« Boubou : sorte de poncho musulman » : gloses d’emprunt dans les récits de voyage et déplacements de sens

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.