Les Allusions – traces culturelles et réalisations discursives dans les textes de presse
Allusions – Cultural Traces and Discursive Realizations in Press Texts

Summary/Abstract: Allusive statements are included in the category of “sentences without text”, explained by the aphorization mechanism (Maingueneau, D., 2012) or in the category of “verbal palimpsests”, illustrated by the mechanism of “delexicalization” (Galisson, R., 1993, 41-62). Allusions are “masked quotes” (by alteration), “cultural revealers” (Galisson, 1993), “prestigious allusions” (Vinay, J.-P., Darbelnet, J., 1993) which activate knowledge shared by the members of a linguistic and cultural community. The purpose of the article is to focus on the “memory” of allusions, identifying both the cultural traces of a phrase considered to be representative and the discursive realizations, as reflected in French press texts. We shall illustrate the problematic of the article by analyzing the phrase “Après moi, le deluge” ("After me, the flood"), the historical traces of which date back to the 18th century. The phrase is examined in contexts extracted from press texts on economical, political, social and cultural subjects in two forms: explicitly, allowing to identify the formal, visible traces of the original phrase, and implicit, distorted, altered, either by substitution or by addition of terms. The results of the analysis lead us to consider the cultural dimension of the allusion, the discursive and contextual realizations which are multiple and diverse. The comparison of the allusive statements mentioned with examples taken from other languages, such as Romanian, can provide interesting paths for the translation of allusive statements from French into Romanian and from Romanian into French.

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