Salience and Relief-Related Discourse

Samia Ounoughi (dir.)

This issue of the Journal of Alpine Research gathers articles that all question relief-related discourse, in particular mountain-related discourse through the linguistic notion of salience. Salience is a term of Latin origin and has recently been adapted to French “saillance” in the field of linguistics where it generally refers to any phenomenon of emphasis. It is precisely because the mountains are by nature salient objects of geography that we would like to bring closer the two disciplines of discourse analysis (and picture analysis) and Alpine geography through the concept of salience. Lying at the crossroads of geography, linguistics and discourse analysis, the leading idea of this volume is to explore texts and paintings of various genres (treaties of aesthetics, novels, poems, schoolbooks, etc.) dating from the turn of the XIXthcentury to the present day so as to analyse the means at work in discourse to give shape to relief.