Chemins de traverse – Voies de travers

In this article, I use and analyze the notion of extravagance in the sense of its etymological composition, “extra-vagance”, in exploring a domain, between literature and linguistics, constituted by a corpus of stories telling metamorphosis, that is to say by texts or narrations which refer to unconventional, counterfactual cases or phenomena; but as a linguist, I observe and, I hope, I demonstrate that the language is able to represent them, sometimes with ambiguity. Nevertheless, I do make a great difference, even if they appear in the same context, between a metamorphosis, which is a process de re, and a metaphor, which is a procedure de dicto.