"Le Monde et le « Grenelle de l’Environnement » : pistes pour l’analyse sémantique assistée par ordinateur d’un corpus de presse“

Abstract “Grenelle Environnement” is the name given to a large multipartite consultation organized by N. Sarkozy after his election in order to define some political and social answers to the economic and ecological crisis. From 2007 to 2009 the french national daily paper Le Monde has largely echoed the event and its political follow up publishing 270 articles on the subject matter. The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities of a computer aided semantic analysis of this corpus. Given the complex plurivocity of news paper article and the lack of a clear categorization, the first methodological condition is to built up the corpus in such a way that certain pragmatic dimensions of the fragments might be reachable during the analysis. The second condition will be to track at local graphic form level the formal expression of meaning in order to explore the possibility of establishing a reliable semantic categorization. At this point of our study we have identified three types of neologisms that provide strong semantic hints for our purpose.