French weekly journals “Charlie Hebdo” and “Le Canard Enchaîné”: linguistic means of creating a comic, thematic field and target audience

Abstract

The satirical press has a long history and established traditions in France, being an integral part of French culture. Understanding this phenomenon leads to a clear understanding of the mechanisms of the emergence and functioning of satire as such and the clarification of its role in French society. A considerable amount of research has been devoted to the French satirical press, but questions related to the linguistic means of representing the comic are still poorly studied. The aim of this work is an attempt to present lexical and stylistic means of creating a comic effect, with the example of two weekly journals - Charlie Hebdo and Le Canard Enchaîné. In addition, we try to answer the question of whom (the social portrait of the reader) and what the modern French satirical press is making laugh at (the thematic spectrum). The research was realised under several approaches to text analysis: functional pragmatic; lexico-semantic approach; stylistic and socio-cultural. The source of the research is a compilation of the newspapers Charlie Hebdo and Le Canard Enchaîné for the period from 2009 to 2016. In addition, two interviews conducted by the author in Paris with journalists of Canard Enchaîné and Charlie Hebdo were used to understand the current concept of publications, including language policy (language presentation of the style). Finally, a survey of the social portrait of readers was conducted in France using the questionnaire method. As a result, 128 French respondents were interviewed.