Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures In the words of the European Landscape Convention: values and social changes

Contact person: mariagrazia.margarito@unito.it

 

It may seem unusual for someone who normally deals with linguistic phenomena to intervene in a field beyond the usual boundaries of analysis and scientific production. However, linguists have a habit of believing that, in order to speak, we need words, and that languages cross bridges and oceans... And, if we wish to resort to the power of poetry, we can quote Baudelaire

“Ta tête, ton geste, ton air Sont beaux comme un beau paysage …”

Here, our corpus for analysis is the official text of an international institution on its tenth anniversary: the European Landscape Convention.Our research is carried out in and on the French language, but the phenomena that we intend to bring to our readers’ attention are linguistic ones, which can be easily detected in the two languages of the Convention, French and English.Our areas of research are lexicology and discourse analysis (with reference to the French school for the latter).As is usual in the official discourse of great international institutions, we can see how the reduced “performativity” of a politically correct style of language has helped to soften any strong contrasts. These are documents which mediate to a remarkable extent between the parties involved; they contain proposals and are occasionally gnomic, with parts that are overtly procedural (saying what is to be done and how).The lexical data are the first to strike us. In the Convention we are celebrating, a whole lexical “cartography” comes into play, showing a well-modulated network of data that reflect contemporary social concerns and changes in sensitivity: the landscape is considered a “basic component of the European natural and cultural heritage” (worthy of note is the patrimoine commun culturel et naturel of the French version [where the adjective culturel is placed before naturel]), the landscape is a “foundation of (people’s) identity”, both as individuals and collectively – we wish to specify –, no landscape is excluded from the Convention: a grammatical structure expressing a comparison of equality joins “landscapes that might be considered outstanding as well as everyday or degraded landscapes”. Landscape historians will devote a quick thought to the evolution of the concept of landscape over the centuries.Through these few examples taken from the lexical surface of the Convention’s text we can observe forms of discourse in which positive evaluation is privileged, and so we will find a predominance of euphoric data: “protection, management and planning” for all European landscapes, “strong forward-looking action”, “essential component of people’s surroundings”, “particular values assigned […] by the interested parties and the population concerned”.The phrastic device providing balance between euphoria (positive linguistic data) and dysphoria (negative linguistic data) is almost completely absent. The diverse political and economic situations of the countries that have drawn up the text have required a strong element of mediation and this provides us with a text which is particularly rich with positive action proposals: terms such as knowledge, identification, safeguard and requalification are used.

In reading the document, another observation that we have made is that the Convention mentions new value theories which are part of our daily and social lives. These are new positive values, which are broadly shared up to the point that they do not create interpretative friction in a text meant to be harmonious, the result of dialogue and of intellectual open-mindedness: the linguistic collocation of “cultural diversity”, “everyday landscape”, even “natural and cultural heritage”, the landscape as the foundation of the identity of the peoples who inhabit it. If we check monolingual dictionaries, diachronically (say over the last fifty to sixty years) it is difficult to find examples of such sequences. And it is a well-known fact that dictionaries are the construction and testimony of a society and its ideologies.Does the text of the European Landscape Convention reveal something of society? Undoubtedly so, as well as up-dating the rich sociological and linguistic notion of “social representation”.

Research group Mariagrazia Margarito

Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures University of Turin