Variabilité diatopique des associations évoquées par les mots en Francophonie

Université nationale de recherche de Novossibirsk, Russie

micheledebrenne@gmail.com

Résumé

La communication portera sur l’analyse des résultats d’une étude psycholinguistique de fixation de la première réaction à un stimulus donné à partir d’une liste de 100 mots courants en France métropolitaine, Belgique wallone, Suisse romande et Canada francophone. Pour ces quatre zones seront comparées les réponses les plus fréquentes, le contenu des champs associatifs et l’ensemble des grands connecteurs structurant le réseau lexical figuré dans notre corpus en un « petit monde ». L’ensemble de ces données permettra de mesurer d’une manière objective les différences et les ressemblances profondes des diverses variétés du français au niveau du lexique et des connotations évoquées par les mots.

Abstract

In order to verify the hypothesis of the existence of a link between the “vision of the world” and language, we propose to compare word associations given by native speakers of French in different countries (France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada). A psycholinguistic free association test was used, where about 500 responses from each zone were collected to 100 stimulus each (frequent nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs). A comparative analysis of the collected data shows that the most frequent reaction is mostly the same in the four francophone regions, especially when those reactions are highly popular. A comparison of the coincidences and discrepancies of the reactions to the stimulus mer (sea), homme (man), porter (to bring) is given, showing a big amount of different individual reactions. In the same time the number of different common reactions in not so big, but they are very frequent and represent about 75% of all reactions. A deeper analysis of association fields with four different approaches tends to prove that their structure is similar, but the concrete lexical content of different subcategories can differ from one language to the other. The structure of the lexicon of French speaking subject of the experience is a “small world” with the same set of superconnectors. In conclusion we make the supposition that dictionaries of word associations can display how language reflects a “vision of the world”, and this vision does not depend on the socio-cultural environment but mostly on the lexicon itself.