Qu’est-ce que la "littérature" au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle en France ? Prolégomenes sémantico-historiques a une théorie de la littérature.

This article aims to give an overview of the way the French word “Littérature” came to adopt its usual contemporary meaning by 1750. Applying a lexico-semantic approach, it shows how the evolution of the word – the denotation of which moved from a wide general meaning to a specialized one – depends on the correlative semantic drift of the words “Lettres” and “Sciences” towards their contemporary antonymic meaning. It also explains how the neologism “Belles-Lettres,” which appeared around 1630, paved the way for the new meaning of “Littérature.” The article also calls for a comparative history of this semantic field in the main languages of Europe.