Verbal violence: linguists' intervention at the workplace ; La violence verbale : de l'intervention des linguistes en entreprise

Abstract

For epistemological reasons specific to discipline (Gadet 2006, Moïse 2007), sociolinguologists in French or France are little 'applied' or even 'involved'. Or, in other words, the involvement of sociolinguists in civil society is rather marginal, although some well-known and circumscribed fields of our vast area of investigation, linguistic arrangements (and more so even in French-speaking than in France) and language teaching, or more restricted fields such as the working environment (Boutet, Gardin and Lacoste 1995) or justice (Lagorgette 2006), can be mentioned. Nevertheless, because the language, historically and in a positivist spirit (of Robillard 2007) was not, a priori, social, because interfering with language productions affects political ideology and the design of the nation (Moïse 2006), sociolinguist is far from having the status of social geograph, spatial planning specialist, communicator, specialist in advertising Semiotic, or even sociologist or psychologist, social and individual experts and advisers and contributors of widely distributed journals or books. The sociolinguist lives in this paradoxical injunction: remain descriptive, variationist or interactionist sociolinguistic, for example (although it is known that in the United States, in particular, W.Labov or J. Gumperz were given major orders for linguistic expertise), in order to be heard in his own world and to derogate from his intimate social commitment, or to live genuinely in the sociolinguistic process involved (Blanchet 2000), to choose the perilous adventure of clearing, 'lost' time, initial exploration, financial apories, and still without always real institutional recognition (number of posts, representation in the CNU, few laboratories). But I am not of the kind to play lamentations or victimisation. I prefer to see the need to intervene in the field of language practices, because we have a public responsibility for transfers of knowledge, exchanges and skills in our complex, changing and linguistic world, because, behind the ...