treat similar themes, but do so in a vastly different way. This result suggests that ideologies can’t be detected only through topic use but through precise semantic testing. It also indicates that division of ideologies by political orientation might not be the most useful when investigating language use. A theory of ideology should study how ideological bias as a whole is constructed inside discourse, instead of applying the classical Left/Right spectrum to it. Building from the philosophy of language literature, this thesis argues that modal adjectives can be used as indicators of collective attunements (in the sense of Stanley and Beaver 2023).