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

Abstract

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).