Le nom propre modifié dans les “Mémoires d’Outre-tombe” de Chateaubriand: de l’exemplarité à l’emphase

Abstract

The consistency of a character in a (literary) text stems not only from the various descriptive, dialogical and narrative sequences that place him on the diegetic scene, but also from the way in which his/her designations are relayed and his/her name is modulated: in particular, following the construction [Det. + Name], the name, together with its bearer, undergoes a whole range of transformations that reveal the nature of the lenses through which its image is seen: anonymity or notoriety, exemplarity or emphasis, metaphor, metamorphosis or antonomasia bring about many possible changes in the ‘system of places’ of the fictional characters. Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’Outre-tombe is particularly striking for the wealth of exemplary and emphatic constructions. An exhaustive survey of the French categorized corpus (Frantext) will be the starting point for a linguistic and pragmatic analysis of the effects of meaning produced, locally and globally, by the constructions of the Name phrase.