Conceptual features of the French military song discourse (corpus-based study)

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus-based empirical research, which uncovers the key concepts structuring the French military song discourse. We view this type of discourse as an integral element of military discourse containing institutional and non-institutional segments. The actualization of statutory relationships is the most striking example of institutionalization. Therefore, we have started our research from the hypothesis that the officially regulated (statutory) and less regulated parts of the military song discourse may manifest some conceptual differences. The selection of this subject is determined by its contribution to understanding the French military's cultural peculiarities, as well as by the lack of exploitations regarding the French military song discourse.

Within the contemporary cognitive paradigm, the designatum is regarded as a pointer to the concept, which allows grasping a concept globally, without reconstructing its elements. Thus, the analysis of lexemes frequency may serve to identify the inherent concepts structuring some kind of discourse.

Using a freely distributed textometric platform TXM (version 0.7.9), we have created a linguistic corpus of 462 texts of French service songs totaling 88305 tokens. Then, we have divided our corpus into two parts, depending on the statutory belonging of the texts. The statistical scores were calculated by applying the hypergeometric probability distribution law. The analysis of statistically significant lemmas has permitted to draw the lexical profile of each part and to identify thereby the most specific concepts. Moreover, we have complemented our research by routine frequency and contextual analysis in order to reveal the additional basic background concepts. Our study leads us to the conclusion that the French military song discourse foregrounds 8 main concepts, but the conceptual structure of each part reveals some differences due to the specifics of the institutional requirements and the military ethos.

Keywords: military song discourse, corpus linguistics, textometry, TXM, French language