Étude sémantique des verbes préfixés en français dans le discours médiatique sur la crise sanitaire

Abstract

Despite the tendencies of contemporary French to limit lexical creations by derivation, verbal prefixation remains an active means of linguistic innovation, especially during periods of economic or social crises. To shed light on this phenomenon, but also draw its limits, this article proposes a study of verbal prefixation in media discourse on the pandemic crisis based on a corpus taken from the daily Liberation covering the period from 25 to 31 May 2020. Allow for the semantic opacity of verbal prefixes, this article analyzes the semantic properties of the prefixes identified in the corpus and leads to two complementary results. First, from the point of view of prefix productivity, the discourse on the health crisis differs little from other discourses concerning the types of prefixes used and their capacity to construct verbs. Secondly, as it concerns the lexical innovations observed in the corpus, these are above all already existed prefixed verbs to which a new meaning is attributed. Two cases arise: common prefixed verbs used in new contexts; common prefixed verbs with rare meanings in everyday language. Finally, the only neologism identified concerns the verb “déconfiner” which was very often used during the pandemic crisis.