Référents évolutifs, anaphores et constructions détachées : étude diachronique de recettes de cuisine

Abstract

EnglishThis article examines French cooking recipes published between the 17th and the end of the 20th century, thus approaching, along the centuries, the question of referents which undergo transformations and may lose their material identity, while still allowing a coreferential relation contributing to local coherence in discourse. In this respect, this diachronic comparison has led to a distinction between what has been called classical and modern recipes, on the one hand, and between devices common to both classical and modern recipes, and devices specific to classical recipes, on the other hand. The former devices include the use of pronouns, generally functioning as direct objects, or, conversely, their omission. The latter include the use of less constrained referential chains, and of initially-placed passive compound participles, which often co-occur with an active form of the same verb in the preceding context, and are also frequently non-standard, according to the rule stipulating that the non-finite form should refer to the subject of the main verb. It is argued that, though non-referential, these participial constructions, also endowed with connecting and framing roles, played a major part in masking ontological changes in referents, before disappearing from modern cooking recipes where, as far as their connecting and framing roles are concerned, they were in some way replaced by typesetting features such as numbered paragraphs. francaisDans cet article, nous analysons un corpus constitue de recueils de recettes de cuisine publies entre le xviie siecle et l’epoque contemporaine. Cette comparaison au fil des siecles a tout d’abord amene a degager deux grandes familles de recettes, classiques et modernes. Elle a ensuite permis de dissocier, dans l’elaboration d’une apparente continuite referentielle, des procedes generaux ou constants (tel le recours a des pronoms, frequemment objets directs, ou, a l’inverse, a leur absence) et des procedes particuliers ou specifiques aux recettes de cuisine qualifiees de classiques – tel le recours a des chaines referentielles « molles » ou, encore, a des constructions participiales composees passives, souvent en « coexistence » avec, dans le contexte precedent, une formulation active du meme verbe, d’une part, et en infraction a ladite regle de coreference selon laquelle le support d’une forme non finie doit etre le sujet du predicat premier, d’autre part. A ete particulierement soulignee l’association privilegiee entre les referents evolutifs et les constructions detachees de cette sorte, neanmoins supplantees par des elements typo-dispositionnels en francais moderne.