Discourse Analysis of an Academic Inaugural Address as an Elite Text

This study investigates the elite text of a welcoming inaugural address (“discours de reception”) delivered by philologist and Hellenist scholar Jacqueline de Romilly upon her election to the French Academy. The analysis reveals how this genre of elogium reaffirms before the academic elite the value of literary texts and scholarly knowledge in general. The reflexive discourse constructed by J. de Romilly regarding both André Roussin's creative biography and her own personal legitimation for future academic activities is examined from semantic and pragmatic perspectives. De Romilly's linguistic reflection involves commenting on, clarifying, or evaluating her own words or third-party statements while taking into account the audience factor. It has been established that de Romilly’s metalinguistic utterances correspond with key concepts crucial to her identity (French language, French literature, Greek language, literary studies, literary culture, literary text), which evoke cognitive tension due to the dissonance between her internalized Hellenistic cultural values and external circumstances surrounding the crisis in classical education. The identified individual semanticization of reflective expressions reflects the pragmatic component of the author's intention, expressed through promoting ideological codes associated with the French Academy (literary culture, quality of the French language).

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