Désignation et représentation des éléments topographiques dans les dialectes de France : synthèse générale (relief, cours d’eau, cavernes)

Abstract

Abstract As the second part of a general study about semantic determinism, this article continues to analyze the topographic lexicon of Gallo-Romance dialects. The new concepts (‘river’, ‘brook’, ‘valley’, ‘cave’) that I examine in this paper complete my previous survey about the designations of hills and mountains. Most of all, the new set of data allows me to go beyond isolated concepts and to present for the first time the motivational synthesis of a whole theme. The result is that, whatever the concept, words referring to topography are generally created according to four matrices of designation: such words originally allude to (1) level; (2) concavity/convexity; (3) physical composition; or stem from a (4) conceptual confusion due to adjacency. The method that reduces hundreds of lexical forms to a handful of creative patterns leads to a direct perception of how the lexicon is structured and has a strong heuristic potential.