Discourse Community Analysis: Sense Construction vs Non-Sense Construction

International audience The proposal examines the nature of the political discourse of international organizations(IMF , world Bank , the UN , European Union , African Union , The Arab League, etc.). Thestudy originates from a fundamental paradox: how can we use the same descriptive linguistictools which we use in analyzing the production of sense for the production of non-sensecharacterizing this type of discourse? The corpus analyzed is a collection of texts producedby the African Union. The high frequency of words and terms occurring in this type ofproduction contributes in loosing their meaning which is contrary to the appreciation of termsoccurring in an expert discourse for information retrieval or lexical resources purposes wherethe high frequency of a term consolidates its belonging to a specific field of knowledge. Howcan this paradox be explained? The full paper will report on the results of our analysis.