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The present study tests Beauvois and Ghiglione’s (1981) model of attitudes towards language to analyse a real situation of political communication, using a lexicometric analysis applied to the speeches made by the ten candidates for the French Presidency on ecology and sustainable development. After assessing the model’s validity, an experiment is carried out on the message impact on recipients (n = 112), which shows that recipients of a paradigmatic message are more inclined to process the message’s content, while recipients of a syntagmatic message are more likely to consider its source.