When reference is subject to change: how to construct and interpret the chains between textuality and ontology?

Abstract

In my paper, I will deal with cases that illustrate, from textual and referential points of view, the linguistic or textual and (vs) ontological problem which has been called evolving reference by French semanticists: the corpus comprising cooking recipes as well as stories of metamorphosis tends to show a conflict between the principles of thematic organization (continuity) and the change of denomination -in conformity with the physical process as it has been or as it can be recorded by the text. From a methodological point of view, we need to address the question of the diversity of treatments, of their collection, and of the types of texts and therefore of corpus which would make it possible to show such a conflict or not.