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]
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.
Harki is the generic term for native Muslim Algerians who served as auxiliaries in the French Army during the Algerian War from 1954 to 1962. The word sometimes applies to all Algerian Muslims who supported French Algeria during the war. The motives for enlisting were mixed. They are regarded as traitors in independent Algeria and tens of thousands of them were killed after the war in reprisals despite the Évian Accords ceasefire and amnesty stipulations. President Charles de Gaulle controversially made the decision to not give the Harkis sanctuary in France, viewing them as "soldiers of fortune" who should be gotten rid of as soon as possible.
Charles de Brosses, comte de Tournay, baron de Montfalcon, seigneur de Vezins et de Prevessin, was a French scholar of the 18th century.
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In 2017, for the first time, a presidential debate took place prior to the first round.
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Denis Tillinac was a French writer and journalist.
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Christophe Castaner is a French politician who served as Minister of the Interior from 16 October 2018 to 6 July 2020 under President Emmanuel Macron. He had been elected in 2017 for a three-year term as chairman of the La République En Marche! party with Macron's support. Castaner was Government Spokesperson under Prime Minister Édouard Philippe in 2017 and Secretary of State for Relations with Parliament from 2017 to 2018. He was also Macron's 2017 presidential campaign spokesman.
René François Ghilbert, known as René Ghil, was a French poet. He was a disciple of Stéphane Mallarmé, a major contributor to the symbolist movement in France, although they later had a falling out over ideological differences. Ghil published a series a short stories which together were called the Traité du Verbe. He worked extensively on a new system of poetic language in reaction to the Decadent Movement and Symbolism. Owing to his widespread use of personal syntax and neological vocabulary, much of Ghil's work was inaccessible, and his own contemporaries labelled it confusing. However, his works gained wider attention after his death.
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.
Mariette Sineau is a French political scientist and sociologist, currently the research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Her research focuses on gender in politics, as well as sociological notions of parity and fairness.
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Logometry is a set of computerized analytical methods and techniques that allow qualitative and quantitative description of the linguistic matter of a textual corpus.
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.