Les sujets de l'agrégation externe (session 2020) sont disponibles sur le site de la SAES à cette adresse : http://saesfrance.org/concours/agregations/agregation-externe/agregation-externe/sujets-agregation-externe-2020/
1. Dissertation
Voir le sujet complet sur le site de la SAES.
Analysez et discutez la citation suivante :
“It becomes clearer every day that Barack Obama, a historic president, presided over a somewhat less than historic presidency. With only one major legislative achievement (Obamacare) – and a fragile one at that – the legacy of Obama’s presidency mainly rests on its tremendous symbolic importance and the fate of a patchwork of executive actions.”
Elaine Kamarck, “The Fragile Legacy of Barack Obama”, Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum, March 27, 2018.
2. Commentaire de texte
Voir le sujet complet sur le site de la SAES.
John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi [1613-14], Act II Scene 3, lines 1-52, London, W. W. Norton Critical Edition, 2015, p. 39-41
3. Composition en linguistique
Voir le sujet complet sur le site de la SAES.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah. London: Harper Collins, [2013] 2017, p. 48-51.
Phonologie
1. Give a phonemic transcription of the following passage:
The girls began to organize themselves. Soon, some of them were writing on the envelopes, and others were cutting and curling pieces of tissue […]. (ll. 56-58). Use weak forms where appropriate.
2. Transcribe the following words phonemically: steely (l. 12), laughed (l. 41), saviour (l. 43), commit (l. 52).
3. Answer the following questions on word stress patterns. Please note that these must be given in numeric form (using /1/ for primary stress, /2/ for secondary stress, /0/ for unstressed syllables and /3/ for tertiary stress, if relevant. Tertiary stress is optional).
a) Give the stress patterns for the following words: refrigerator (l. 5), unclasped (l. 19), spiritual (l. 36).
b) Explain placement of both primary and secondary stress (where relevant) in all of the above words.
c) Give the word stress pattern for each of the following compounds / word units. Do not justify your answer: deep-sown (l. 45), fund-raising envelopes (l. 55).
4. a) How are the two occurrences of was (underlined) pronounced in the following context? Justify.
(ll. 39-40) It was difficult to tell how old she was, […].
b) For each of the following words, indicate the pronunciation of the letter (underlined) and justify your answer: got (l. 3), landlord (l. 6), gold (l. 18), closed (l. 40).
c) For each of the following words, indicate the pronunciation of (underlined) and justify your answer: months (l. 8), females (l. 43), always (l. 45).
5. a) What connected speech processes might occur in the following phrases (one per phrase)? Demonstrate briefly: he had checked the water in her car (l. 24), go and iron […] (l. 29).
b) What phonetic processes may occur within the following words (one per word)? Demonstrate briefly how each process works: cramped (l. 13), happened (l. 63).
c) In the following words, indicate 4 differences you would expect to find between General American and Southern British English pronunciations (one per word). Refer to both British and American pronunciations: brassy (l. 9), iron (l. 27), started (l. 35), donated (l. 61).
6. a) Indicate the tone boundaries, tonic (nucleus) and tone for each tone unit in the following dialogue (ll. 62-67). Do not justify your answer.
“Join that group, Ifemelu,” […].
“Why should I make decorations for a thief?” […]
“What did you say?”
b) In the following extract, where would the nuclei (tonics) be placed? Why? (The expected tone boundaries have been inserted.)
| other times they were silent | a shared and satisfying silence | (l. 4)
Linguistique
1. Le candidat analysera les segments du texte indiqués ci-après par un soulignage :
a) (l. 15) “A braggart of a man,” her father said after the landlord left, […].
b) (l. 28) “It doesn’t need ironing.”
c) (l. 34) The pastor, it was said, did whatever she asked him.
2. À partir d’exemples choisis dans l’ensemble du texte, le candidat traitera la question suivante :
Les infinitives en TO
4. Traduction
Voir le sujet complet sur le site de la SAES.
Thème
Siméon, sous la pluie, parcourut un village aveugle.
Il marchait à pas très lents, tenant son bâton à main nue, le dos courbé sous le havresac et la tête basse. Il portait un manteau de gabardine noir, dont il avait relevé le col. Mais la forte pluie lui glissait entre le col et la nuque, le faisant par instants frissonner.
Il était jeune encore, mais si laid, et d’une laideur si pathétique, qu’on ne lui donnait plus d’âge. Il avait le teint basané, mais sale sous la barbe vieille. Il avait plus d’une paume de distance entre ses gros yeux et un nez proéminent qui lui donnait l’air triste d’un vieux bélier. Les sourcils lui mangeaient le front et le visage.
