Les procédés métalinguistiques et la saisie du référent exotique. Le cas d’incompatibilité sémantico-référentielle

Abstract

Which metalinguistic processes are used in a travel narrati­ve, when the universe of reference (which serves as the referen­tial framework experienced by the author-traveler) is fundamen­tally heterogeneous to the language of the author and to his readers? What does he do to name the referen­ts which have not received a name in that language? This is an importan­t question especially at the beginning of the nineteen­th cen­tury when Orien­talists began to take an interest in the East. The Western author feels a priori that his poten­tial reader is capable of grasping the represen­tations he transcribed of real referen­ts of exotic character. However, the estimate made is false, resulting in a break in understanding on the reader’s side. This occurs especially when the textual referen­t moves away from the “real” referen­t. The cogniti­ve and seman­tic-referen­tial difference or approximation are analyzed in the case of unexplained foreign words, using the strategies implemen­ted by the author that we will discuss. For us, it is a question of studying, from a seman­tico-discursive perspecti­ve, the differen­t processes that allow the writer to describe the exotic referen­t, starting from a limited corpus of texts of French travelers in Persia in the nineteen­th cen­tury.