Les discours antécédents dans la compréhension des langues voisines.

The aim of this study was to examine the strategies used by Italophone speakers-readers who find themselves in the position of having to understand discourses produced in an unknown foreign language, in this case French. The inferences drawn by these speakers are necessarily based on their prior knowledge, which is simultaneously linguistic, textual and referential. The role occupied by the intertextuality in this discovery of the meaning is important. In fact this type of reader must base his efforts on prior discourses in his own language to determine the matches with the text to decipher. In this case it is not the polyphony of the speech that is perceived by the reader but it is on his part that the activation of a range of prior discourses that go to make up a polyphonic collection occurs, contributing thus to a comprehension of the meaning. The results show that there is a definite synergy between linguistic cognisance, textual clues and encyclopedic knowledge. However, it was found that the attitude that a reader adopts when facing a highly-stereotyped text is subject to a certain cultural conditioning, which tends, partially at least, to invalidate the correct interpretation of the text. This leads us to reflect on the problem of the reformulation of one language into another, given that both languages, in addition, do not apparently share the same social conventions, which themselves arise from the many discourses that circulate in a language community and contribute greatly to its formation.