Mediation beyond immediate co-text and recent anglicisms in the french press

Résumé En

Immediate co-text is one overt "strategy" which provides a reader with information to help make sense of new, unknown, foreign or specialized lexis and concepts or of an author's particular meaning in a text. The study of immediate co-text certainly sheds light on language in use but perhaps not complete enough, in that a text needs to be considered as Halliday and Hasan (1976: 1 and 293) suggest: "a unified whole". The present study aims to reconsider overt "mediation strategies" whose aim is to enable a reader to make sense of little-known, unknown, or recent (as perceived by a writer) innovations expressed by anglicisms in a corpus of thirteen news articles, mostly from the French quality newspaper, Le Monde. More precisely, the aim is to identify other strategies, their actual use, frequency and position in a text. Based on a workable taxonomy based on scholars' work on cohesion and text organization (Halliday and Hasan 1976, Hoey 1991, and Combettes and Tomassone 1988), results from this limited corpus show there is quite a variety of different overt strategies: journalistic, meta-discoursal, lexical and grammatical. Their position is not necessarily immediately after the anglicism but sometimes detached, throughout a text, or in succession. Besides variety, multiple strategies and features may be deployed in one text.