Abstract: The article examines the question of the integration/lexicalisation of loanwords, based on a French language corpus of discursive occurrences of loanwords from Japanese (karaoke, tsunami, zen). Four issues are discussed :
- the stabilisation of the written form of the loanword after interaction between phonetic, graphic and epilinguistic representations of the Japanese words ;
- the act of naming, without really knowing the meaning of the borrowed term, i.e. naming an exogenous cultural entity, an act which can be dated and analysed ;
- the incorporation of facets representing the cultural ethnotype “Japan” into a programme of meaning, where they posit semantic values which differ from the reference ;
- correlations between the restrictions of the loanword and its semantic plasticity – some syntactic functions promote movement of subduction of its lexical matter.
