Du français médiévaltravail(lier)à l’anglaistravel: parcours d’un régionalisme sémantique

Abstract

The lexeme travail(lier), well-known in Medieval French, pertains in limited use to the notion of travel, in the specific sense of ʻ(to) travelʼ. Our work shows that this precise meaning could be identified as a regionalism that first appeared in Anglo-Norman during the second half of the 12th century, quickly spreading on the continent to the other regional areas of the Oïl territory. Adopted in Middle English by the end of the 13th century, it survives in Modern English as travel and its derivatives. The present paper recounts the journey of this semantic regionalism during the past centuries, establishes a syntactic-semantic synthesis of its different uses and formulates a hypothesis on the modalities of its origin.