Damon Mayaffre born in 1970 is a French academic, historian and linguist, specializing in the analysis of political discourse. He is the author of several books on contemporary French presidential speeches evaluated scientifically and statistically via software-supported analysis.
His early work considers the Interwar period in France, through public speeches by Léon Blum or Maurice Thorez, he follows with work on the public addresses of early presidents of the French Fifth Republic, and more recently those of leaders such as Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and Emmanuel Macron.
Damon Mayaffre holds a doctorate in history and linguistics, oversees research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and is a professor at the Université Nice-Sophia-Antipolis/Côte d'Azur.
To understand the rhetoric of politicians, Damon Mayaffre practices logometry as a method of analysis and interpretation; Logometry is described by Jean-Paul Metzger as a "a set of computerized analytical methods and techniques that allow qualitative and quantitative description of the linguistic matter of a textual corpus". [1]
He processes digitized speech corpora (a large and coherent set of texts) with appropriate software for analysis, to study contrasts, namely Hyperbase created and developed by Étienne Brunet for CNRS - Nice University. [2] His work thus falls within the field of digital humanities that are developing at the beginning of the 21st century. [3]
By reintroducing methodological rigor to the heart of discourse analysis, and by combining bottom-up qualitative approach with AI supported statistical processing of texts, [4] Damon Mayaffre has helped revive French Discourse Analysis whose principles and theories stem from Post-structuralism. [5] French Discourse Analysis was introduced in the 1960s by Michel Pêcheux through his book: Automatic Discourse Analysis, although not translated into English at the time, it found ready reception especially in Italy, Spain, Portugal and several Latin-American countries, [6] and was adopted in the 1970s by a team of scholars working with Jean Dubois (linguist) and Maurice Tournier in the department of political lexicometry, at ENS Saint-Cloud. [7] Mayaffre follows in the footsteps with corpus-driven semantic analysis, nowadays computer-assisted. [8]
In his first book: Le poids des mots. Le discours de gauche et de droite dans l'entre-deux-guerres (The Weight of Words: The Discourse of the Left and the Right in the Interwar Period), adapted from his doctoral dissertation, he conducts a lexicometric analysis of several hundred political speeches given or written by the main actors of the period. He identifies that Léon Blum made limited use of the vocabulary pertaining to class struggle in the 1930s, in favor of language more palatable to the public. He also concludes that the rhetoric of Maurice Thorez evolves significantly during the period, moving from a revolutionary and internationalist discourse at the end of the 1920s to a reformist and patriotic discourse after the 1936 victory of the Popular Front. [9] [10]
His book: Le discours présidentiel sous la Vème République. Chirac, Mitterrand, Giscard, Pompidou, de Gaulle, (The presidential discourse under the Fifth Republic) analyzes de Gaulle's patriotic rhetoric, comments on Pompidou's poetic style, draws attention to Giscard's communication errors in the midst of the oil crisis, Mitterrand's egotism, and Chirac's language tactics. [11] On the latter, according to reviewers, Damon Mayaffre shows that President Chirac overuses the adverb "naturally" to assert with confidence things that are far from reality or to articulate with the force of evidence "one thing and its opposite". [12] [13]
The book: Mesure et démesure du discours. Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012) (measure and excess) - addresses the French president's language and shows how Sarkozy breaks with the standard presidential discourse with strong and unusual words that are more common in populist language. [11] [14]
His latest book: Macron ou le mystère du verbe. Ses discours décryptés par la machine (Macron or the mystery of the verb. His speeches decoded by the machine) uses artificial Intelligence to analyze Emmanuel Macron's speech patterns. [15] [16] [17] Artificial intelligence algorithms identify that Macron overuses the letter "r" and the prefix "re-" as in "renaissance", "renewal" or "refoundation" to give impetus to his speech, [18] Mayaffre contends that "Macron is as a whole the most linguistically versatile performer of all the Fifth Republic's presidents". [19]
Jacques René Chirac was a French politician who served as President of France from 1995 to 2007. Chirac was previously Prime Minister of France from 1974 to 1976 and from 1986 to 1988, as well as Mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995.
The Fifth Republic is France's current republican system of government. It was established on 4 October 1958 by Charles de Gaulle under the Constitution of the Fifth Republic.
