"Populisme" dans les commentaires sur YouTube : entre dimension conflictuelle et enjeux argumentatifs

In this paper, I analyse the metadiscursive debates on the word populism in YouTube comments posted between 2015 and 2020, following the posting of videos where scholars debate around the phenomenon of populism. My aim is to show that although populism is considered by French specialists as an insult, functioning as a polemical label used essentially to denigrate others, in ordinary exchanges it is the object of metadiscursive remarks that can nuance this polemical charge, even to the point of erasing it. To this end, I will focus on three ordinary metadiscursive practices that characterize the corpus: acts of naming, lexicographisms, among which we find different types of resignification, and, finally, spontaneous defining statements.