EVOLUTION OF THE LINGUO-CULTURAL CONCEPTS IN THE FRENCH PRESIDENTS’ NEW YEAR’S EVE ADDRESSES: NATIONAL VALUES AS A MANIPULATION TOOL

Abstract

The article deals with the search of key linguo-cultural concepts of the French political culture, verbalized in the French Presidents’ of the Fifth Republic New Year’s eve addresses (les Voeux de Nouvel An) from 1960 to 2016. The author analyzes French politicians’ public speech as the mirror im- age of the French core national values. This research summarizes achievements in the field of cultural linguistics, pragmalinguistics and discourse analysis. Moreover, it provides leading modern scientists’ ideas about the genre of the congratulatory speech and its characteristics, highlighting major differ- ences between the congratulatory speech and other speeches. Much attention is given to the notion of “linguo-cultural concept”, defined as a core element of the French language and culture, and to its difference from the notion of “social representation” that is considered to be a basic unit in the field of French sociolinguistics. Applying linguo-cultural approach to the data, gained thanks to the use of the lexicometric software program Tropes, we defined five core linguo-cultural concepts in the New Year’s Eve addresses, namely la France, la Nation, la Liberté, l’Esprit cartésien and la Fraternité as objectively as possible. It is spoken in detail about verbal representations of the mentioned concepts. The author gives also the example of their use in the congratulatory speeches of Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, François Mitterand, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarcozy and François Hollande. The article gives a detailed analysis of the linguo-cultural concept la Fra- ternité and its transformation into the concept la Solidarité. The perspectives of further research are discussed.