La léxicologie et la léxicographie de Pierre-Roland-François Butet (de la Sarthe).

In 1801 Pierre-Roland-François Butet, a language scholar, scientist, and educator, published two comprehensive manuals to be used by students in the École polymathique. The two manuals deal with the study of the French lexicon, and are in full conformity with the educational program of the Idéologues, aiming at a philosophically-based cognitive instruction, in which theoretical and empirical knowledge are intrinsically related. As such, Butet's two manuals, dealing respectively with léxicologie and léxicographie, are complementary: whereas the handbook on 'lexicography' offers a methodical, systematic description of the processes involved in the constitution of the French lexicon, the manual on 'lexicology' supplies the didactic materials for the analysis. The overall aim of the two works is to show, and to understand, the principles through which French words are connected to their Latin ancestors. The present contribution focuses on Butet's manual for léxicographie, which provides the scientific basis for its didactic counterpart. In his léxicographie Butet, who was thoroughly acquainted with the history of etymological studies, develops a systematic framework for the description and explanation of the historical changes (altérations) that have affected Latin words in their evolution to French. Contrary to traditional etymologists, Butet proceeds in a stepwise controlled way, adopting a 'decompositional' approach and observing a neat distinction between formal and semantic aspects. For the description of the evolutionary stages Butet elaborates a theory of possible changes, i.e. a closed set of hypothetical laws that have to be confirmed by the data. This research program thus corresponds to a procedure comparable to demonstration in geometry. Interestingly, Butet allows for variation within the lawlike evolution of language. Butet's project, which has received only limited attention from linguistic historiographers, is built on philosophical principles, but involves considerable empirical content, viz. an articulatory-phonetic component containing a detailed description of consonantal segments, and a language-historical component, testified to by the materials exemplifying the laws of alteration. Butet's revolutionary project is cast in a new, systematic and extensive, terminology. This contribution offers a study of the background, structure, theoretical and empirical tenets, and the metalanguage of Butet's léxicographie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]