Representing the Mythical French Tower of Babel: The Meaning of Patois in the French Literary Arts Between 1700 and 2000

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This paper explores the deeper connotations associated with patois by studying its longitudianl representation in an electronic corpus of the French literary arts, which includes works of fiction written between 1700 and 2000. There is no doubt that the evolution of the meaning of this word has been influenced by the French elitist view on language and the political agenda of the Revolutionaries, amongst other influences. The analysis of the use of the word patois in its linguistic and literary contexts will allow a better understanding of how the literary arts and its representation of meaning contribute to the complexification of meaning.

Stream: Meaning and Representation

Paper: Representing the Mythical French Tower of Babel

Sylvie Gagnon's maint interest as an interdisciplinary researcher is the interaction between individual identity, culture, language and gender at both literary and linguistic levels. After gaining a PhD in French Linguistics, she was appointed lecturer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand in 1995. She has written articles in the field of linguistics and published two novels and poetry. Her work in progress includes the writing of a novel about the meaning of language loss and a funded research project on the representation of minority languages in a corpus of French literary texts between 1500 and 2000.