Autorité du latin et transparence constructionnelle : le sort des néologismes médiévaux dans le domaine médical

This article gives an overview of the research project Latin authority and constructional transparency at work: neologisms in the French medical vocabulary of the Middle Ages and their fate, financed by the Research Fund of the KU Leuven (OT/14/047). This project aims at investigating why certain French neologisms that emerged in the field of medicine during the Middle Ages managed to survive, while others disappeared after some time. Our hypothesis is that morphological criteria, in particular constructional transparency, contribute in a crucial manner to lexical preservation. In other words, terms showing a close formal relation with the Latin equivalent from which they were borrowed, could stand the test of time better than original French creations, i.e. derivations or compounds on the basis of genuinely French morphemes. After selecting the medical neologisms in a corpus of medieval medical texts, containing both translations from Latin and texts directly written in French, we will analyze the external and internal factors decisive for the survival of these neologisms. With respect to internal factors, a first set of criteria concerns more general linguistic characteristics; a second one, the morphological characteristics of each neologism. Those internal criteria form the guiding principles in order to fill in an online morphological database of medical vocabulary, which will be put at the disposal of the scientific community. After this morphological analysis, we would like to extract existing correlations between morphological structures by applying the framework of Construction Morphology (Booij 2010) to our data before concluding our article with a series of prospects.

Publication year:2017