Abstract: Borrowing is studied here from a discursive viewpoint, before it is incorporated
into the language or in its initial stages of incorporation. from a corpus
of french travel writing – the genre itself being an important vehicle conveying
foreign words – an analysis is made of the way in which the writers provide access
to the many foreign words which they call upon in their writing to refer to exotic
realities. focus is put on the glosses in which the writers reformulate the meaning
of the borrowings with the ensuing semantic shifts and the representations thereby
constructed.themain semantic processes used for this are approximation, singling
out one possible meaning of the word cited and axiologisation. these semantic
processes which take place when a word is taken from one cultural context and
placed in another may be highlighted in this way, giving a new perspective to
the phenomenon of neology by borrowing, in stressing the way that the meaning
of the borrowings are constructed just before they completely integrate into the
receptor language.
