In this paper we consider the word apartheid which occurs in different discourses – one French allocution of Manuel Valls and two English slogans on badges – and we intend to study it both in a structural semantic and in an argumentative perspective, according respectively to differential approaches of semantic level in languages and with the argumentative approach of signification defended by Pierre-Yves Raccah. We question thus the relations between the axiology and the signification through an example of the polysemioticity of topoi, as suggested by François Rastier.