Valérie Saugera

Associate Professor

French Studies

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Education

Ph.D. in French Linguistics, Indiana University

Research interests

Lexical Borrowing, French Anglicisms, Neology, Lexicography, Morphology, Argotology

Narrative bio

My research has centered on languages in contact, lexical borrowing, and etymology, with the publication of Remade in France: Anglicisms in the Lexicon and Morphology of French (Oxford University Press, 2017). This book chronicles the current status of French Anglicisms, a heated topic in the history of the French language and a compelling example of the influence of global English in the creation of neologisms in other languages. My new project on Louchébem, the argot of Parisian butchers, has emerged from a fascination with the secret (vs. global) language of smaller (vs. larger) communities.

Books

Remade in France: Anglicisms in the Lexicon and Morphology of French (OUP, 2017).

Articles

Saugera, V. (2024). Open Louchébem: Secrecy in the Argot of Paris Butchers. Forum for Modern Language Studies 60:3, 315–335.

Saugera, V. (2021). Louchébem: la pérennité d’un argot à clef. La Linguistique 57:2, 137–164.

Saugera, V. (2019). Brèves de billot: fonctions de l’argot des louchébems de Paris. Journal of French Language Studies 29:3, 349–372.

Saugera, V. (2017). La fabrique des anglicismes. Travaux de linguistique 75:2, 59–79.

Saugera, V. (2018). French Anglicisms: An ever-changing linguistic case. OUPblog. https://blog.oup.com/2018/06/french-anglicisms-linguistic-case/

Saugera, V. (2012). How English-origin nouns (do not) pluralize in French. Lingvisticæ Investigationes 35:1, 120–142.

Saugera, V. (2012). The inflectional behavior of English-origin adjectives in French. Journal of French Language Studies 22:2, 225–250.

Awards

NEH Fellowship

American Philosophical Society Grant