Damon Mayaffre

Damon Mayaffre born in 1970 is a French academic, historian and linguist, specializing in the analysis of political discourse. He is the author of several books on contemporary French presidential speeches evaluated scientifically and statistically via software-supported analysis.

Damon Mayaffre, spring 2023.

His early work considers the Interwar period in France, through public speeches by Léon Blum or Maurice Thorez, he follows with work on the public addresses of early presidents of the French Fifth Republic, and more recently those of leaders such as Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and Emmanuel Macron.

Damon Mayaffre holds a doctorate in history and linguistics, oversees research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and is a professor at the Université Nice-Sophia-Antipolis/Côte d'Azur.

Methodology

To understand the rhetoric of politicians, Damon Mayaffre practices logometry as a method of analysis and interpretation; Logometry is described by Jean-Paul Metzger as a "a set of computerized analytical methods and techniques that allow qualitative and quantitative description of the linguistic matter of a textual corpus".[1]

He processes digitized speech corpora (a large and coherent set of texts) with appropriate software for analysis, to study contrasts, namely Hyperbase created and developed by Étienne Brunet for CNRS - Nice University.[2] His work thus falls within the field of digital humanities that are developing at the beginning of the 21st century.[3]

By reintroducing methodological rigor to the heart of discourse analysis, and by combining bottom-up qualitative approach with AI supported statistical processing of texts,[4] Damon Mayaffre has helped revive French Discourse Analysis whose principles and theories stem from Post-structuralism.[5] French Discourse Analysis was introduced in the 1960s by Michel Pêcheux through his book: Automatic Discourse Analysis, although not translated into English at the time, it found ready reception especially in Italy, Spain, Portugal and several Latin-American countries,[6] and was adopted in the 1970s by a team of scholars working with Jean Dubois (linguist) and Maurice Tournier in the department of political lexicometry, at ENS Saint-Cloud.[7] Mayaffre follows in the footsteps with corpus-driven semantic analysis, nowadays computer-assisted.[8]

Case studies

In his first book: Le poids des mots. Le discours de gauche et de droite dans l'entre-deux-guerres (The Weight of Words: The Discourse of the Left and the Right in the Interwar Period), adapted from his doctoral dissertation, he conducts a lexicometric analysis of several hundred political speeches given or written by the main actors of the period. He identifies that Léon Blum made limited use of the vocabulary pertaining to class struggle in the 1930s, in favor of language more palatable to the public. He also concludes that the rhetoric of Maurice Thorez evolves significantly during the period, moving from a revolutionary and internationalist discourse at the end of the 1920s to a reformist and patriotic discourse after the 1936 victory of the Popular Front.[9][10]

His book: Le discours présidentiel sous la Vème République. Chirac, Mitterrand, Giscard, Pompidou, de Gaulle, (The presidential discourse under the Fifth Republic) analyzes de Gaulle's patriotic rhetoric, comments on Pompidou's poetic style, draws attention to Giscard's communication errors in the midst of the oil crisis, Mitterrand's egotism, and Chirac's language tactics.[11] On the latter, according to reviewers, Damon Mayaffre shows that President Chirac overuses the adverb "naturally" to assert with confidence things that are far from reality or to articulate with the force of evidence "one thing and its opposite".[12][13]

The book: Mesure et démesure du discours. Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012) (measure and excess) - addresses the French president's language and shows how Sarkozy breaks with the standard presidential discourse with strong and unusual words that are more common in populist language.[11][14]

His latest book: Macron ou le mystère du verbe. Ses discours décryptés par la machine (Macron or the mystery of the verb. His speeches decoded by the machine) uses artificial Intelligence to analyze Emmanuel Macron's speech patterns.[15][16][17] Artificial intelligence algorithms identify that Macron overuses the letter "r" and the prefix "re-" as in "renaissance", "renewal" or "refoundation" to give impetus to his speech,[18] Mayaffre contends that "Macron is as a whole the most linguistically versatile performer of all the Fifth Republic's presidents".[19]

