Aspects innovants des métonymies dans le discours quotidien de Brazzavillois

Abstract

Innovative Aspects of Metonymies in Brazzavillois' Everyday Discourse

This article examines the innovative aspects of metonymies in the everyday speech of Brazzavillois residents, who live in an environment influenced by both the French language and local languages. The primary goal of the study is to discern the network of metonymies in oral communication and to identify the stylistic reasons for their expressive use in Brazzaville French.The chosen methodology involves compiling a corpus sourced from recordings, posters, and various daily uses related to the professional and linguistic habits of the Brazzaville community. Data selection criteria prioritize relevance and qualitative value. Utilizing this corpus, we applied the linguistic components criteria and the implicit approach developed by Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1998), along with the ellipsis approach proposed by Michel Le Guern (1973). This application aims to elucidate the discursive implications of metonymy in everyday conversation, seeking to verify how metonymic expressions illuminate the subjectivity, culture, and language proficiency of the speaker. Furthermore, metonymies in oral communication hold implicit value as they allow for the examination of undisclosed informational content omitted by the speaker through ellipses. The ellipsis approach aids in analyzing metonymy as a process that accentuates the container, with the content being elliptically placed by the speaker based on communication needs, intending to magnify a salient element of metonymic adjacency. Our anticipated results are expected to confirm that metonymy actively contributes to the semantic innovation of French in the Brazzaville context. This is attributed to its discursive techniques, particularly the containing/content relationship, which remains a decisive factor in semantic evolution and polysemy. Additionally, metonymy, being a figure of everyday life, permeates various domains such as family, professional settings, religious language, and even in journalism. It is commonly employed in familiar discourse, the realm of transportation, educational institutions, and commercial communication. This usage often arises from the application of verbs like 'pay' and 'buy,' where the content is replaced by the container (e.g., the bottle replaces the gas, and the invoice replaces the company). In conclusion, our findings indicate that metonymy in oral communication is not merely a tool for aesthetic language creation; rather, it emerges as a phenomenon driving linguistic innovation. It adds new layers of meaning to verbs like 'buy' and 'pay' within the specific context of Brazzaville, contributing to a diatopic variation of French in Africa.