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Reference: From conventions to pragmatics
Edited by Laure Gardelle, Laurence Vincent-Durroux and Hélène Vinckel-Roisin
[Studies in Language Companion Series 228] 2023
► pp. 249–266

Referring to an avenue as an ‘artery’ (artère) in French

From lexical signification to referential and discursive issues

| Université de Bretagne Occidentale, LaTIM

This study draws on lexical semantics to support a discourse analysis perspective (Gosselin 2018; Galatanu 2018). It examines the use of the French noun artère ‘artery’ (a common word from the lexicon (Maingueneau 2021)) to refer to a street-like entity (street, avenue, boulevard, etc.). The empirical investigation was based on an analysis of 150 utterances (extracted from three full-text databases). On the one hand, the study shows that selecting artère to refer to a street-like entity is a discursive strategy targeting a significant representation of the referent, especially when this referent is not a prototypical urban street. On the other hand, it supports the idea that this discursive choice strongly relies on the lexical signification of artère (Bertin 2018).

Keywords: artère (‘artery’), lexical signification, reference, discourse analysis, argumentation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The French noun artère (‘artery’)
    • 1.2Theoretical issues
  • 2.Methodological framework
    • 2.1Defining a corpus
    • 2.2A linguistic perspective on the corpus
  • 3.Empirical investigation
    • 3.1Reactivated metaphors
    • 3.2Explanatory apposition
    • 3.3Anaphoric reference
    • 3.4First reference
    • 3.5Subject complements
    • 3.6Towards new referents
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 February 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.228.13ber
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