La métaphore, berceau et enfant de la langue : la métaphore verbale comme approximation sémantique par analogie dans les textes scientifiques et les productions enfantines (2-4 ans)

This study proposes seeing verbal metaphor not as a divergence in relation to the usual functioning of language but as a phenomenon which reflects one of the principal means of organising the lexicon. We analyse the "unusual" utterances with verbal pivots produced by adults in scientific texts with didactic aim and by children of 2-4 years of age, in the process of constituting the lexicon. We establish that the verbal metaphors as well as the productions of metaphoric appearance of 2/4 year-old children, constitute semantic approximations by analogy which contribute to the lexicon building (and not errors or metaphors) concerning the child, and play a role of intra-lingual "translator" as concerns the adult, and reflect the organisation of the verbal lexicon according to a relation of co-hyponymy intra-domain vs co-hyponymy inter-domains. We consider three repercussions of this work: in the automatic processing of the verb lexicon, in the early-learning of the lexicon, and also in language pathology.