توطئة الدستور التونسي الجديد: مقاربة نصّية - لغوية A Text-linguistic Approach to the Preamble of the 2014 Tunisian Constitution

English Extended Abstract: What is controversial about the preamble to the new Tunisian constitution is that while it acquires its binding legal force - as a justiciable document and a substantive source of rights - from a peritextual provision, i.e. Article 145 which stipulates that "the constitution's preamble is deemed an integral part of the constitution", it conflicts however with a textual content which strips the preamble of any legal force on account of its vulnerable anchorage in ideology and consensual politics. Clearly, such a dubious status would affect the functionality of the preamble and lower its status to that of a ceremonial-symbolic document, neither relevant nor irrelevant. Using a corpus-based text-linguistic approach, the paper explores the legal status and the social functions of the preamble to the constitution drafted by the first post-revolutionary National Constituent Assembly (NCA) and adopted on 27 January 2014. Section one defines the study's epistemic context in the light of Bahatia's genre analysis as "a recognizable communicative event characterized by a set of purpose(s) identified and mutually understood by the members of the professional academic community in which it regularly occurs" (1993:13). In this respect, the preamble under scrutiny has developed its legal identity not only from its operative language, or from its linear three-move structure – enactment, justification and establishing of rules – but also from the fact that the sender is a binding original authority. The relationship between senders, both direct (NCA) and indirect (the Draft Committee), and receivers - direct (the executive authority) and indirect ( citizens, judges, lawyers, the Constitutional Court…) - is governed by the power acquired by the senders to take decisions on behalf of the receivers. Methodologically, this means that we should distinguish between the document's legal and discursive contexts. Given that the approach's emphasis is on the preamble as text-linguistic options and discourse rooted in its macro context of production, our concern with its legal status is restricted to the document's legal functionality as defined in the peritextual above-cited Article 145 of the constitution. This leads to the study's basic assumption that the framers of the Tunisian constitution were insufficiently aware of the preamble's ideological and political intricacies when they voted in favor of Article 145 which grants it substantive binding powers. The remaining sections, therefore, were meant to provide textual evidence that the preamble, an ideological document par excellence, conflicts with its assumed functional legality. Eight lofty goals or in Schmitt's terms , " fundamental political decisions "(77-79), have been detected in the text. It recognizes the Tunisian revolution as a liberation movement deep-seated in the social struggle of all Tunisians across their history, adheres to Arab-Islamic culture as a civilizational identity of the people, abides by universal rights and the principles of the UN charter, adopts a relativist moderate and tolerant approach to Islam, recognizes the national achievements accomplished by Tunisians throughout their modern history, acknowledges the state's secular status where supremacy belongs to law and sovereignty to the people, advocates participatory citizenship and stimulates rational thinking, and lastly promotes equitable and sustainable development. Textual Resources The preamble's consensual context of production has borne heavily on the collective construction of the document, leading to a text that reads more like a political alliance manifesto than a guiding document for understanding the constitution and interpreting its clauses. This is detectable in a writing strategy privileging expressivity over referentiality, fluidity over economy, and structural complexity over simplicity and formality. Lexicon Lexically, most meaningful units deployed in the text refer to the categories "relevant for the definition of the political text and context" as defined by Van Dijk (1997:16-17), i.e. political systems, values, ideologies, institutions, organizations, groups, actors, relations, processes, acts, discourse, and the macro societal domain. This suggests that the preamble's framers have been more representative of their political parties than of the people in whose name they drafted and ordained the constitution. They acted as members of a legislature not of a constituent assembly elected by the people for the sole task of writing a new constitution. Hence the preamble's disputable character. Syntax The major grammatical operations which contributed to the construction of the text's identity are modality, nominalization, modification, coordination, passivization and the plural category. All these have been mobilized in the service of a major strategy engaged in the preamble, i.e. expressivity. Modality, a processing strategy detected in the use of the cognate object (المفعول المطلق) and in absolutist discourse, announces an overt authorial visibility and triggers a