How has blog and the lexical field associated with it been integrated into French ? This article analyses 530 adapted lexical loanwords taken from three subcorpora : glossaries, the popular IT press and metablogs, over a five year period (2003-2007). The aim was to track the actual use made by certain French-speaking “agents” (bloggers and journalists), using the general and unified theory of the transmission process in language contact and the concept of the factor of stability of Frans Van Coetsem (2000). The lexical units were classified according to three criteria : presence of adaptation, number of adaptations made on the loan in relation to the source language form, and the type of adaptation : graphic, morphological, syntactic or lexical. The results are analysed from the point of view of the factor of stability, which appears to account for linguistic reaction and adaptation in relation to the lack of stability of the lexical nucleus, and thus the imitation of the original nucleus. The proximity between French and English obviously helps in adapting language elements other than the nucleus, and even the nucleus too on occasion. The agent proves to be important in choosing a wide variety of strategies in adapting loans.
CLIL theme: 3147 -- SCIENCES HUMAINES ET SOCIALES, LETTRES -- Lettres et Sciences du langage -- Linguistique, Sciences du langage
