Naming is also considering...

Arnaud Richard (1)

1 Praxiling - Praxiling

The language is an intense and complex entity. Different objectives or practices can be related to it. Sport as an individual or a social practice, has nowadays a predominant place in everyday life of most of the cultures. One thing is already sure: the importance of sport in terms of economy, politics or ideology in general is undeniable. It would be highly interesting to find out some characteristics in the language of sport to see if it emerged any kinds of specificities So, as an important element of a lot of societies, I would like to consider its correlation with language and socio-linguistic behaviors. Sport has developed some terminological specificity but nonetheless it has grown as a massive theme in our everyday discourses and in some other important fields. Metaphors of war are a classic example. A lot of studies are made upon this sport's language particularity. For this study, I will focus on linguistic categorization. The data and the context from where it is extracted, is based on the theme of sport. However, I won't generalize to sports' discourses in general, neither consider that the results can be true for any language or any sport event. This study is considering the French television during the beginning of 1990 and it coverage of the Winter Olympic games of Albertville (France). The hypothesis is that the French media were not presenting the information in the same way, depending on the country it was about. I will highlight this difference thanks to the use and comparison of different linguistic categorization. This study is based on a discourse analysis approach. I will develop some on the necessary shared concepts in the following part. The next part will present the results with an emphasis on the context: the data is from the French television during the Winter Olympic games in 1992. We won't focus on the gold medalists but on the delegations that participate thanks to some quotas (in particular the African and Caribbean countries). In the last part (Discussion / Conclusion), we will emphasize the difference of media treatments between these 'new participant' countries and the 'traditionally represented' ones. This study has no pretention to give any lessons but wants to explore and analyze a very precise situation, clearly dated and located - the French television in the early eighties.

Mots clés: Categorization; Sport; Media; Discrimination

Domaines: Linguistique; Sciences de l'information et de la communication

Arnaud Richard. Naming is also considering...: A media case study of representations of minorities on French television. Winter Universiade Sport Science Conference, 2009, Harbin, China. pp.23-31. ⟨halshs-00784758⟩