Abstract
COMMUNIST SPEECH AND THE « GRAND TOURNANT » : A STUDY OF SPECIFICITIES IN THE COMMUNIST VOCABULARY The change of direction of the French Communist Party (PCF) between 1934 and 1935 has been often studied. Because it was considered unacceptable to recognise a relative autonomy and an internal rate of development of political speech the analysis of the PCF speech, was scarcely touched upon during this period. Using the program written by P. Lafon to analyse lexical specificities, it is possible to determine the variability of the frequency of the forms within a corpus ; this program therefore is particularly suited to such a study. The application of this method to a corpus of leading articles in L'Humanité before and after dates of strong political expression between February 1934 and August 1936, demonstrates the use of two successive registers of vocabularly before and after May-June 1935 : a vocabulary of the « working class » and social struggle, and then a vocabulary of « the people ».