Enjeux argumentatifs des structures énumératives longues : analyse d’un corpus de tribunes consacrées à la biodiversité

The multi-factorial nature of the environmental crisis favors the use of enumeration in argumentative discourses. In order to study the rhetorical functions of long enumerations, we collected 131 view articles published in the daily newspaper Le Monde (2006-2018) and related to biodiversity. Our study showed that long enumerations were mainly used in three different perspectives: alerting to the gravity of the environmental crisis, promoting actions to stop environmental destruction, underlying the detrimental effects of the rhetorical functions of amplification. In our corpus, the use of the rhetoric of amplification is associated with an axiological vocabulary. Such axiological terms give an emotional lecture of the co-enumerated items and do not explicit the common properties of the multiple entities that characterize the environmental crisis.