Presenting Grammar to a Non-Specialist Audience: Vaugelas's Use of Metaphors in his Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647)

Abstract

Abstract This article examines Claude Favre de Vaugelas's use of metaphors in his Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647). The metaphors relate to a wide range of domains: taste; fashion; growth; sickness, health and medicine; richness and economy; power, authority and monarchy; religion; law. We consider the extent to which these metaphors are part of a strategy to present the key ideas and arguments of the work to a non-specialist readership, alongside, for example, the choice of the random presentation of short observations and the dilution of technical terminology inherited from the Latin grammatical tradition. The metaphors have a number of other functions: they help make the key arguments more accessible by relating them to the shared everyday experiences of his readers, they give structural unity and coherence to the work, and they create intertextual references, thereby situating Vaugelas's volume in relation to Classical and Renaissance works on language.