Climbing summits: when exception becomes the rule. A linguistic approach

ABSTRACT This article belongs to a wider interdisciplinary project (enunciation and cognitive linguistics, history, geography, anthropology) to shed light on the relations between space, motion and language. It examines nineteenth-century British mountain travel narratives selected from the Alpine Journal (1858 and 1899). It stems from the observation that higher mountain exploration as a sports and scientific discipline belongs to the exceptional, and that an exception in language is the counterpart of a grammatical rule the limits of which are themselves blurry. Reading mountain travelogues fully partakes of the alpinist’s preparation to facing a perilous milieu characterised by fleeting conditions in which exception becomes the sole rule. After a presentation of the corpus the article questions the functions of mountain travel writing. The last section is dedicated to linguistic analyses of salient grammatical and semantic traits of alpinists’ discourse.