Désignation et représentation des éléments topographiques dans les dialectes de France: l’élévation de terrain

Abstract The purpose of this article is to analyze the semantic patterns according to which rises of land are referred to in the Romance dialects of France. Using the motivational method, I examine the etymology and the semantic field of more than 80 lexical types (found in dialect atlases) and their corresponding word families, going from pre-Latin to current language. If we look at their original meanings, it appears that the words that bear the sense ‘rise of land’ first referred to the shape or the rocky/bushy/earthy nature of hills and mountains, when they did not simply represent these as borders, heaps, projections or even as blows, as bumps. The main result of my research lies in the observation of semantic determinism. Any word that is related at one point of its history to the concept of ‘mountain’ is prone to develop (or to have developed) many – if not all – of the meanings listed above. This points out the highly probable existence of semantic laws that bind together sets of correlated notions. Using my results, I attempt to describe the global organization of meaning and its cyclical nature.