Victimes et bourreaux, corpus et sens lexical

Beyond its status as an object of research, the victim is also a meaningful linguistic sign. But what is meaning and what is the meaning of “victim” ? In this paper we first review a few of the main theoretical approaches to meaning. We then propose an illustrated methodology for extracting lexical meaning from machine readable corpora, which is subsequently applied to the sign “victim”. On a semiotic level, this word seems to be a sort of trigger which turns one entity into a victimiser and another one into a victim.