Une forme d’hétérogénéité des usages : la variation sociale du sens du nom événement

This article on lexical semantics aims at studying the specialized languages coming with professional groups. I consider here that this variation in meaning is a kind of social variation which is not based on differences between social groups, but between professional groups. It is well known that some of these groups have communication habits, use specific text genres or terminologies. I put the focus here on the variation of the lexical meaning of the French noun événement, whose general meaning is clear. The use of a corpus made exclusively of handbooks and articles of human sciences (journalism, marketing, social psychology) shows that its meaning is very different from one professional group to another. For example, it occurs as an argument of different predicates. Consommation et production d’événements sportifs (consumption and production of sportive events) is attested in marketing, and interprétation d’événements (interpretation of events) in journalism. Thus, the argument spectrum of this noun is different from one discourse to another. This can be understood from a referential point of view : the entity denoted by événement is involved in different activities (here, consommation or interpretation). Then, I conclude that the semantic variation of the noun événement is correlated with the professional activity in which the texts are involved. Thus, I can bind the social variation attested in my corpus with the social fact defining the language variety I study here : the professional activity. My study shows the specificity of the specialized languages within the scope of social variation. Because they are defined by social activities, they rely on socio-cultural modellings, which allows a thin semantic variation of meaning of some language units