The Features of René Lévesque’s Political Discourse in the Context of the Struggle for Quebec Identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers the political discourse of René Lévesque (1922–1987) in the context of his fight for Quebec identity. In our opinion, he was the most brilliant Quebec leader during the second half of the twentieth century. A selection of his public speeches and most notable interviews from the work La voix de René Lévesque (Québec 2002) were used as the source material for analysis. As a media and mass communication researcher, the author does not aspire solely to linguistic analysis. We consider René Lévesque’s political discourse in view of his ability to communicate with different audiences supporting Quebec identity. It was therefore vital to determine who these target audiences were and highlight the principal methods employed by Lévesque to influence them. The speeches of Lévesque the politician reflect his experience as a TV journalist (the habit of presenting information in spoken, rather than in written, form), and this is where some of its “coarseness” – the repetition of individual words and phrases, the use of interjections, the absence of stylistic excesses, etc. – comes from. One of the conclusions made is that all of Lévesque’s public speeches demonstrate, step by step, his consistent programme for preserving Quebec identity in its English environment (the change of self-designation into “Québécois (Quebecers)”; the proclamation of French as the only language of the province; the attempt to secure the support of France, its former metropole; referendum on province independence; declining the federal offer to sign “patriated” Canadian Constitution without recognizing Quebec as “a distinct society” and others). However, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, his federal opponent, considered René Lévesque an ambitious person, who wanted to split united Canada. Unfortunately, La voix de René Lévesque did not include the internal Parti Québécois discussions on the province’s independence, which were the reason he abandoned the Parti Québécois and his post of Prime Minister of Quebec. The author argues that political discourse of René Lévesque was a form of social action, which served as a prerequisite for recognizing the Parti Québécois Nation by the Parliament of Canada in 2006. Today, the Parti Québécois continues to successfully build on and develop René Lévesque’s political legacy, and the issue of Quebec’s independence is still on its agenda. The research shows that further research is needed on the political discourse of the leaders of small nations, people like René Lévesque. The context of the modern world gives us many other similar regional situations. T ransl.: Ovcharenko E. F. 2022. The Features of René Lévesque’s Political Discourse in the Context of the Struggle for Quebec Identity. Linguistics & Polyglot Studies. 8(2). P. 112–125. DOI: https://doi.org/10.24833/2410-2423-2022-2-31-112-125
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".