Negation and the Unspoken. Towards the Social Meaning of Russia in the French Press Media

This paper deals with the social meaning of Russia in the French Press Discourse. The particular aim is to examine the nature and the role of negation, which seems to be one of the mechanisms that have a considerable impact on the construction of the meaning of the Proper Name. We discuss, on the one hand, the role of negation that affects the reformulations of la Russie within attributive structures and, on the other hand, the negation in the conditional propositions of structure si A, B (if A, B). Corpus material is taken from the French national daily press and published in March 2014, at the time of the annexation of Crimea.