Expressions nominales de la pluralité. La France, les Français, le peuple français : propriétés partagées et différences

This paper aims at analysing and comparing several nominal expressions of plurality from a semantic and a discursive perspective: inhabited place names (cities, countries – la France), plural nominal syntagmas (les Français), human collective nouns (le peuple français, la population française, l’opinion française). From a denotative point of view, these expressions may be compared and may sometimes be substituted for one another, but each of them has distinctive characteristics, concerning the potential for ambiguity, the lexical meaning, the globalizing vs individualizing interpretation. By analysing mainly political discourse and basing our study on a semantico-referential approach, we will attempt to grasp the discursive and rhetorical stakes involved in the use of these different nominal expressions.