Critical retourn to the notion of ethos

Abstract: This article aims at criticizing the way the notion of discursive ethos has been generally used by discourse analysts for about fifteen years. This criticism is at the same time self-criticism, because from the 1980's on I contributed to develop this field of research. Firstly, I try to analyze the content of the notion of ethos, which I divide into three dimensions: “categorial”, “experiential”, “ideological”. Such a division allows us to take into account the full diversity of activity. Secondly, I reflect on the very process through which addressees construct ethos; this reflection draws on data from matchmaking websites, not from the kind of corpora (political discourse, advertising, literature…) that are usually analyzed by the researchers who work on ethos. Thirdly, this article deals with the problems that one encounters when one studies texts in which iconic and verbal dimensions are tightly connected. Two kinds of data are taken into consideration: websites, which imply both digital and verbal ethos, and commercials.