Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
to better pinpoint the specific place occupied by an audiovisual text or corpus which
-
grossomodo
- deals with the same subject.
5)
Whatisthe level ofprecision(of“granularity”)ofthe treatmentofthesubject
talked about by the author?
While it does not depend upon them, this fifth question
is strongly linked to the fourth (the discursive selection of the facets from which to
approach a subject) and the sixth (see below, the question of the weighting of the
discourse). Specifying the level of precision of a text is a way of assigning it a
specific pragmatic position with a
corpus of audiovisual texts
dealing with the same
subject: certain texts may be considered to be specialized texts, others as general
texts, and still others as texts whose granularity profile is circumscribed from the
referential point of view.
6)
How is the subject developed throughout the audiovisual text being analyzed?
While it refers back to the fourth question - that of the
discursive framing
of a topic
- this relates more specifically to the question of the logic and strategies of the
syntagmatic
progression
of a theme and its treatment in a given discourse. As we
know, the purely linear development of an argument, consisting of adding more and
more “new” information to a selected theme, which enrichs it in accordance with the
author's intentions and depending on its audience, is a rather uncommon case.
The development of a theme in his discourse may serve the author as a “pretext”
for touching on other themes or subjects; the development itself may take the form
of a “more in-depth examination of a domain of reference” but this is only one of
many forms of discursive development. For instance, even in so-called scientific
discourse, it is not uncommon for the cognitive specialization and enrichment of a
given theme to be replaced or “complemented” - a little like in
political
or
didactic
discourse - by all kinds of
figures of repetition
and emphasis (pure and simple
repetitions, terminological variations, variations around a given theme, summaries of
what has already been said, elaborations, examples serving to demonstrate the
interest or the importance of the specific theme, and so on).
In the context of our research on the
universe of discourse*
of audiovisual
archives, we have begun to integrate the problem of describing the discourse
production around a topic into the process of analyzing audiovisual corpora. This
undoubtedly constitutes a very considerable improvement upon the usual practices
of description/indexation of corpora of (digital) texts. The contribution of discourse
analysis, we believe, will mainly be felt in the context of information monitoring
and in the republication of audiovisual corpora in order to adapt them to specific use
contexts.
