L’idiolecte proustien. Basin de Guermantes
Proust's Idiolect. Basin de Guermantes

Summary/Abstract: This article presents the language characteristics of the duke of Guermantes in À la recherche du temps perdu de Marcel Proust. It analyses how certain words and groups of words keep repeating inside the duke’s speeches, thus making his portrait and illustrating Proust’s vision about the death of language through the use of collocations. We consider his idiolect interesting and relevant for our research on translating the Proustian idiolect into Romanian because his idiolect is so easy to be identified, through repetition and coherence of use, and because collocations are the most relevant lexical characteristic of the idiolect. Working with the large mass of phrases that Basin utters, we discovered his discourse is made of collocations, but also of freer expressions like stereotypes and sometimes a mixture of the two, that is a collocation personalized according to the context and to the interlocutor.

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