La phraséologie dans l’étude du français langue maternelle : des faits de langue d’Hippolyte-Auguste Dupont aux faits d’expression de Charles Bally

Abstract

The Phraséologie française élémentaire ou Nouveaux exercices de grammaire by Hippolyte-Auguste Dupont (1833) is, to our knowledge, the only work to use the word phraseology as a synonym for “Grammar of the French language”. It represents an exception not only to the school grammars of the nineteenth century, the century of schooling in France and school grammars, but also to the phraseological precepts of Charles Bally (1909). The analysis of this work, intended for the teaching of French as a mother tongue, will allow us to highlight two innovative aspects for the time: on the one hand, a very particular meaning of the word phraseology, namely that of the study of language through ordinary syntactic sentences, and, on the other hand, the place reserved for gallicisms, considered as “particular idioms” contrary to the general rules of grammar. The study of the opposition between these two groups of constructions in both Dupont’s and Bally’s work will lead us to contrast the facts of language in the former with the facts of expression in the latter.