Abstract EN:

This study goes back to the origins of classical ballet in order to describe the vocabulary or "la belle dance" and the way it functions within a macro-synchrony of 40 years long spreading from 1661 to 1701. The study is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the semantic fields of "bal", "danse", and "ballet" from wich the new concept of "la belle danse" has been developed. The second part proceeds to adescriptive study of the vocabulary of movement, adapted from bernard pottier's semic analysis scale. The movement was broken down into "cinemes" - minimal cinetic units - considered as distinctive features. Once combined among themselves the "cinemes", formed on the one hand the "choremes" or "chories simples" - minimal step units created after the linguistic concept of "lexemes", nominals - and on the other hand the "chories composees ou complexes" - memorized step sequences (after the concept of "lexies composees ou complexes", complex nominals). The third part deals more specialy with the proce- dures or word formation within the dance vocabulary in order to determine the main features of this lexicon and to decide whether it belongs to terminologies or to technical vocabularies. Are also examined in this part the most important procedures such as lexical borrowing, lexicalization (lexical frozeness) as well as nominalization, metonymy and metaphor.