La rhetorique du journal quotidien

par Anne-Marie Jannet

Thèse de doctorat en Sciences de l'information et de la communication

Sous la direction de Jacques Gonnet.

Soutenue en 1997

à Paris 3 .

mots clés

Résumé

L'ecriture journalistique est "un art de parler" souvent meconnu. Une analyse de discours orientee vers une etude des processus linguistiques de production de sens permet de caracteriser le fonctionnement du discours du journal. Elle est effectuee ici a trois niveaux d'articulation du discours : le dispositif, des faits de langue (enonciation, modes de reference. . . ), les modes d'organisation discursive (narratif, descriptif, argumentatif). Les outils theoriques, appliques generalement a la litterature, sont adaptes pour etudier le travail rhetorique applique a l'information, dans une situation de communication particuliere-la communication mediatee. Un espace de strategies dans lequel se meuvent les partenaires de la communication, a ainsi pu etre defini en fonction des deux visees principales de ce discours : faire savoir et faire croire. La credibilite du journal repose alors sur deux effets, l'effet de realite et l'effet de verite. Par ailleurs le journal ne surgit pas de "rien" et le lecteur est soumis a un double processus : celui de la decouverte et celui de la reconnaissance. Enfin la production du sens reside dans une tension entre des contraires qui se resoud dans le dispositif particulier du journal, mais qui suscite chaque jour l'interet pour ces pages et le besoin de se realimenter a la source de l'actualite. Mais, etant donne l'evolution de la fonction de journaliste, on peut se demander si la rhetorique de la communication ne prendra pas le pas sur la rhetorique de l'information.

Titre traduit

The rhetoric of a daily newspaper

Résumé

Writing for a newspaper as a specific way of "speaking" is hardly a wellknown activity. A speech analysis with such an objective as the study of the linguistic processes that eventually lead the "speaker" to produce sense can enable very researcher to define the main ways in which what specefic speech is used by the newspaper eventually works. In the present study, such an analysis will probe into three different levels of speech : the layout of the newspaper, such a varied linguage phenomena as enunciation technics, the various modes of referring to the topics dealt with. . . And also the different ways of organizing any speech, whether it be a story, a description or a demonstration. Such theorical processes as are ordinarily used for the study of litterature have been adapted to fit the study of rhetorical means used to provide the readers with news and information in as specific a situation as that of communicating through the media. Various strategies within whose range the two partners implied in the act of communicating have to "operate" as thus been defined, taking into account the main two aims of this kind of speech : how to let the readers know about the news and how to make them trust what is thus said. The way in which what information is given by the newspaper will be trusted depends upon a twofold process : how real and how trustfull the information will eventually sound. Besides, whatever text may be a produced by the newspaper cannot come "out of the blue", and its readers will be implied in a twofold way of copying with the articles : they will both have to discover and to recognize.