deviation from conventional legal discourse which promotes linearity, referentiality, neutrality and economy. It indicates that the document is only minimally persuasive because it is drafted to convey an agenda not to set an encouraging tone for the people to freely comply with the law. Moreover, grounding constitutional discourse on expressivity is likely to undermine readability, a discursive value already flouted by the text's enormous structural complexity. Another prominent syntactic feature is the predominance of nominal categories and structures. A very long complex sentence (284 words), the preamble comprises six verbs and 230 nouns excessively connected by 60 coordinators and 58 prepositions, a structural option, if it made the text sound static, pretentious and opaque, it proved more comfortable for the preamble's framers to construct the text on nominal forms than on verbs. First, nominalized writing allows for content-carrying words which are typical of ideological discourse. Second, it enables abstraction and generic, impersonal and timeless reference such as concepts, relations, ideas and substantial values. Third, given the preamble's consensual context of production, it facilitates the addition of negotiable content. Fourth, compared with verb structures, nominalization allows categorization, labelling and modification. Fifth, it contributes to the text's general coherence. To take just one example of the implications of grounding discourse on nouns, it is interesting to note that the text exhibits a polarity of two ideological semantic fields reflecting two visions for the state and society, one conservative and self-sufficient and the other liberal and humanistic: "Islamic prescriptions, maqa:sid (higher intents of Islamic law), civilizational heritage, our history, our identity, Islamic-Arab, dignified creature, our cultural identity, Arab nation, Islamic, fraternity, mutual assistance, Arab unity, Islamic principles, with God's blessing " " human values, human rights, peoples, universal, human civilizational achievements, national gains, democratic, participatory, civil state, human rights, citizenship, peoples of the world, liberation movements, the will of the people, in the name of the people " This semantic polarization reflects a macro context governed by ideological alertness and a partisan logic best featured in politically-loaded modifiers, where adjectives are selected not to capture faithfully the modified, but to prevent possible interpretations of the political others. A relevant example is the carefully-worded phrase "Expressing our people’s commitment to (…) sublime universal human rights principles…" where the qualifiers "universal", on the one hand, is used (by some) to extend the source of referential values beyond the Islamic creed, and "sublime", on the other, is used (by others) preventively to restrict universality only to the values deemed "sublime". Thus, such 'conditional' commitment to UN principles would not, for instance, place a positive obligation on the rights of LGBT people, nor would it allow prospective legitimation of their propaganda. Lastly, predominance of nominal forms allows us to approach the document as a substantial preamble in the light of Schmitt's constitutional theory (Op. Cit.) in which he distinguishes "the constitution" from "the laws of the constitution" and claims that the preamble constitutes, to a large extent, the society's constitution, as it reflects "substantial political decisions" which are "the real goals of society", whereas the laws are normative provisions meant to regulate behavior. Rhetoric Unlike the linguistic, detectable in lexical and morpho-syntactic devices, the rhetorical is a set of optional moves and strategies, often manipulative, engaged to influence or at least attract readers' attention to what is conveyed. Different persuasive techniques, such as delaying purposes and arguments, appealing to religious, moral and historical values, modalizing by reversing word order, indirectness and implicitness, amplification, maximization and intensification, etc. are deployed to ensure the receiver's identification in the sender's agenda. Being governed by the framer's conviction that the Tunisian people have demonstrated their eligibility for a better life, a better political system and a better constitution, the preamble's major rhetorical strategy is argumentative. It follows the overall goals of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation, as shown in Van Dijk's ideological square . Four rhetorical options are detected in the text: - A global three-move structure: enactment, justification and the establishing of rules. - An expressive fluid strategy marked by the use of binomials, multinomials, and repetition. - Dominance of the explicit-implicit dichotomy. - An argumentative strategy centered around several persuasive and mobilizing techniques, such as identification in a collective identity, appeal to the sacred, moral, historical and logical, emotion-based argumentation by celebrating the nation's struggle for a better life, honoring those who have suffered and died for a better Tunisia, and condemning the wrongs and injustices of the past.