The Vocabulary of Modern French

Origins, Structure and Function

Hilary Wise

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134817078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Persönliche Entwicklung
• Subtopic: Schreib- & Präsentationsfähigkeiten

The Vocabulary of Modern French provides a fresh insight into contemporary French.
With this book, Hilary Wise offers the first comprehensive overview of the modern French vocabulary: its historical sources, formal organisation and social and stylistic functions.
Topics covered include:
* external influences on the language
* word formation
* semantic change
* style and register
In addition, the author looks at the relationship between social and lexical change and examines attempts at intervention in the development of the language.
Each chapter is concluded by notes for further reading, and by suggestions for project work which are designed to increase awareness of specific lexical phenomena and enable the student-reader to use lexicographic databases of all kinds.
The Vocabulary of Modern French is an accessible and fascinating study of the relationship between a nation and its language, as well as providing a key text for all students of modern French.

Chapter 1
Questions and concepts

WHY STUDY WORDS?

Words are the elements of language most closely associated with the way we conceptualise the world we live in. As our world changes, so do the words that reflect it. It is therefore through the study of vocabulary, or lexis,¹ that we can discover which areas of experience are of particular importance or carry a particular emotional charge for a speech community, at any given point in time. Certain fields may be taboo, and veiled in euphemism; some may suddenly burgeon while others dwindle and fade; whole strata of the lexis may be exclusive to particular social groups, or restricted to use in certain types of discourse. It is up to the lexicologist to detect such concentrations, gaps and shifts, and to draw conclusions which will inevitably be closely linked to the social and cultural history of the speakers concerned.

The lexis of a language is also one of the surest reflections of contact with other cultures. Lying geographically at the heart of western Europe, France has necessarily been subject to migration and conquest, and has been involved in the ebb and flow of political, cultural and religious movements of all kinds, all of which have left their mark on the lexis (see Chapters Two to Five). While most linguistic influences stem from interaction with immediate neighbours, trading links with the wider world and colonial adventures have introduced more ‘exotic’ words into the language; this small but culturally significant element of the lexis is looked at briefly in Chapter Four. Whatever their origins, once in the language words are subject to complex processes of change and recycling, through which new words are constantly being formed, in response to the changing needs of the community. As these creative processes are responsible for the vast majority of items in the language, Chapters Six and Seven which investigate them may be considered pivotal to the book.

If we are to grasp fully the specificity of French, then in a sense we should know what makes it different from its neighbours. Linguistic research suggests that grammatical differences between languages are essentially superficial; if significant differences do exist, they are primarily lexical. There has been much (sometimes almost mystical) speculation about the correspondence between linguistic differences and different ‘world views’. A proper exploration of the subject is beyond the scope of this book, but it is a theme which is touched on at various points, most notably in Chapter Seven.

WHAT IS A WORD?

What constitutes ‘a word’ would seem to be self-evident, in that in their written form words are separated by spaces, in most languages. These spaces do not of course correspond to pauses in speech, in which there may be few clues as to where words begin and end (see p.). Nevertheless, irrespective of phonetic clues or orthographic conventions, words are usually identifiable as freely mobile units, able to occur in a wide variety of environments, and carrying a relatively stable meaning. Some elements traditionally thought of as words are, however, limited in their patterns of distribution—like the pronouns je, se or le, which are closely associated with verbs, and which in some ways behave more like appendages or ‘affixes’ than like independent words.

Another grey area is that of ‘compound’ words; grands-parents and bonhomme are semantically and distributionally single units, although they consist of elements which can themselves function independently as words. In other sequences of adjective+noun, like petits pois or petitbourgeois, it is less clear whether we are dealing with a single compound word or a phrase. The much-disputed question of where to draw the line between the two is discussed further in Chapter Six.

Another problem with the term ‘word’ is that it can be used in two quite different senses. In one sense, savoir and su, or aller and va, are different words, in that they differ in form; in another sense they are different forms of the same ‘word’, in that only one entry in the dictionary is required for each verb, whose basic meaning remains constant, whatever the person or tense involved. In referring to ‘word’ in this latter, global sense, linguists often prefer to use the term lexeme or lexical item. Some dictionary entries are phrasal in form, like avoir peur or se rendre compte, but have the semantic coherence of single lexical items. One might go so far as to argue that idioms like casser la croûte, rouler sa bosse are also single lexical items, on similar grounds.

Words may be the most obvious meaningful units of a language, but they are not the most fundamental. Many can be analysed into smaller, though less mobile, meaningful elements. Démontable, for example, consists of three parts: the prefix dé-, the root -mont- and the suffix -able—all of which are to be found in other words in the language, with much the same meanings. Affixes like dé- and -able are often given separate entries in dictionaries, in recognition of their lexical status. The way in which these minimal lexical elements (known as morphemes) are organised into lexical items is investigated in Chapter Six.

GRAMMAR VERSUS LEXIS

We have already seen that the distinction between savoir and su is a grammatical rather than a lexical one, and would be discussed in a grammar book, where verbal paradigms are set out, rather than in a dictionary. Certain words may be considered grammatical rather than lexical elements, typically carrying information such as the tense, aspect or person of a verb, or the number or gender of a noun, or indicating relations between different parts of the sentence. Examples would be auxiliary verbs, pronouns, determiners and prepositions. Their incorporation into a dictionary poses something of a problem for the lexicographer, who is generally obliged to provide a good deal of complex grammatical information. (Compare, for example, the adjacent entries of the essentially grammatical de and the lexical dé-, in the Petit Robert or any other monolingual dictionary.)

