War, Syria, Expressivity, Public comments

La guerre civile Syrienne, parfois appelée « une révolution syrienne », est un conflit armé toujours en cours qui a éclaté au printemps 2011 en Syrie. Au début, il s’agissait des manifestations pacifiques dont l’objectif était de soutenir la démocratie dans le pays et en même temps de manifester le mécontentement du peuple contre le régime autoritaire du président Bachar el Assad. Néanmoins, les représailles violentes contre les manifestants se sont vite transformées en conflits armés qui ont commencé à ravager tout le pays. Une opposition, formée en exil, sʼest donné pour objectif de supprimer le gouvernement de Bachar al Assad et d’installer la démocratie en Syrie.

The war is defined as a conflictual situation between two or more countries, states, social groups, individuals, with or without an armed struggle. Currently, the Western medias, including the online press, are very interested in the Syrian war. The Syrian civil war broke out in the context of the Arab Spring with mostly peaceful demonstrations in favor of democracy against the Baathist regime led by president Bashar al-Assad. It quickly turned into an armed rebellion that demanded the engagement of some western countries, which provoked many discussions. In this paper we will try to understand how the phenomenon of war can intervene in the choice of identity of internet users. It should be pointed out that the choice of the pseudonym is one of the first acts that should be realised by internet user, before expressing himself by the language, he has to name himself. The aim of this article is to analyze the relationship between the expressivity of the comments and the digital identity. We also want to examine, whether the possibility of hiding the identity is a trigger factor for the use of slang words. To answer these questions we propose a comparative study of two corpuses of public commentaries appearing in online press sites that describe the war in Syria. The first corpus will consist of Czech sites (Idnes.cz, Blesk.cz), the second will be made from French sites (20.minutes.fr, Closer.fr), according to an identical protocol.