LE LEXIQUE DE L’ECOLE DANS LES RECRES DU PETIT NICOLAS
SCHOOL’S VOCABULARY IN LES RECRES DU PETIT NICOLAS

Summary/Abstract: Regardless of whether or not his name is Nicholas, or he is a prince, by all means he must be little. The lyrical vein, characteristic of one of his creators, or the humour of the other, make of Little Nicholas the incarnation of the universal child. The age of all characters who give life to the actions told by Jean-Jacques Sempé and drawn by René Goscinnyrepresent the first criterion that allows us to envisage the recounting of the adventures lived by Little Nicholas as stages in his life path, as defining moments for the shaping and development of a character. Moreover, the very origin of these stories, residing in a whole series of cartoon boards made in order to be published in a Belgian journal, is largely developed along several years, evolving towards school stories that tell the events taking place at school, having as characters school children bearing strange and antiquated first names, recreating the atmosphere of an obsolete era, which eventually proves to be terribly up-to-date, through the dramas told, as well as though the reactions of the characters to these events. Last but not least, the title of the volume, which represents the object of the present article, situates the reader, explicitly, in the middle of the school environment. We would like to underline the constant presence of certain words that define notions pertaining to the school space, caught in its spatial and temporal evolution. Fully aware of the truth concerning the constant evolution of each language, as well as of the ad-hoc nature of any linguistic analysis, rigorously carried out, we would like to conclude on the current status of the French language lexicon development, used for the creation of the school life canvas and its description. The creation of a thematic inventory of terms that delineate the school lexical field, as well as the completion of word lists grouped according to their grammatical category represent the two main aims of this article. Our research will be based on text analysis and will resort to word inventories, mainly attested in a digital format, through famous explanatory dictionaries of the French language, such as Larousse , Robert or TLF.

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