Typologie comparée des langues romanes : les spécificités de la langue française et leur implication sur la cognition et la culture

The article studies the ways in which words are constructed in French: they become increasingly compact and frequently end up as monosyllables. The written word behaves as an ideogram and its oral counterpart tends to become a morphologically unanalysable ideophone. The verb loses progressively its personal endings, which tends to make the link between its expression and its content more abstract. The relation in endocentric languages between verbs and nouns is shifted in French, which has become a typologically exocentric language, towards an opposition between a constructed alleviated lexicon and a more developed syntax, submitted to more strict and logical rules. On the cognitive level words are no longer analysed morphologically: they are directly grasped en langue in a more abstract way, differently from the other Romance languages, which continue to construct their words en discours. The sentence with its stricter word order imposes a development of thoughts in a more coherent logical chain, which induces specific cultural behaviours.