Entre bérureries et san-antoniaiseries Prolégomènes à l’étude des néologismes chez San-Antonio

Those who are fond of thrillers and hanky-panky will know that the novels by San-Antonio are a veritable gold mine. Frédéric Dard has been exercising his talent in this genre for the last fifty years using a freewheeling, sometime wild language, which is always ironic, where the syntax is mauled and lexical creations are rife. His work, once relegated to popular literature but now studied in academic circles, constitutes a valuable corpus for all those interested in literary neologisms. One of the aims of the present paper is to demonstrate why a detailed systematic study of Dard’s neologisms would seem to be not only necessary for a better understanding of his works, but also offers perspectives which go well beyond the mere linguistic dimension, because of the variety and the density of the corpus. This type of study has the advantage of bringing out clearly the specificities of standard and slang lexicon and their various means of enrichment in the course of the second half of the twentieth century. This paper also aims at accounting for the difficulties inherent in this sort of endeavour by showing examples of the limitations of certain studies already carried out on the subject. Its other main aim though is to open up research perspectives by presenting preliminary work and sketching out the method which this sort of study presupposes.