Publications

See also

References
  1. Metzger, Jean-Paul (May 2019). Logometry in (chapter 8 - Discourse). pp. 153–173. doi:10.1002/9781119508670.ch8. ISBN 9781119508670. S2CID 242882576. Retrieved 3 March 2023. Logometry is a set of computerized analytical methods and techniques that allow qualitative and quantitative description of the linguistic matter of a textual corpus. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  2. "Hyperbase". hyperbase.unice.fr (in French). CNRS - Université Côte d’Azur. Hyperbase est un logiciel universitaire téléchargeable d'exploration documentaire et statistique des textes. Il est diffusé par le CNRS et l'Université Nice Sophia Antipolis et est conçu et développé par Étienne Brunet, assisté de Laurent Vanni, au sein de l'UMR Bases, Corpus, Langage1. Entre sa naissance en 1989 et sa dernière version 10 en 2017, Hyperbase a implémenté continuement le savoir-faire lexicométrique français en matière de statistique textuelle et d'exploration documentaire des grands corpus.
  3. Comby, Émeline; Mosset, Yannick (2016). Le corpus à l'interface des humanités et des sciences sociales in Corpus de Textes : Composer, Mesurer, Interpréter (in French). Lyon: ENS éditions. doi:10.4000/books.enseditions.7341. ISBN 9782847888294. Retrieved 11 February 2023.
  4. Azzopardi, Sophie (2010). "Présentation : La linguistique " de " corpus au-delà des champs disciplinaires : questions et enjeux transversaux". Cahiers de Praxématique (Corpus, données, modèles) (in French) (54): 11–24. doi:10.4000/praxematique.1108. Retrieved 11 February 2023.
  5. Williams, Glyn (2014). French Discourse Analysis: The Method of Post-Structuralism. London, New-York: Routledge. ISBN 9781317854005.
  6. Helsloot, Niels; Tony, Hak (May 2007). "Pêcheux's Contribution to Discourse Analysis". Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research. 8 (2, Art. 1). Retrieved 11 February 2023.
  7. Metzger, Jean-Paul (2019). Discourse: A Concept for Information and Communication Sciences. London, Hoboken: Wiley. pp. 42–45. ISBN 9781786303073. OCLC 1097612413.
  8. Née, Émilie; Sitri, Frédérique; Veniard, Marie (2016). "Les routines, une catégorie pour l'analyse de discours : le cas des rapports éducatifs". Lidil - Revue de linguistique et de didactiques des langues (in French) (53): 71–93. doi:10.4000/lidil.3939. Retrieved 11 February 2023.
  9. Ormières, Jean-Louis (2002). "Damon Mayaffre Le poids des mots. Le discours de gauche et de droite dans l'entre-deux-guerres. Maurice Thorez, Léon Blum, Pierre-Etienne Flandin et André Tardieu (1928-1939)". Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales (in French) (4): 1111–1112. doi:10.1017/S0395264900035502. S2CID 163636934. Retrieved 11 February 2023.
  10. Guilhaumou, Jacques (September 1999). "Damon Mayaffre, « Le discours politique dans les années 30. Analyse de vocabulaire de Maurice Thorez, Léon Blum, Pierre-Etienne Flandin et André Tardieu (1928-1939) », thèse, Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis, 1998 »". Mots (in French) (60): 173–176. Retrieved 11 February 2023.
  11. Guillaumou, Jacques (April 2005). "Damon Mayaffre — Paroles de président. Jacques Chirac (1995-2003) et le discours présidentiel sous la Vème République. Paris : Champion, 2004, 292 pages". Corpus (in French): 218–221. doi:10.4000/corpus.322. S2CID 161619160. Retrieved 11 February 2023.
  12. Nouschi, André (2005). "Paroles de Président. Jacques Chirac (1995-2003) et le discours présidentiel sous la Ve République (Damon Mayaffre) - Book Review". Revue suisse d'histoire (in French). 55 (4): 496–500. Retrieved 11 February 2023.
  13. Dospinescu, Vasile (April 2006). "Construction de l'image de soi ou intermittence de l'énonciateur : un modèle d'analyse d'un discours politique dans Paroles de président – Jacques Chirac (1995-2003) et le discours présidentiel sous la Ve République par Damon Mayaffre (2004)" (PDF). Anadiss Via DOAJ (in French). 1 (1): 93–110. Retrieved 27 February 2023.
  14. Mayaffre & Scholz 2017
  15. Bouzereau, Camille (2022). "D. Mayaffre, Macron ou le mystère du verbe. Ses discours décryptés par la machine, La Tour-d'Aigues, Éditions de l'Aube". Corpus (in French) (23). doi:10.4000/corpus.6759. S2CID 247283408. Retrieved 11 February 2023.
  16. Chamoux, Jean-Pierre (2022). "Damon Mayaffre (2021), Macron ou le mystère du verbe. Ses discours décryptés par la machine". Communications (in French). 39 (2). doi:10.4000/communication.16145. S2CID 252637808. Retrieved 11 February 2023.
  17. Monte, Michèle (2022). "Damon Mayaffre, Macron ou la puissance du verbe, La Tour-d'Aigues, Éditions de l'aube, 2021, 342 pages". Langage et société (in French). 1 (175): 180–182. doi:10.3917/ls.175.0182. S2CID 246580596. Retrieved 11 February 2023.
  18. Haris, Sofiane (2021). "Damon Mayaffre. 2021. Macron ou le mystère du verbe. Ses discours décryptés par la machine (Paris : Editions de l'Aube)". Argumentation & Analyse du Discours (in French) (27). doi:10.4000/aad.5914. S2CID 244616709. Retrieved 11 February 2023.
  19. Ahearne, Jeremy (2022). "Emmanuel Macron and the reprojection of the French". Language, Modern & Contemporary France. 30 (3): 257–274. doi:10.1080/09639489.2022.2077715. S2CID 249255215. Retrieved 11 February 2023.
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