Une récente bourrasque avait, chez les Dogde, emporté un volet : sur la façade une fenêtre brillait, éclairée par la lampe à huile et, derrière la fenêtre, Walter et sa femme Clara, tapis dans un recoin, guettaient le passage de l’étranger. Siméon, en effet, s’attarda devant chez eux, les fixant sans les voir de son regard implorant, leur souriant de son pitoyable sourire.
C’était l’épreuve de force : Siméon serait resté là toute la nuit et son sourire, peut-être, aurait vaincu. Mais Walter Dogde avait eu le temps de fourbir son arme. Sortant sans bruit par la porte de derrière, il monta par l’échelle au grenier. Et de là, soudain, presque du haut du toit, il lança en direction de l’homme un étrange obus blanc qui s’écrasa à ses pieds avec un bruit de noix vides. Siméon se baissa pour mieux le voir : c’était un crâne de mouton, blanchi par les années. Sous le choc, le maxillaire inférieur s’était détaché et quelques dents avaient roulé dans la boue.
Siméon, sans réfléchir, voulut envoyer rouler au loin, d’un coup de pied, l’affreuse tête qui semblait le narguer de ses orbites vides. Mais il n’était chaussé que de sandalettes à lanières, détrempées par la pluie et la boue des chemins. Le coup lui fit mal. Il gémit. Le lendemain, en se chaussant, il devait constater qu’il s’était fêlé sur toute la longueur l’ongle du gros orteil et que le sang avait formé, sous la lunule, un caillot rouge sombre.
Dans le noir, il entendit un rire sarcastique et une phrase qu’il ne comprit pas bien mais qui pouvait être quelque chose comme : « … mouton, mouton et demi… ».
Siméon ébaucha un haussement d’épaules, mais il ne mena pas son geste jusqu’à son achèvement : au contraire, lorsque ses épaules eurent atteint leur position haute, il plia le dos et courba la tête – et ainsi, un peu plus voûté, un peu plus tassé sur lui-même, il s’enfonça plus avant dans le village.
Eût-il levé les yeux autour de son ombre, il n’aurait pas manqué d’être frappé par la sauvage laideur des lieux.
Maurice PONS, Les Saisons, Paris, Christian Bourgois éditeur, 1975, p. 13-14.
Version
As he grew long-legged and lanky, he became more difficult to catch. Tara, who had always felt at a disadvantage when competing for Raja’s attention since she was the smaller and weaker one, born to trail behind the others, while Bim and Raja were not only closer in age but a match for each other in many other ways, began to realize that she and Bim were actually comrades-in-arms for they pursued Raja together now and Raja eluded them both.
In games of hide-and-seek in the garden, on summer evenings when the long, flattenedout afternoon could at last be ripped away so that their refreshed evening selves could spring up and come into being, it was always Raja who was the leader, who did the counting-out, who ran and hid, and it was always the two girls who were left to run about in frenzied pursuit, tearing their dresses and bruising their knees, quite unmindful of stains and scratches and beads of blood while their eyes gleamed and their faces flushed with lust to find and capture him and call him captive.
There was one glorious moment when they cornered him, up against the impenetrable carvanda hedge, and leapt upon him, from east and west, all nails and teeth and banshee screams. But, ducking beneath their arms, he turned and dashed his head madly into that thick, solid hedge behind him and broke his way through it with one desperate, inspired thrust of his body. And they, too, were sucked into the tunnel he had so surprisingly made in that wall of thorns and twigs and leaves, fell into it and blew through it, then streamed after him, made limitless by surprise, into the forbidden area of the back garden. This was the still, uninhabited no-man’s land into which the gardener hurled branches of thorn and broken flower pots. Here he built his steaming, fetid compost heaps. Here was the well in which the cow had drowned, the deep stone well that held green scum and black deeds.
Here the girls stopped, halted in their mad stampede by the sad realization that Raja had escaped them again, fled past these barriers and probably found shelter in the servants’ quarters where Hamid would help to hide him from them. Out of breath, heated, glaring, they looked down at the thorns they stood in that had scratched long strings of blood-beads out of their brown legs, and at the convolvulus and the castor oil plants that grew thickly about the well.
For a while they panted noisily, unnecessarily noisily, trying to recapture the glory of that moment when they had caught Raja, nearly caught him, up against the hedge. Then they bent to wipe the blood from their legs and straightened to slap at the mosquitoes that rose humming from out of the moist compost heap and hovered about their heads in dark nets.
Anita DESAI, Clear Light of Day [1980], London, Vintage, 2001, p. 116-117.
