Revue Hybrides (Sep 2023)
ANALYSE CONTRASTIVE DE L’INDÉFINITION EN GRAMMAIRE ET DANS LES USAGES JOURNALISTIQUES : ENTRE INDÉFINI ET INDÉFINISSANT
Abstract
Indefinites in French do not always express indefiniteness as mentioned in some grammars. They can, in certain contexts, refer explicitly to clearly identified referents or speech acts. The objective of this article is to determine the conditions in which the indefinition occurs. Those conditions depend on the context of enunciation and the communication intentions of the speaking subject. By referring to a corpus composed of 702 statements extracted from six Cameroonian newspapers and which content gives rise, from determiners and indefinite pronouns, to the indefiniteness or not of the referent, we deal with the semantic and referential complexity of this grammatical category. The derivational grammar of Muller (2002) serves us, for this purpose, as a theory of analysis. We therefore postulate that the use of indefinites arises from the mental operations of the speaker; their semantic trajectories, because of right, left, median or zero, are an invitation to also suggest the name indefining in grammar to refer to the category of “indefinites”.
