Resumen de The argument from authority in Doppagne’s Franco-Belgian language column: polyphonic interplays and construction of epistemic authority
Albert Doppagne (1912–2003) was one of the main representatives of a language correction movement of the 1960s and 1970s which aimed at cleansing the practices of French-speaking Belgians of everything which seemed to deviate from the supposed good usage of French. The aim of this article is to examine Doppagne’s use of the argument from authority in his “Chronique du langage”. The focus is on argumentative schemes in which the language columnist accepts or rejects a point of view on linguistic issues, not on the grounds of an examination of the conformity of the point of view with the linguistic facts themselves, but only according to the sources from which the columnist received the point of view. The analysis is based on the Scandinavian approach to linguistic polyphony ( ScaPoLine). This theoretical framework draws on the distinction between polyphonic authority and reasoning from authority and allows studying both the sources that Doppagne invokes as authority and the way in which he verbalises the argument from authority. The analysis makes it possible to verify the extent to which the argument from authority constitutes a discursive process with which Doppagne constructs his own image as an eminent authority in language issues.
