Les énoncés détachés dans la presse écrite. De la surassertion à l’aphorisation

Abstract

This article differs from most of the research on reported discourse in the newspapers. It focuses on utterances that were detached from a text, but were not inserted into a new set of sentences. The press can be considered as a medium that systematically detaches utterances deprived of context and puts them into circulation. In the first section, I reflect on the very fact of detaching utterances and introduce the concept of "overassertion" ("surassertion"), i.e. the operation that emphasizes in a text what fragments can be detached. In the second section a distinction is made between "overassertion" and "aphorisation", whose pragmatic status is quite specific. This allows us to distinguish between two types of utterances: "textual enunciations" ("énonciations textualisantes") and "aphorizing enunciations" ("énonciations aphorisantes").