Un observable pour décrire les changements sémantiques dans les traditions discursives : la tactique sémantique

This article focuses on variation in the content of lexical units according to their positions in texts. This variation according to the position is called “semantic tactic” (the name is influenced by “phonotactics”). This variation in lexical content may be observed in a corpus organised by genres (or, rather, by discursive traditions), since genres organize regularities in texts such as correlations between positions and lexical contents. Variations in lexical contents are described using a measure of word attractions: the coocurrents of a lexical unit are different according to their positions. Two corpora are used: the first one, containing newspaper articles, represents a sociolect. The second one, a philosophical essay, represents an idiolect. The results suggest a more complex model of semantic context be used; the semantic tactic seems to be important for describing the content of lexical units in texts and in usage.