Aimé Fernand David Césaire was a Francophone Martinican poet, author, and politician. He was "one of the founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature" and coined the word négritude in French. He founded the Parti progressiste martiniquais in 1958, and served in the French National Assembly from 1945 to 1993 and as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988.
Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa is a French politician who served as the President of France from 2007 to 2012.
Jean-Baptiste du Val-de-Grâce, baron de Cloots, better known as Anacharsis Cloots, was a Prussian nobleman who was a significant figure in the French Revolution. Perhaps the first to advocate a world parliament, long before Albert Camus and Albert Einstein, he was a world federalist and an internationalist anarchist. He was nicknamed "orator of mankind", "citizen of humanity" and "a personal enemy of God".
Charles de Brosses, comte de Tournay, baron de Montfalcon, seigneur de Vezins et de Prevessin, was a French scholar of the 18th century.
Jean Lassalle is a French politician who represented the 4th constituency of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department in the National Assembly from 2002 to 2022. A former member of the Democratic Movement (MoDem), he was a candidate in the 2017 presidential election, in which he received 435,301 votes (1.21%). Lassalle ran under the banner of Résistons! (RES), a party he founded and has led since he left the MoDem in 2016. In the 2022 presidential election he received 1.3 million votes constituting over 3% of those cast.
French presidential debates, broadcast on TV, traditionally occurred only between the two rounds of the presidential elections.
In 2017, for the first time, a presidential debate took place prior to the first round.
Yves Roucaute is a French philosopher, Phd, Phd (philosophy), writer, professeur agrégé in philosophy, professeur agrégé in political science, teaching at Paris X University Nanterre, Previous President of the scientific Council of the "Institut National des Hautes Etudes de Securité et de Justice", director of the review "Cahiers de la Sécurité", counsellor of the "réformateurs" group at the French National Assembly. He has held a number of positions in cabinet ministers of right-wing governments, and is a close friend of Alain Madelin, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, and Nicolas Sarkozy. He is also a journalist and columnist He was editing director of some newspapers and he is the owner of newspaper in the south of France and minority stockholder of some others. He is the majority stockholder of "Contemporary Bookstore" SAS.
Denis Jeambar is a French journalist.
Amable de Bourzeis was a French churchman, writer, hellenist, and Academician.
Denis Tillinac was a French writer and journalist.
Guillaume-Charles Faipoult was a French aristocrat, soldier and politician who was Minister of Finance during the French Revolution. He then represented France in Italy, where he organized the newly formed republics. During the First French Empire he was prefect of the Scheldt department, and then Minister of Finance in Spain under Joseph Bonaparte. Faipoult was prefect of Saône-et-Loire during the Hundred Days.
Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron is a French politician who has served as President of France since 2017. Macron is ex officio one of the two Co-Princes of Andorra. He previously served as Minister of Economics, Industry and Digital Affairs under President François Hollande from 2014 to 2016, and as Deputy Secretary-General to the President from 2012 to 2014. He is a member of Renaissance.
The Republicans is a liberal-conservative political party in France, largely inspired by the Gaullist tradition. The party was formed on 30 May 2015 as the re-incorporation of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), which had been established in 2002 under the leadership of then President of France Jacques Chirac.
Renaissance (RE) is a liberal and centrist political party in France. The party was originally known as En Marche ! and later La République En Marche ! before adopting its current name in September 2022.
Dominique Maingueneau is a French linguist, emeritus Professor at Sorbonne University (Paris). His research focuses on discourse analysis. It associates a pragmatic outlook on discourse with linguistic «enunciation» theories and some aspects of Michel Foucault's line of thought.
France–Rwanda relations are the international relations between France and Rwanda.
Sophie Wahnich is a French historian. She is director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a specialist in the French Revolution.
Logometry is a set of computerized analytical methods and techniques that allow qualitative and quantitative description of the linguistic matter of a textual corpus.
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ignored (help)Hyperbase est un logiciel universitaire téléchargeable d'exploration documentaire et statistique des textes. Il est diffusé par le CNRS et l'Université Nice Sophia Antipolis et est conçu et développé par Étienne Brunet, assisté de Laurent Vanni, au sein de l'UMR Bases, Corpus, Langage1. Entre sa naissance en 1989 et sa dernière version 10 en 2017, Hyperbase a implémenté continuement le savoir-faire lexicométrique français en matière de statistique textuelle et d'exploration documentaire des grands corpus.