Ethos and Political Discourse Analysis: a Look from the French Perspective

Abstract

This work analyzes the notion of ethos from a French perspective of discourse analysis. A corpus of political monologues and dialogues was analyzed to illustrate how the ethos concept works in different political contexts and to understand how the participants’ identity is constructed. The work will be organized in three parts. First, the ethos notion will be covered from a discourse analysis perspective, including its main difficulties. After that, some examples extracted from political speeches from different genre will be analyzed. Finally, some general reflections and conclusions on the notion of ethos will be presented.