BOOK REVIEW
La violence verbale: Représentations dans le discours littéraire et dans la communication quotidienne. Volume coordonné par Iuliana-Anca Mateiu, Cluj-Napoca, Casa Cărţii de Ştiinţă, 2016, 206 pp., ISBN 978-606-17-1022-5.
Reviewed
by Maria-Crina Herțeg 
, 1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia
The volume edited by Iuliana-Anca Mateiu brings together five articles on the topic of verbal violence representing part of the results of a research project about verbal violence embedded in literary discourse and in everyday speech. All the articles included in the book rely on corpus, the corpora complied for this purpose encompass texts written in French, Romanian or English. The variety of the sources in which the contributors identified verbal violence (novels, plays, school environment, the internet) and the complexity of the phenomenon motivated the diversity of the approaches they proposed.
The first article is titled ‘Figures de la violence verbale et enjeu identitaire dans le roman Naissance de Yann Moix’ and it is authored by Anamaria Curea. It analyses verbal violence in the novel Naissance written by Yann Moix. Curea (2016) starts with a short introduction of the writer, she further undertakes a linguistic analysis of verbal violence in literary discourse and identifies and analyses instances of verbal violence throughout the novel. As Curea (2016) observes, the strategies used by Yann Moix in order to render verbal violence rely on the use of pronoun and pronominal constructions. To this end, she analyses pragmatic and stylistic uses of pronouns in the novel Naissance, the analysis is well illustrated with examples retrieved from the novel. In explaining how pronominal strategies render verbal violence Curea (2016) relies on the theory propounded by Benveniste (1966).
The second contribution is titled ‘La violence de la contrainte dans Pulvérisés d’Alexandra Badea. Analyse des rapports de places’ and it is signed by Vlad Dobroiu. Dobroiu (2016) undertakes an analysis of verbal violence in the play Pulvérisés by Alexandra Badea, a play written in French and translated into Romanian. As the author announces, the aim of the article is to analyse the interpersonal relationships between two characters in the play. Dobroiu (2016) relies on the theories proposed by Roland Barthes who distinguishes different types of violence as well as by Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1992) who studies the role of markers in interpersonal relationship.
Lavinia Margea is the author of the third contribution included in the volume. It investigates instances of scatological representations in the novel Le Roi des Aulnes by Michel Tournier. The aim of the article is to capture different instances of the language pertaining to scatology and their function in the representation of verbal violence. Margea (2016) briefly introduces Michel Tournier’s work and embarks on a linguistic analysis focusing on the use and role of scatology in the above-mentioned novel. The author gives the definition of scatology and identifies lexical realisations of scatology in Michel Tournier’s novel Le Roi des Aulnes as well as its effect on the readers, these effects range from humour to rejection. Margea (2016) explains that the choice of the novel under investigation is triggered by the richness of symbols it displays, as well as by its very diverse stylistic repertoire. Margea (2016) carries out a fine lexical, semantic and pragmatic analysis. Thus, scatology is analysed lexically, more specifically the lexical units realising it, grammatically - the parts of speech, and pragmatically, the pragmatic roles of the adjectives and adverbs associated with the lexis pertaining to scatology. Margea (2016) followed Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni’s theory in the analysis of irony as a figure of speech.
The fourth contribution in the book by Ileana-Georgiana Todoran and Alexandra Melinda Stanciu, ‘Procédés de reformulation et dynamique conflictuelle dans l’interaction en milieu scolaire’ brings a shift from the analysis of verbal violence in literary discourse to the analysis of verbal violence in conversation. More specifically, the authors analyse instances of verbal conflict in a school environment, the role of rephrasing within verbal conflict. The authors use a spoken corpus which comprises a transcription during the class of French as a foreign language in a high school. The analysis is preceded by theoretical insights on the issue of rephrasing and paraphrase. Thus, in the Introduction the authors explain and define rephrasing and its role in the analysis undertaken by them. The authors situate their contribution at the crossroads between semantics and pragmatics and they draw on semantic and pragmatic contributions to the study of rephrase and paraphrase. Todoran and Stanciu (2016) enumerate some of the authors who were preoccupied with these lines of research. The framework of analysis relies on and uses the classification of paraphrase as formulated by Gülich et Kotschi. Within the framework of analysis selected by the authors, paraphrase and rephrase is built on the principle of semantic equivalence. Following the theories formulated by Gülich, Kotschi and Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Todoran and Stanciu (2016) distinguish between four types of rephrasing and introduce the linguistic criteria which lie at the basis of this classification, explaining the role of linkers in different types of paraphrase. In the section titled Analysis of examples, Todoran and Stanciu (2016) retrieve examples from the corpus which encompass instances of verbal conflict and analyse them. The examples proposed for the analysis encompass students-teacher dialogues captured during the teaching-learning process and the types of paraphrase and rephrase used by the teacher. These examples are clustered around the classification used by the authors. The dialogues between the teacher and the students display a high degree of verbal violence oriented towards the teacher. Furthermore, students’ use of rephrasing and paraphrase increases the degrees of violence.
Todoran and Stanciu (2016) conclude that the multiple perspectives in approaching rephrasing and paraphrase result in the richness and diversity of the theories formulated in this area of research. In the Addendum the authors provide the full transcription under analysis.
The last contribution is co-authored by Radu Cernuta and Iuliana-Anca Mateiu and it analyses verbal violence in virtual space: the role of verbal violence in the evolution of a conflict within the framework of an email exchange. The corpus of the study comprises 21 emails from a thread on the mailing list of an open-source software project. Usually, the mailing list is the most important tool that ensures cooperation between the participants, mostly volunteers, to an open-source project. The emails selected contain an attack on the project from a competitor who tries to disrupt the community at the time of an important technical decision and also the community’s response to the attack.
In analysing the conflict, the authors use concepts from enunciative pragmatics, illocutionary pragmatics, the pragmatics of verbal interactions, socio-linguistic concepts and the concept of group norm from social psychology. They identify a wide range of forms of violence taking the form of both positive face-threatening acts (like insults, accusations, reproaches, threats, irony) articulated into strategies aimed at discrediting or delegitimising opponents, or relegitimising themselves, and negative face-threatening acts (like irrelevant posts in the thread) aimed at disrupting the list. By concentrating on the strategies of the various subjects with respect to their respective stakes, they determine in which way and to what extent the use of verbal violence allows the subjects to attain their goals, or, on the contrary, prevent them from doing that on a mailing list.
References
Mateiu, I.-A. (2016). (Ed.). La violence verbale: Représentations dans le discours littéraire et dans la communication quotidienne. Cluj-Napoca: Casa Cărţii de Ştiinţă.
How to cite this article: Herțeg, M. C. (2022). La violence verbale: Représentations dans le discours littéraire et dans la communication quotidienne. Volume coordonné par Iuliana-Anca Mateiu, Cluj-Napoca, Casa Cărţii de Ştiinţă, 2016, 206 pp., ISBN 978-606-17-1022-5. Journal of Linguistic and Intercultural Education – JoLIE, 15(3), 249-252. doi: https://doi.org/10.29302/jolie.2022.15.3.16
For details on subscription, go to: http://jolie.uab.ro/index.php?pagina=-&id=19&l=en