Damon Mayaffre born in 1970 is a French academic,
historian and
linguist, specializing in the analysis of
political discourse. He is the author of several books on contemporary French presidential speeches evaluated scientifically and statistically via software-supported analysis.
To understand the rhetoric of politicians, Damon Mayaffre practices logometry as a method of analysis and interpretation; Logometry is described by Jean-Paul Metzger as a "a set of computerized analytical methods and techniques that allow qualitative and quantitative description of the linguistic matter of a textual corpus".[1]
He processes digitized speech
corpora (a large and coherent set of texts) with appropriate software for analysis, to study contrasts, namely Hyperbase created and developed by Étienne Brunet for CNRS - Nice University.[2] His work thus falls within the field of
digital humanities that are developing at the beginning of the 21st century.[3]
By reintroducing methodological rigor to the heart of
discourse analysis, and by combining bottom-up qualitative approach with AI supported statistical processing of texts,[4] Damon Mayaffre has helped revive French Discourse Analysis whose principles and theories stem from
Post-structuralism.[5] French Discourse Analysis was introduced in the 1960s by
Michel Pêcheux through his book: Automatic Discourse Analysis, although not translated into English at the time, it found ready reception especially in Italy, Spain, Portugal and several Latin-American countries,[6] and was adopted in the 1970s by a team of scholars working with
Jean Dubois (linguist) and Maurice Tournier in the department of political lexicometry, at
ENSSaint-Cloud.[7] Mayaffre follows in the footsteps with corpus-driven
semantic analysis, nowadays computer-assisted.[8]
Case studies
In his first book: Le poids des mots. Le discours de gauche et de droite dans l'entre-deux-guerres (The Weight of Words: The Discourse of the Left and the Right in the Interwar Period), adapted from his doctoral dissertation, he conducts a lexicometric analysis of several hundred political speeches given or written by the main actors of the period. He identifies that
Léon Blum made limited use of the vocabulary pertaining to
class struggle in the 1930s, in favor of language more palatable to the public. He also concludes that the rhetoric of
Maurice Thorez evolves significantly during the period, moving from a revolutionary and internationalist discourse at the end of the 1920s to a reformist and patriotic discourse after the 1936 victory of the
Popular Front.[9][10]
His book: Le discours présidentiel sous la Vème République. Chirac, Mitterrand, Giscard, Pompidou, de Gaulle, (The presidential discourse under the Fifth Republic) analyzes
de Gaulle's patriotic rhetoric, comments on
Pompidou's poetic style, draws attention to
Giscard's communication errors in the midst of the
oil crisis,
Mitterrand's
egotism, and
Chirac's language tactics.[11] On the latter, according to reviewers, Damon Mayaffre shows that President Chirac overuses the adverb "naturally" to assert with confidence things that are far from reality or to articulate with the force of evidence "one thing and its opposite".[12][13]
The book: Mesure et démesure du discours. Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012) (measure and excess) - addresses the French president's language and shows how
Sarkozy breaks with the standard presidential discourse with strong and unusual words that are more common in
populist language.[11][14]
His latest book: Macron ou le mystère du verbe. Ses discours décryptés par la machine (Macron or the mystery of the verb. His speeches decoded by the machine) uses
artificial Intelligence to analyze
Emmanuel Macron's speech patterns.[15][16][17]Artificial intelligence algorithms identify that Macron overuses the letter "r" and the prefix "re-" as in "renaissance", "renewal" or "refoundation" to give impetus to his speech,[18] Mayaffre contends that "Macron is as a whole the most linguistically versatile performer of all the Fifth Republic's presidents".[19]
Mayaffre, Damon (2012). Le Discours présidentiel sous la Ve République. Chirac, Mitterrand, Giscard, Pompidou, de Gaulle (in French). Paris: Presses de Sciences Po.
ISBN9782724612448.
OCLC1281871285.
Mayaffre Damon with Vanni Laurent, (2021) L'intelligence artificielle des textes : Des algorithmes à l'interprétation (in French). Paris: Honoré Champion. 2021.
ISBN9782745356406.
OCLC1257760989.
^Metzger, Jean-Paul (May 2019).
"Logometry". Discourse: A Concept for Information and Communication Sciences. Wiley. pp. 153–173.
doi:
10.1002/9781119508670.ch8.
ISBN9781119508670.
S2CID242882576. Retrieved 3 March 2023 – via researchgate.net. Logometry is a set of computerized analytical methods and techniques that allow qualitative and quantitative description of the linguistic matter of a textual corpus.
^"Hyperbase". hyperbase.unice.fr (in French). CNRS - Université Côte d’Azur. Hyperbase est un logiciel universitaire téléchargeable d'exploration documentaire et statistique des textes. Il est diffusé par le CNRS et l'Université Nice Sophia Antipolis et est conçu et développé par Étienne Brunet, assisté de Laurent Vanni, au sein de l'UMR Bases, Corpus, Langage1. Entre sa naissance en 1989 et sa dernière version 10 en 2017, Hyperbase a implémenté continuement le savoir-faire lexicométrique français en matière de statistique textuelle et d'exploration documentaire des grands corpus.