The "Limit" between french and english and making sense of anglicisms in the french press

Résumé En

Innovations, new ideas, concepts, and objects, are appearing more and more, in terms of quantity and frequency, in today's world; they need to be named and understood. The name of many innovations in some of the world's languages today, including French, are loanwords from English, or anglicisms, which may pose a problem as neologisms with unmotivated, unknown form and meaning. Words in general do not occur in isolation , but in text/discourse, which would imply that there are various - textual, discoursal or linguistic - features or strategies to clarify meaning and enable interlocutors to make sense. Considering the number and frequency of anglicisms the "limit" or "border" between the two languages in contact is called into question. The original form of the loanword is often maintained with sometimes the co-existence of a form adapted to the recipient language: e.g. flipped classroom or serious game versus classe inversée or jeu sérieux but either or both may be equally opaque. Many scholars have studied various sense-making strategies, often immediate co-text , albeit called by different names, e.g.: "Le jeu vidéo d'horreur ou " survival horror ", un cauchemar bien parti pour durer" or "Apparu dans les années 1990, le desk sharing, c'est-à-dire le bureau non attribuée, débarrassée chaque soir et dépersonnalisée […]". This body of research sheds interesting light on sense-making but provides a rather limited view of language use, especially since a text is, according to Halliday and Hasan (1976: 1-2): "a passage, spoken or written, of any length, that does form a unified whole" or "[…] best regarded as a semantic unit: a unit not of form but of meaning." Based on this view and Halliday's (1994: 15) view of language as "a network of systems, or interrelated sets of options for making meaning", I propose to take a broader view/approach , and look at complete texts to identify, describe and explain a number of textual, discoursal or linguistic features or strategies which implicitly or explicitly provide equivalent and transparent text/information to make clear(er) sense of recently introduced anglicisms/neologisms. The research questions are as follows: What strategies or features are available to an author to help a reader make sense of relatively recently introduced anglicisms/neologisms? Does the use of sense-making strategies indicate the (or any) (degree of) general acceptance (or implantation) of these anglicisms/neologisms in French? The article is divided into five parts. The first briefly describes basic concepts loanwords, news media and text production reception (audience). The second deals with the literature concerning the concepts of audience and its knowledge, text genre and purpose, and relationships between parts of the text. In the third part the corpus and methodology used are presented. In part four, results are presented and discussed. I finish with future perspectives of the study.