This article focuses on lexical borrowings into French, namely the anglicism bootstrap, which, in both the donor language (English) and recipient language (French), is polysemous, with a range of senses across various domains. The article defines a specific, specialized sense of the word, used in reference to the relatively new sphere of activity known as the creative economy. The article also outlines the process of searching for the word’s French equivalents using the Sketch Engine corpus manager. As evidence of bootstrap’s full assimilation into French terminology, the article presents examples of its derivatives in primarily online texts, using the web corpora French Web 2020 (frTenTen20) and French Web 2023 (frTenTen23).
Dagmar Veselá (Fri,) studied this question.