Traitement discursif et conversationnel des représentations sociales

This paper examines the participants’ interpretative process of social representations of bilingualism, by means of discourse and conversational analysis. At the example of their own experiences, the participants either challenge routinized representations or confirm them, leading to an elaborate, common interpretation. Representations are to be understood as an interpretative set of assumptions conveyed by discourse, creating recurrent and habitual systems of dispositions and expectations. The paper shows how the participants’ discourse is framed by an argumentative macrostructure, which displays narrative, explicative and justificative types of discourse. In addition, it is claimed that the use of such types of discourse is generated by and used for interactive purposes.