Referring to an avenue as an ‘artery’ (artère) in French
From lexical signification to referential and discursive issues
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).
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
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Notes
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References