L’amalgamation lexicale dans un corpus specializé: Analyse morphologique

Abstract

Word formation phenomenon in French is constantly evolving. There are debates, research and conferences that focus on the description and clarification of the mechanisms employed in the creation of new lexical units. As a result of technical advancements, social, economic and political changes, new lexical forms are created to express new concepts and ideas. Hence, language being a social phenomenon remains dynamic. Terminology as a branch of study that specializes, among others, in the development of Language for Special Purposes (LSP) employs different mechanisms in the formation of terms used in a specific technical domain of knowledge. It is therefore common that terminologists as well as lexicologists make use of linguistic, extralinguistic, grammatical and extra-grammatical processes in the formation of neologisms. Lexical blending, classified as extra-grammatical because of the controversies and irregularities surrounding it, is one of such processes used in the formation of words and terms. In this thesis, we focus on the study of blends and their formation in the field of multimedia. Through a detailed structural study of the terms in the domain, we will extract the terms formed through the process of lexical blending. Firstly, a careful observation of the terms (blends) extracted tends to highlight essentially that lexical blending as a process of word formation is not only effective in terminology but also, it is a morphological process developed by natural language exigencies to ensure lexical renewal. Secondly, this study employs a hypothetico-deductive approach to identify the procedure or procedures employed in the formation of these blends. Our analysis of the terms will be generally descriptive and equally based on the theories already formulated on the process of lexical blending. While refraining from justifying the terminological or linguistic status of the terms collected, this study will explore the morphological and morpho-semantic aspects of such formations in our corpus.