French grammar, Linguistics, Pragmatics

My research is situated within discourse analysis, pragmatics and media studies, with a focus on French political and media discourse. I am interested in how linguistic forms are used pragmatically, rhetorically and argumentatively in concrete communicative situations.

A central part of my research concerns negation and negative meaning. I study negation as a resource for refutation, distancing and counter-argumentation, but also as a way of introducing different voices and points of view into discourse. In my work on French editorials, presidential debates and electoral campaigns, I have examined how negation can be used to challenge an opponent’s discourse, construct credibility and shape political meaning. My interest in negation concerns thus the relation between linguistic form, interpretation and social context. Through negation, we discover how discourse organizes voices and positions, and how speakers and writers negotiate authority through language.

Another theme are political narratives, especially in relation to populism and nationalism. I am interested in how political actors construct collective identities and oppositions — such as “the people”, “the elite”, “the nation” or “the enemy” — through recurrent narratives, ideological framing and argumentative strategies.

Media digital public discourse is another interest. Here, I focus on how political meanings circulate and change across media spaces, especially in relation to polarization and hate speech. I am interested in how hostile or stigmatizing meanings are built up in discourse, and in how politically charged terms can shift meaning depending on context, speaker, medium and audience.

My research has been conducted in close collaboration with several research groups and networks from my home department and researchers from universities around the world. In particular, the researcher network Pragmatics of Negation has resulted in several publications, as well as ROMPOL, a research environment on political discourse in Romance-speaking countries based at Stockholm University. The network and collaborations on Narratives in political discourse bring together colleagues from the universities in Nordic countries.

Theoretically, to sum up, my work draws on theories of enunciation, polyphony and dialogism, as well as argumentation theory, genre studies, corpus pragmatics and discourse analysis.