Words between texts and language: preliminary reflections on building a multilingual lexicon of puppetry

Françoise Canon-Roger

Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne

Abstract

Many linguists have emphasised the difficulties in attempting to define what a word is. The notion differs according to the language under study and it even proves irrelevant for a certain number of languages. Although ‘word’ has not quite ceased to be used for convenience with a fuzzy extension, it is replaced by metalinguistic terms coined to fit the units specific to lexicology, semantics or terminology. There remains the central question of the nature and boundaries of these units and of their relation with a linguistic system, on the one hand, and with the texts in which they occur, on the other. Consideration given to the theoretical framework of terminology leads to a critical viewpoint on practices that rest on logical principles incompatible with a context sensitive approach to lexical semantics even in a technical field such as the art of puppetry dealt with here. A language for specific purposes is not a linguistic sub-system since any text, oral or written, originates in a particular social situation manifested by its discourse and genre. Texts are not strings of words. Text semantics provides a textual approach to the lexicon in which the entries in a semantic class are selected contextually thus partaking of both texts and language as a system.

Keywords:

interpretative semantics, lexicology, terminology, text, context, puppetry