Les modalités de représentation du discours dans Diderot et d'Alembert en comparaison avec deux encyclopédies du 21ème siècle : Universalis et Wikipédia

This paper aims at exploring some of the possible ways in which <i>represented discourse</i> (defined as the representation of a content whose source can either be the speaker itself or a third party) manifests itself in Diderot and D'Alembert's <i>Encyclopédie</i> in comparison with two different encyclopedic works from the 21st century. To do so, we take into account two possible variation factors regarding the representation of a discourse within encyclopedic enunciation: the choice of a subject pronoun in association with a particular 'verbum dicendi' (verb describing speech), and the possible modalization of this type of verb by means of a modal verb. In order to investigate these parameters we use a quantitative perspective based on statistic measures. Our aim is to give an image of the way in which the author(s) of different encyclopedias stage different contents from different and variously modalized sources.