Abstract
WHEN NOUS IS PART OF A QUOTATION As a pronoun, nous(we/us), when found in a particular text, does not, in general, explicitly stands for a noun. However, when it is in a quotation, it does. So, if only for the sake of the argument, it is possible to imagine a robot put to the task of analyzing such nous. Let us consider first a multitextual corpus of 42 000 words from the political press, dealing with the 1967 and 1968 French general elections. Then let us imagine a robot which has the task of producing 1. an index, 2. a significant concordance and 3. an extensive analysis of all the quoted nous in the corpus. What output can we expect ? The automatic establishing of the index seems feasible, despite the wide variety of punctuation marks of quotation. As regards the concordance, it appears that contexts of two paragraphs would provide us with the minimum of interesting information. As for the extensive analysis, it would seem beyond the competence of a robot. This is because the knowledge of at least 16 textual or situational variables would be necessary for it to reply to the following nest of embedded questions which alone could deal with the communicative value of nous in a quotation : what is the aim of the person quoting the quotation which includes nous when si he quotes the person who - in whose name and to what end - uses nous in the quotation ?