Some words may have a double function. In il a une nouvelle voiture, avoir is a lexical item roughly synonymous with posséder, while in il a acheté une voiture it has the grammatical function of expressing past tense. Similarly, faire in il fait une très bonne soupe has a lexical function, but a grammatical (specifically, causative) one in il fait construire une maison. In some languages, grammatical categories like ‘past’ or ‘causative’ may be more clearly grammaticalised, as an affix attached to the verb.

Unlike lexical items, grammatical elements form small, closed subsystems which change only very gradually with time. The lexis of a language, on the other hand, is open-ended, a potentially infinite set of elements in a constant state of flux, subject to more or less conscious manipulation by its speakers. This is perhaps one reason why professional linguists, interested in explaining just how languages work, have tended to focus on the study of grammar. It is a difficult, but conceivable, task to discover how limited subsets of elements combine, according to a finite set of rules and formal constraints. The size and volatility of the lexis, and its apparent lack of structure, make it less amenable to analysis and to the construction of grand, explanatory theories; lexicologists have to be content with investigating bite-sized samples of the lexis, on the basis of which they may hope to make some interesting generalisations about the system as a whole.

WORDS AND MEANING

The term ‘meaning’ has been used rather freely so far, as if its own meaning is self-evident. But it has been the subject of much debate and numerous interpretations, by both philosophers and linguists. To enter fully into the debate would take us far beyond the scope of this book. The next few pages simply focus on those aspects of meaning which will be relevant to topics raised in subsequent chapters.

For present purposes, one important distinction is that between denotation or ‘reference’, and connotation. Many words ‘refer to’ or designate things or events in the real world (that which is actually being referred to is known as the ‘referent’). One could in fact claim that this is one of the prime functions of language. Most speakers will agree on the denotational value, or ‘reference’ of taureau, for example, although they might express it in different ways. The definition of taureau given in the Petit Robert is: ‘mammifère ruminant domestique, mâle de la vache, apte à la reproduction’. However, in addition to referential meaning, words frequently carry secondary associations—in the case of taureau, ones of strength and irascibility. The Petit Robert makes an additional observation to this effect: ‘un animal puissant et irritable’. Such associations or ‘connotations’ may be widely shared by the speech community, in which case they often give rise to metaphors which become part of the lexical fabric of the language (see Chapter Seven).

It is possible to differentiate the two types of meaning by applying a relatively simple test. If a statement includes elements of referential meaning which are contradictory, it will be bizarre to the point of being uninterpretable. It is therefore very difficult to make sense of ‘Ce taureau est femelle’ because part of the referential meaning of taureau is ‘male’. If however a statement contradicts only the connotations of one its constituent items, the result may be surprising, but make perfectly good sense, as with the sentence ‘Ce taureau est très docile’.

Connotations are often associated with the social context in which a word is habitually used. A noun like policier is neutral, in the sense that it can occur in many different kinds of text and discourse. From a denotational point of view, keuf is synonymous with it, but, occurring as it does in informal conversation, especially among the young, it carries rather different connotations, implying an attitude of humour, hostility or lack of respect. (Such non-referential distinctions in the lexis are the focus of Chapters Nine and Ten.) Since the two words are essentially synonymous, from a referential point of view, les keufs could be substituted for les policiers in any sentence, without the risk of producing a nonsensical utterance; at most, the hearer will find it stylistically inappropriate.

IS THE LEXIS STRUCTURED?

We have noted that, compared to the tightly structured grammatical system of a language, the lexis appears to be amorphous and fluid. However, it is far from being a random collection of unrelated items, as dictionaries, with their essentially arbitrary arrangement of words in alphabetical order, might suggest.

The father of European structuralism, Ferdinand de Saussure, asserted that the value of every element in a linguistic system—at the grammatical, phonological or lexical level—is defined by the value of neighbouring elements. A change in one part of the system is therefore bound to have repercussions for adjacent elements. Colour terms, which impose structure on what is actually an unbroken continuum, are often taken to illustrate the interrelatedne...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES, MAPS AND TABLES
• PREFACE
• PHONETIC SYMBOLS AND ABBREVIATIONS
• CHAPTER 1: QUESTIONS AND CONCEPTS
• CHAPTER 2: THE LEXICAL FOUNDATIONS OF FRENCH
• CHAPTER 3: LES RACINES NOBLES: BORROWING FROM LATIN AND GREEK
• CHAPTER 4: THE ROMANCE CONTRIBUTION
• CHAPTER 5: ENGLISH INFLUENCE: GOOD NEIGHBOURS OR FALSE FRIENDS?
• CHAPTER 6: NEW WORDS FOR OLD: THE DERIVATIONAL PROCESSES OF FRENCH
• CHAPTER 7: COGNITIVE PROCESSES AND SEMANTIC CHANGE
• CHAPTER 8: LEXIS IN SOCIETY
• CHAPTER 9: LEXIS IN CONTEXT
• CHAPTER 10: ARGOT: FROM CRIMINAL SLANG TO LA LANGUE DES JEUNES
• CHAPTER 11: CODIFICATION, CONTROL AND LINGUISTIC MYTHOLOGY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY