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MaJ-Britt Mosegaard Hansen

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface: Synchronic and Diachronic Issues A Study with Special Reference to the French Phasal Adverbs

Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface Series Editors: K.M. Jaszczolt, University of Cambridge, UK K. Turner, University of Brighton, UK

Other titles in this series: TURNER (ed.) JASZCZOLT GEURTS JASZCZOLT (ed.) PEETERS (ed.) PAPAFRAGOU LEEZENBERG NÉMETH & BIBOK (eds.) BRAS & VIEU (eds.) GUTIÉRREZ-REXACH (ed.) KAMP & PARTEE (eds.) PEREGRIN (ed.) DOBROVOL’SKIJ & PIIRAINEN WEDGWOOD BULTINCK VON HEUSINGER & TURNER (eds.) ALONI et al. (eds.) PIETARINEN (ed.)

The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface from Different Points of View Discourse, Beliefs and Intentions: Semantic Defaults and Propositional Attitude Ascription Presuppositions and Pronouns The Pragmatics of Propositional Attitude Reports The Lexicon-Encyclopedia Interface Modality: Issues in the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface Contexts of Metaphor Pragmatics and the Flexibility of Word Meaning Semantic and Pragmatic Issues in Discourse and Dialogue From Words to Discourse: Trends in Spanish Semantics and Pragmatics Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning Meaning: The Dynamic Turn Figurative Language: Cross-cultural and Cross-linguistic Perspectives Shifting the Focus: From Static Structures to the Dynamics of Interpretation Numerous Meanings: The Meaning of English Cardinals and the Legacy of Paul Grice Where Semantics Meets Pragmatics Questions in Dynamic Semantics Game Theory and Linguistic Meaning

For more information visit: www.elsevier.com/locate/series/crispi

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface: Synchronic and Diachronic Issues A Study with Special Reference to the French Phasal Adverbs

Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen The University of Manchester, UK

Amsterdam – Boston – Heidelberg – London – New York – Oxford Paris – San Diego – San Francisco – Singapore – Sydney – Tokyo

Elsevier Linacre House, Jordan Hill, Oxford OX2 8DP, UK Radarweg 29, PO Box 211, 1000 AE Amsterdam, The Netherlands

First edition 2008 Copyright © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher Permissions may be sought directly from Elsevier’s Science & Technology Rights Department in Oxford, UK: phone (+44) (0) 1865 843830; fax (+44) (0) 1865 853333; email: [email protected]. Alternatively you can submit your request online by visiting the Elsevier web site at http://elsevier.com/locate/permissions, and selecting Obtaining permission to use Elsevier material Notice No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein. Because of rapid advances in the medical sciences, in particular, independent verification of diagnoses and drug dosages should be made British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN: ISSN:

978-0-08-055293-4 1472-7870

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Printed and bound in The United Kingdom 08 09 10 11 12

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface (CRiSPI)

Series Editors: K.M. Jaszczolt, University of Cambridge, UK and K. Turner, University of Brighton, UK Editorial Advisory Board: N. Asher, USA B. Birner, USA C. Casadio, Italy M. Dascal, Israel B. Fraser, USA T. Fretheim, Norway B. Gillon, Canada P. Gochet, Belgium J. Groenendijk, The Netherlands Y. Gu, PRC A. Kasher, Israel M. Krifka, Germany S. Kubo, Japan C. Lee, Korea S. Levinson, The Netherlands T. McEnery, UK F. Nemo, France P. Pelyvas, Hungary J. Peregrin, Czech Republic A. Ramsay, UK R. Stalnaker, USA M. Stokhof, The Netherlands J. van der Auwera, Belgium R. van der Sandt, The Netherlands K. von Heusinger, Germany G. Ward, USA H. Zeevat, The Netherlands The aim of this series is to focus upon the relationship between semantic and pragmatic theories for a variety of natural language constructions. The boundary between semantics and pragmatics can be drawn in many various ways; the relative benefits of each gave rise to a vivid theoretical dispute in the literature in the last two decades. As a side effect, this variety has given rise to a certain amount of confusion and lack of purpose in the extant publications on the topic. This series provides a forum where the confusion within existing literature can be removed and the issues raised by different positions can be discussed with a renewed sense of purpose. The editors intend the contributions to this series to take further strides towards clarity and cautious consensus.

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CONTENTS Preface

xi

1

1 1 2 4 7 8

Introduction 1 Preamble 2 What are phasal adverbs? 3 Why are phasal adverbs of interest to linguistics? 4 A note on particles 5 Structure of this book

2 Particles at the Lexical-Semantics / Pragmatics Interface: A Conceptual Framework 1 Frame semantics 1.1 Summary 2 Semantics vs pragmatics 2.1 Content-level uses vs context-level uses of phasal adverbs 2.2 Instructional semantics 2.3 Summary 3 Types of (allegedly) pragmatic meaning 3.1 Conversational implicature 3.2 Conventional implicature 3.3 Presupposition 3.4 Summary 4 The problem of polyfunctionality in semantic / pragmatic description 4.1 Homonymy, monosemy, polysemy 4.2 Constraints on polysemy 4.3 The notion of “basic sense” 4.4 Summary 5 The problem of paradigmaticity in lexical semantics 5.1 Semantic fields and paradigmatic relations between lexical items 5.2 Summary 6 A Peircean approach to meaning 6.1 Summary 7 General summary

9 9 12 12 14 17 26 26 27 29 32 33 33 34 36 39 40 40 41 46 46 51 51

3 A Framework for Describing the Diachronic Evolution of Phasal Adverbs 1 Introduction 2 Diachronic prototype semantics 3 The evolution of phasal adverbs: grammaticalization or not? 3.1 Parameters of grammaticalization 3.2 Pragmaticalization 3.3 The role of reinterpretation / reanalysis 3.4 Summary

53 53 53 54 55 58 60 64

viii Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface 4 Tracing semasiological changes 4.1 Transition 4.2 Actuation 4.3 Motivation 4.4 Summary 5 The notion of “persistence” in semasiological change 6 A Peircean approach to meaning change 6.1 Summary 7 General summary

64 65 69 72 77 77 79 82 82

4 General Properties of Phasal Adverbs Across Languages 1 Introduction 2 The aspectuality of phasal adverbs 2.1 The linguistic expression of time: tense, aspect, Aktionsart 2.2 The linguistic expression of time: adverbials 2.3 Interaction of phasal adverbs with aspect and Aktionsart 2.4 Perspectivity 2.5 Summary 3 The paradigmaticity of phasal adverbs 3.1 Two competing hypotheses about the interrelations of phasal adverbs 3.1.1 The duality hypothesis 3.1.2 The three-scenarios hypothesis 3.2 Summary 4 The presuppositionality of phasal adverbs 4.1 Presuppositions concerning preceding phases of the SoA 4.2 “Presuppositions” concerning subsequent phases of the SoA 4.3 “Presuppositions” concerning earliness or lateness of the change of state 4.4 Summary 5 General summary

85 85 85 86 89 91 94 99 100 100 100 109 112 113 113 116 119 121 122

5 Data and Methodology 1 Empirical basis of the investigation 2 Corpora used 2.1 Problems with the data 3 Tests 3.1 Tests for content-level vs context-level function 3.2 Problems with the use of tests in semantic / pragmatic description 4 Summary

123 123 125 126 128 129 130 131

6 Content-Level Uses of the French Phasal Adverbs 1 Introduction 2 Etymology of the French phasal adverbs 3 Temporal and closely related uses of déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin 3.1 Déjà 3.2 Toujours 3.2.1 Distributive use 3.3 Enfin 3.4 Summary 4 Phasal uses of the four adverbs 4.1 Déjà

133 133 134 135 135 136 137 139 142 142 142

Contents ix 4.2 Encore 4.3 Toujours 4.4 Enfin 4.5 Summary 5 Iterative and related uses of déjà and encore 5.1 Déjà 5.2 Encore 5.2.1 Additive encore 5.3 Habitual toujours 5.4 Summary 6 Déjà, encore, and toujours as phrasal adjuncts 6.1 Focus-particle uses of déjà and encore 6.1.1 Déjà and encore as temporal focus particles 6.1.2 Encore as an additive focus particle 6.2 Encore and toujours as degree adverbs 6.3 Summary 7 General summary

144 148 150 151 152 152 155 156 158 159 160 160 161 162 164 168 168

7 Context-Level Uses of the French Phasal Adverbs 1 Introduction 2 “Modal” uses 2.1 “Scalar” use 2.1.1 Déjà 2.1.2 Encore 2.1.3 Toujours 2.2 “Categorizing” use 2.3 Non-temporal focus-particle use 2.4 A note on enfin / finalement 2.5 Summary 3 Connective uses 3.1 Déjà 3.2 Encore 3.3 Toujours 3.4 Enfin 3.4.1 Collocations with enfin 3.5 Summary 4 Interactional uses 4.1 Summary 5 General summary

171 171 171 172 173 175 178 179 183 185 186 187 187 192 199 203 209 212 213 216 217

8 Conclusion 1 Introduction 2 Summary of results 3 Retrospects and prospects

221 221 221 224

References Data sources

229 241

Index

243


PREFACE This book has rather a long history. Following publication of my 1998 monograph The function of discourse particles. A study with special reference to spoken standard French (Amsterdam: John Benjamins), I had planned to give the category of particles a well-deserved rest, and go to work on other linguistic phenomena. While I did, indeed, do so (and continue to do so on a regular basis), it ultimately proved impossible for me to leave particles alone, the study of these small items having continued to be a “growth industry” within linguistics, and especially within the field of semantics and pragmatics. Indeed, in as much as the field of particle studies is still a relatively recent one, it continues not only to raise new issues of interest to general linguistics, but also to throw new light on a variety of existing issues. For me, the most interesting topic of all within the field of linguistics as a whole is the question of how meaning is created by the use of language, and particles have proved to be very fertile ground for thinking about precisely that. Consequently, although this monograph has as its object to describe the uses of a small group of particles in one specific language, namely French, it also has the more far-reaching aim of contributing to current theorizing about the nature of linguistic meaning and how it changes over time. The book would not have come into existence without the help and support of a number of people and institutions: First, I must thank the Danish Research Council for Culture and Communication (Forskningsrådet for Kultur og Kommunikation) for granting me the year’s research leave I needed to complete this book (grant no. 273-05-0189), and the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, where I was employed from 1993 to the spring of 2007, for providing not only financial sustenance, but also an infrastructure conducive to research. Secondly, I would like to thank (in alphabetical order) Peter Harder (Copenhagen) Henning Nølke (Aarhus), Povl Skårup (Aarhus), Elizabeth Closs Traugott (Stanford), Johan van der Auwera (Antwerp), Co Vet (Groningen), and Richard Waltereit (Newcastle-upon-Tyne) for having taken the time to read and comment on parts of this book, and Ken Turner (Brighton), co-editor with Kasia Jaszczolt of this series, for handling my book proposal (and not least for judging it favorably). The following people have been less directly involved in the genesis of the present volume, but, over the years, they have nonetheless helped me in various ways, either with practical matters related to the completion of the study, or by helping me to sharpen my thinking on the relevant issues, for which I am very grateful: Henning Andersen (Los Angeles), Carla Bazzanella (Turin), Daron Burrows (Manchester), Frans Gregersen (Copenhagen), Hans Lauge Hansen (Aarhus), Andreas Jucker (Zurich), Jonna Kjær (Copenhagen), Christiane MarchelloNizia (ENS Lyon), Salvador Pons Bordería (Valéncia), Scott A. Schwenter (Columbus, OH),

xii Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface Lene Schøsler (Copenhagen), Erling Strudsholm (Copenhagen), Jacqueline Visconti (Genoa), and a number of anonymous referees for various international journals, in which the preliminary results of my research on phasal adverbs in French, or on other issues of relevance to this monograph, have been published. It goes without saying that none of the above-mentioned colleagues can or should be held responsible in any way for whatever errors and misinterpretations I may have made in this study. My husband, Steen Lisby, and our son, Victor Thomas Lisby, have been an inexhaustible source of both joy and moral support. This book is dedicated to them. Manchester, UK, August 2007

1 INTRODUCTION

1 PREAMBLE As Morgan (1978: 264) puts it, “[a] central question for the study of language is this: How do people understand what’s said to them?”. That question will be very much at the forefront of attention in the present study, which has both a general theoretical aim, and a specific descriptive aim. The theoretical problems I will be concerned with are two-fold: first, I seek to develop a synchronic model of the interface between lexical semantics and pragmatic interpretation. Subsequently, I complement the synchronic model by a diachronic model capable of giving an account of how the pragmatic interpretation of utterances may influence language users’ representations of the coded meanings of individual lexemes, leading to extensions and/or shifts in lexical meanings. On the descriptive side, the present work will propose a syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and diachronic analysis of four particles that are highly frequent in modern French, viz. the socalled “phasal adverbs” déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin (for my use of the notions of “particle” vs “adverb”, see sect. 4 infra). These adverbs are quite unusually polyfunctional, and their description therefore raises the question of the interface between lexical semantics and pragmatics to a particularly conspicuous degree. First, it raises the question of the extent to which their different contemporary uses can and should be attributed to the existence of so many different coded meanings, or, conversely, of the extent to which at least some of these uses are, instead, attributable to more or less

2

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface

straightforward pragmatic inferencing. In other words, are these adverbs not merely polyfunctional, but actually polysemous, and if yes, how polysemous are they really? Secondly, it seems that, as a rule, phasal adverbs in their various uses convey certain elements of meaning that are clearly of a non-truth-conditional nature. Thus, their description compels the linguist to take a stand on the precise nature of such elements, and on the level of description (semantics or pragmatics?) at which they belong, and why. Thirdly, given that not all the current uses of the French phasal adverbs appear to have existed from the birth of the French language, but that the range of uses rather seems to have developed gradually over a period of many centuries, the polyfunctionality of these items raises the question of how exactly new uses of words become entrenched in a language. In as much as extensions in the use and / or meaning of words are usually assumed to originate in pragmatic inferences from existing meanings, the question of the entrenchment of new uses involves investigating how and why pragmatic elements of utterance interpretation may become semanticized, that is, it involves a diachronic view on the semantics / pragmatics interface. All of these issues will be dealt with in some detail in subsequent chapters of this book.

2 WHAT ARE PHASAL ADVERBS? Many languages possess a set of lexical items largely equivalent to French déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin, e.g. English already, yet, still, and finally; German schon, (immer) noch, and endlich; Danish allerede, endnu, stadig(væk) and endelig; Italian già, ancora, and infine; etc... (cf. Välikangas 1982, van der Auwera 1998 and van Baar 1997 for further examples, including ones from more exotic languages). Irrespective of the specific language studied, it has been noted in a number of places in the literature that the meanings of these items are intuitively related, in that they involve taking a particular perspective on some state-of-affairs (henceforth abbreviated as “SoA”, and represented by the variable e). The perspective in question involves, on the one hand, the possibility that a transition between two phases – one positive and one negative – of that same SoA has taken place or might conceivably take place at the time of reference, or “topic time” (henceforth TT), a time interval that is prototypically indicated by the speaker’s1 choice of tense and by the presence of any adverbials of temporal location in the host clause.2 On the other hand, it involves the location of that transition with respect to TT. Thus, in (1) below, déjà indicates that at TT (which in this case is identical to the time of utterance) a transition between a prior negative SoA ~e and a current positive SoA e has occurred. The same is true of enfin in (2), although with the important difference that, while déjà seems to suggest that the transition between ~e and e has occurred prematurely with respect to what might have been expected by at least some virtual individual, enfin signifies rather that the transition has occurred later than might have been expected. Both particles may

1 As a matter of convention, I will, in the remainder of this study, refer to individual speakers as she and to individual hearers as he, except where authentic corpus examples are used, in which case the actual sex of the speaker will determine pronominal gender, or if the contents of a constructed example would make these arbitrary gender assignments appear odd. 2 This notion of topic time relies on Klein (1992), and will be defined in chapter 4 infra.

Introduction 3 thus be said to be essentially retrospective (cf. Vandeweghe 1992: 100), in as much as they are concerned with a transition that has occurred prior to TT. (1)

(2)

Benoît et Nadine se sont rencontrés il y a six mois, et ils attendent déjà un enfant.3 ‘Benoît and Nadine met six months ago, and they are already expecting a child.’ Ça fait trois ans qu’Alexis et Léa essayent d’avoir un bébé, et voilà enfin qu’elle est enceinte. ‘Alexis and Léa have been trying to have a baby for three years, and now she is finally pregnant.’

In (3)-(4), on the other hand, both encore and toujours indicate that the SoA e has reached a relatively advanced stage at TT, given that they both presuppose that e was also the case prior to TT. The difference between them will be argued in ch. 6 infra to lie in the fact that, while encore contains a further element of meaning to the effect that a future transition between e and a negative SoA ~e is at least conceivable within the current universe of discourse, toujours is entirely neutral with respect to the possibility of such a transition. As neither particle actually excludes a future transition to an SoA of the opposite polarity, we may then say that they are essentially prospective in nature (cf. Vandeweghe 1992: 100), although encore is more clearly so than toujours. (3) (4)

Max et Sylvie ont divorcé il y a dix ans, mais ils se détestent encore autant. Max et Sylvie ont divorcé il y a dix ans, mais ils se détestent toujours autant. ‘Max and Sylvie divorced ten years ago, but they still hate one another as much as ever.’

Some or all of these particles, and their equivalents in other languages, have been of interest to linguistics at least since the late 1960s (some of the earliest studies being Traugott & Waterhouse 1969 for English, Doherty 1973 for German, and Muller 1975 for French). In the existing literature, the group is frequently expanded to include (the equivalents of) negative or restrictive adverbs such not yet, no longer, not until, and certain uses of only (in French: ne…pas encore, ne…toujours pas, ne…plus, ne…(encore) que, and seul(ement) cf. (5)-(9)). The latter items will be touched upon in various places in this work, but they will not be treated individually and in depth: (5)

(6)

(7)

Ça fait trois ans qu’Alexis et Léa essayent d’avoir un bébé, mais elle n’est pas encore tombée enceinte. ‘Alexis and Léa have been trying to have a baby for three years, but she has not become pregnant yet.’ Ça fait trois ans qu’Alexis et Léa essayent d’avoir un bébé, mais elle n’est toujours pas tombée enceinte. ‘Alexis and Léa have been trying to have a baby for three years, but she still has not become pregnant.’ Max et Sylvie ont divorcé il y a dix ans, et maintenant ils ne se détestent plus. ‘Max and Sylvie divorced ten years ago, and now they don’t hate one another anymore.’

3 Examples that are not marked for source have been constructed by the author. See chapter 5 for a discussion of data and methodology.

4

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface (8)

(9)

Est-ce que Frédéric est déjà passé professeur ? − Non, il n’est encore que maître de conférences. ‘Has Frédéric already got tenure? − No, he’s still only an assistant professor.’ Est-ce que Frédéric est passé professeur à l’âge de 30 ans déjà ? − Non, à 40 ans seulement. ‘Did Frédéric get tenure at the age of 30 already? − No, only at 40.’

As a group, the above-mentioned particles have been variously referred to as “aspect markers” (Traugott & Waterhouse 1969), “presuppositional time adverbs” (Vet 1980), “phasal quantifiers” (Löbner 1989, 1999), “scalar focus particles” (König 1991), “perspectivity particles” (Vandeweghe 1992), “phasal polarity expressions” (van Baar 1997), “phasal adverbials” (van der Auwera 1998), and probably others things besides. The term chosen to designate the French items treated in this work will be “phasal adverbs”. This is intended as a neutral term, and does not as such imply a preference for any existing descriptive or explanatory model.

3 WHY ARE PHASAL ADVERBS OF INTEREST TO LINGUISTICS? Although there are many areas within linguistics which, with respect to sheer bulk, greatly surpass the study of phasal adverbs in importance, we are nevertheless far from dealing with a field that is entirely unexplored. Indeed, items of this kind in various languages have been the object not only of a fairly large number of papers and / or book chapters, but also of a few fulllength monographic treatments. Most studies largely confine themselves to one of the major European languages, although several analyses tend to at least suggest some cross-linguistic applicability, but larger-scale typological studies can also be found (e.g. Välikangas 1982, van Baar 1997, van der Auwera 1998). Generally speaking, it is the semantics and pragmatics of what I will call the “aspectual” uses of these adverbs (i.e. the uses exemplified in (1)-(4) above) that has claimed the greatest amount of scholarly interest. However, it appears to be a prominent characteristic of phasal adverbs across languages that they tend to develop a (sometimes very wide) range of different senses, some of which are largely similar from one language to the next, while others are language-specific. For instance, French déjà possesses at least ten different uses, only four of which appear idiomatically translatable by English already. A selection of such extended senses of déjà and other French phasal adverbs is seen in (10)-(16): (10) (11)

(12)

4

Donnez-lui encore une bière ! ‘Give him another beer!’ Entre Ventimille et Menton, je préfère passer mes vacances à Menton : c’est déjà / encore / toujours la France.4 ‘If I have to choose between Ventimiglia and Menton, I prefer to spend my vacation in Menton: then we’ll at least be in France / it’s still in France / if nothing else, it’s in France’ Max aura sûrement une mauvaise note à l’examen : déjà que son prof ne l’aime guère, mais en plus il n’a pas travaillé.

It almost goes without saying, but the English translations of my French examples are meant as approximations only, and will in at least some cases aim specifically at spelling out a contrast in meaning between two particles. Hence, any given translation will not necessarily represent the most “natural” choice in English, nor can it necessarily be generalized to all possible contexts.

Introduction 5

(13)

(14)

(15) (16)

‘Max will probably get a bad grade at the exam : not only does his teacher dislike him, but on top of that, he hasn’t studied for it’ Max aura sûrement une mauvaise note à l’examen, encore que son prof l’aime beaucoup. ‘Max will probably get a bad grade at the exam, although his teacher does like him a lot’ Max a eu une mauvaise note à l’examen. Toujours est-il que son prof l’aime beaucoup. ‘Max got a bad grade at the exam. Nevertheless, his teacher likes him a lot’ C’est Duschnok, son nom, déjà / encore ? ‘His name was Duschnok, now, wasn’t it?/So, WAS his name Duschnok?’ Mes amis sont tous venus à mon anniversaire. Enfin, pas littéralement tous, mais presque. ‘My friends all came to my birthday. Well, not literally all, but almost.’

In the bulk of the existing literature, these non-aspectual uses have for the most part the status of “poor relatives”, sometimes to the point of being explicitly excluded from the purview of the analyses. Thus, it is probably fair to say that the various non-aspectual senses that phasal adverbs seem to develop in a number of languages are still underexplored (which, of course, is not intended to imply that no work has been done in the area). As a consequence, the relations – if any – that obtain between the two types of senses, and between the different non-aspectual senses, likewise call for more in-depth consideration. Finally, studies of the diachronic development of these items in different languages appear to be next to non-existent. Describing the meaning of phasal adverbs poses a challenge in several ways: First, it has always been clear that a purely truth-conditional semantics could not adequately account for their use. Indeed, in many cases, speakers will have a choice between two or more of these particles when describing what is objectively the same SoA, the choice depending on the particular point to be made with respect to that SoA in the context, e.g. (17)-(19): (17) (18) (19)

A 40 ans, Max est déjà / enfin devenu titulaire. ‘At 40, Max has already / finally got tenure.’ Le feu est déjà / encore au rouge. ‘The light is already / still red.’ Mais, chéri, tu es encore / toujours beau mec ! ‘But darling, you are as yet / still a handsome guy!’

In other words, the contribution that phasal adverbs make to the interpretation of the utterances in which they occur involves an essential non-referential, contextualizing – some would say “pragmatic” – component. However, the exact nature of that contextualizing component is controversial: is it a presupposition, a conventional implicature, a conversational implicature, an argumentational feature, or something else again? And not only that, but once the researcher has decided on the terms in which to cast his or her description, there remains the problem of determining the precise content of this element of meaning. Furthermore, the contextualizing component of meaning becomes even more salient in more “modal” and/or discourse-oriented uses of the particles, such as those exemplified in (11)-(16) above. What this means is that phasal adverbs raise the question of the semantics / pragmatics interface as an essential part of their functional description. The present work places itself within a predominantly Continental tradition, in which semantics is conceived of as the abstract virtual content that is encoded in linguistic items (be

6


they morphemes, lexemes, or constructions), such that semantic content cannot in the first instance be defined as denotative / referential, i.e. truth-conditional, in nature. Rather, in a great many cases, encoded semantic content will consist in instructions on how to appropriately contextualize the host utterance, for instance, as part of an (explicit or implicit) argumentational sequence, or of a process of interactional positioning. On this conception, pragmatic meaning consists in specific actualized meanings which are the result of the interaction between coded (i.e. semantic) content and the particular context of occurrence of the host utterance. Thus, pragmatic meanings are inferentially based and potentially cancelable. The question of truth conditions is orthogonal to that of the semantics / pragmatics distinction, in as much as semantic content may be non-truth-conditional, whereas pragmatically derived meanings may be truth-conditional. In the case of phasal adverbs, it implies that there is no qualitative leap from their temporal/aspectual uses to the discourseoriented ones. Secondly, as already mentioned, the different phasal adverbs intuitively seem to contrast with one another along a set of dimensions having to do with polarity, position of the potential transition with respect to TT, and contextually relevant expectations as to the exact moment of transition. This naturally raises the question of whether and to what extent they can be said to constitute a paradigm in the strict, structuralist sense, such that the meaning of each can usefully be defined in opposition to that of the others. I will argue in chs. 2 and 4 infra that, in spite of its elegance, such a view – which has been expounded in prominent parts of the existing literature (cf. Löbner 1989, 1999; Vandeweghe 1992) – is nevertheless misconceived. Indeed, there is in general reason to believe that the lexicon is not tightly structured in this way, but consists instead of a set of flexible resources which allow considerable creativity in the production of meaning. In that connection, I develop, in chs. 3, 6 and 7, the diachronic notion of “persistence”, i.e. the fact that linguistic items that have been subject to meaning change will, as a rule, retain central elements of their source meanings (cf. Hopper 1991). This fact calls into question not only the structuralist assumption of the independence of synchrony and diachrony, but also the tenability of a structuralist conception of the lexicon, for lexemes belonging to one and the same synchronic frame may nevertheless have very different diachronic sources, and persistence of central elements of meaning from these sources may place (from a synchronic point of view, apparently arbitrary) constraints on the syntactic, semantic, and micropragmatic contexts that the new meanings can enter into, thereby preventing the new meanings from forming a tight structuralist paradigm. Last, but not least, the multifunctionality of phasal adverbs raises interesting questions about the interrelations between the various notional domains in which they may function, and about the diachronic pathways and mechanisms regulating the variation and change we find in their uses. I take my point of departure in this book in the cognitively-oriented, frame-semantic tradition, with its concomitant view of polysemy as an essential feature of lexical semantics, and combine it with Peircean semiotics to arrive at a model which can account for both synchronic variations and for diachronic changes in lexical meanings.

Introduction 7

4 A NOTE ON PARTICLES In this book, déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin will be variously referred to as “adverbs” and as “particles”, irrespective of the specific use of them that is at issue at any time.5 They are “adverbs” in so far as – in the vast majority of their uses – they fulfil adverbial functions within their host clauses, that is to say functions that are syntactically optional, and in which they modify some aspect of the information that is conveyed by the host clause, be it information about the state-of-affairs denoted by the clause, or explicit or implicit information about the communicative status of the clause. They also, in contemporary French, have the status of particles in the traditional morphological sense, that is, they are invariable simplex morphemes, which are not subject to inflection or derivation. In the Continental European, principally the Germanist, tradition, a different distinction is frequently drawn between adverbs and particles. According to that tradition, the two categories overlap only to a minimal degree, and the distinction between them is not primarily based on the morphological features of the items classified, but on their semantic and syntactic characteristics. Thus, semantically, particles are defined as synsemantic items (Vandeweghe 1992: 8; van Baar 1997: 247; Hentschel & Weydt 2002: 646), i.e. their precise meaning can only be determined in context, by their interaction with other expressions used in the host clause. The principal syntactic criterion, viz. that particles do not, in the normal case, occur in isolation, follows from this central semantic property of particles (cf. Vandeweghe 1992: 16, van Baar 1997: 243). This is no doubt a relevant distinction to make in the case of the Continental Germanic languages, which all possess a set of so-called “modal particles”, i.e. items like German ja, doch, eben,…, Danish jo, da, vist,…, or Dutch toch, maar, even,…. Modal particles – although syntactically optional, and functioning as modifiers – nevertheless possess quite particular syntactic and semantic properties, chief among which is their obligatory occurrence in the socalled “middle field” of the clause, their fixed propositional scope, and their very abstract meaning, all of which set them apart from sentence adverbs like (the equivalents of) fortunately, briefly, etc. (e.g. Abraham 1991, Foolen 1993; Waltereit fc). It may even be the case, as argued by Waltereit (fc) that modal particles arise diachronically as a result of processes that are distinct from those that give rise to other types of functional items in language. However, French, and the Romance languages in general, do not possess a significant and clearly delimitable class of such modal particles, and drawing a distinction between adverbs and particles along the lines just mentioned would appear to be arbitrary and unjustified in the case of Romance. Thus, the precise meaning and function of a great many French adverbs is context-dependent, as (20)-(22) show, and while some items that are particles in the morphological sense may appear in isolation, other items, which quite clearly are not particles, cannot (cf. (23)-(24) vs (25)-(26)): (20)

Céline m’a parlé franchement. ‘Céline spoke to me frankly.’

5 For purposes of stylistic variation, the words ”marker” and ”morpheme” will also be used. Nothing whatsoever hinges on the precise choice between these terms in any single instance.

8

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface (21) (22) (23) (24) (25) (26)

Franchement, Céline est une imbécile. ‘Frankly, Céline is an idiot.’ (= I say to you frankly) Franchement, est-ce que Céline trompe son mari ? ‘Frankly, does Céline cheat on her husband?’ (= Tell me frankly) Marc est déjà arrivé. ‘Marc has already arrived.’ A. Marc est arrivé. B. Déjà ? ‘A. Marc has arrived. B. Already?’ Très brièvement, Benjamin a été licencié. ‘Very briefly, Benjamin has been fired.’ A. Benjamin a été licencié. B. #Très brièvement ? ‘A. Benjamin has been fired. B. Very briefly?’

In the remainder of this book, I will therefore adhere to the “classical”, morphological definition of “particles”, whereby the phasal adverbs indeed happen also to be particles, even if they do not fulfil the criteria for “particle-hood” as defined in Germanic linguistics.

5 STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK The book is roughly divided into two parts: a theoretical/methodological part, spanning chs. 15, and a descriptive part, spanning chs. 6-7, although with some overlap between them, particularly in ch. 4. Ch. 2 presents the synchronic approach to meaning and the semantics/pragmatics distinction that I will be assuming in the remainder of the study, while ch. 3 presents a complementary diachronic approach. Ch. 4 is a critical review of the literature on phasal adverbs across languages. Ch. 5 describes the data and the methodology in the descriptive part II of the book. Ch. 6 describes in some detail what I call the content-level uses of the four French phasal adverbs, their interrelations, and their diachronic evolution. Ch. 7 does the same for what I call their context-level uses. (For the distinction between content-level and context-level uses, see ch. 2, sect. 2.1.) Ch. 8 is a conclusion.

2

PARTICLES AT THE LEXICAL-SEMANTICS / PRAGMATICS INTERFACE: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

1 FRAME SEMANTICS The general approach to semantics adopted in this work is that of frame semantics (e.g. Fillmore 1982, 1985; Croft & Cruse 2004: ch. 2). Frame semantics is an experientially-based approach to linguistic meaning, specifically lexical meaning, and it stands in opposition to structural and feature-based approaches to the lexicon. (This aspect of frame semantics will be treated more fully in sect. 5.1 below.) The essential feature is that our understanding of words must be relativized to wider conceptual and / or experiential frames, which are evoked by the use of words, and which are thus part of their meaning. Outside the domain of lexical semantics proper, frames of understanding may also be actively invoked by hearers / readers in order to impose coherence on a given discourse (Fillmore 1982: 124, 1985: 232). Fillmore (1985: 232) offers the example in (1), where a Western addressee is likely to spontaneously invoke a Christmas frame, even if no mention is made of Christmas in the discourse itself. Such invokings are, of course, firmly situated within the domain of pragmatics: (1)

We never open our presents until the morning.

A semantic, or evoked, frame is defined as “a script-like conceptual structure that describes a particular type of situation, object, or event and the participants and props involved in it” (Ruppenhofer et al. 2005: 5). Words are taken to denote, or focus attention on, specific elements of such frames, and what is objectively one and the same real-world situation may thus be framed differently by the use of different words.

10


Hence, frame semantics stands in opposition also to semantic theories that see truth conditions as the primary (or, indeed, the only) determinant of linguistic meaning. Because of this explicit orientation towards understandings, rather than objective truth conditions, frame semantics is particularly well suited to account for the meanings of items like phasal adverbs, our understanding of which is – at best – only very partially explained by a statement of their truth conditions. To take a simple, and by now classic, example of how a different choice of words can frame the same event differently, the verbs buy and sell can both be considered to belong to a superordinate commercial transaction frame containing elements like BUYER, SELLER, GOODS, and PRICE. Indeed, (2) and (3) should have the exact same truth conditions: (2) (3)

Sylvester bought a used guitar from Francesca for 30 dollars. Francesca sold a used guitar to Sylvester for 30 dollars.

The two converse verbs, however, correspond to individual subframes of this superordinate frame. The difference between them is that buy perspectivizes the transaction from the point of view of the BUYER role, on which attention is therefore focused, while sell perspectivizes it from the point of view of the SELLER role. The English words buyer and seller, respectively, of course directly denote these two elements of the commercial transaction frame. In the case of polysemous words, each individual sense is assumed to evoke a different frame, or a different aspect of the same frame (the latter possibility will be argued in ch. 3 below to be an important explanatory factor in semantic change). As an example of the first type of polysemy, the polysemy of the word mouth can be explained as the profiling of the opening of a container against different kinds of bases, i.e. different kinds of containers (heads, caves, rivers, etc.) (cf. Croft & Cruse 2004: 19). An example of the second type would be words for “to rent”, which in several languages are polysemous between an etymological “renting-out” sense and a newer “obtain-by-rental” sense, cf. the alternative translations of (4). As argued by Waltereit (1998: 75ff), this polysemy most probably arose because the two senses represent different profilings of one and the same event-type, and because, in many contexts (such as that in (5)), either sense may be understood without creating problems for communication. (4) (5)

Fernand a loué une chambre à Delphine. ‘Fernand rented a room to / from Delphine.’ [Sign in an apartment window] Chambre à louer. ‘Room to let / for rent.’

Frames are linked to one another in virtue of a variety of relations, some of the more important of which are (cf. Ruppenhofer et al. 2005: 7f): • Inheritance, which is defined as a taxonomic relation. The example given by Ruppenhofer et al. is the Revenge frame, which is a subtype of the Rewards-andpunishments frame. • Using, defined in terms of presupposition or backgrounding. For instance, the Speed frame “uses” the Motion frame. • Subframe (already mentioned above), defined in terms of subevents of more complex events. Thus, the Criminal-process frame has a number of subframes, such as Arrest, Arraignment, Trial, and Sentencing.

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface: A Conceptual Framework

11

Words belonging to the same or neighboring frames are conceptually linked in the minds of language users. This, I take it, can be explained by considerations of cognitive economy, concepts being presumably more easily remembered if they can be integrated with other neighboring concepts. Moreover, in some cases, a word evoking one frame may be used with words that evoke a different, but related frame, thus giving rise to particular nuances of meaning. For instance, the German verbs essen and fressen both denote the activity of eating, but while essen evokes a frame where the agent is human, fressen evokes one where the agent is an animal. Hence, if used with a human subject, as in (6), fressen will convey the idea that the subject referent eats in an animal-like way: (6)

Wolfgang hat die Pizza gefrisst. ‘Wolfgang has eaten the pizza (in a gluttonous and / or less than savory way).’

Clauses and sentences will typically evoke several different frames simultaneously, some of which may be highly abstract. Thus, in an example like (7) (from Ruppenhofer et al. 2005: 23, their (9)) evokes at least three frames: a telephone-calling frame due to the presence of the verb call, an office-frame evoked by the direct object the office, and an iteration-frame evoked by the adverb again: (7)

Lee called the office again.

Elements like again are of particular interest in the context of the present work: they constitute so-called “extra-thematic” frame elements, and belong, not to the “host frame” as such (in casu, the telephone-calling frame), but to very abstract frames that “take them as well as the targets that they modify as arguments” (Ruppenhofer et al. 2005: 23). It is clear that the French phasal adverbs in all of their various uses must be included among such extra-thematic elements. In ch. 4 infra, we will see how their basic phasal meanings can be described in frame-based terms. In the case of complex clauses and discourse, extra-thematic elements such as connectives will signal specific ways of unifying the frames evoked by the component clauses, thereby providing a natural explanation of certain non-truth-conditional inferences that will typically be made. Thus, for instance, the connective so evokes a cause-result frame, where the roles of cause and result must be filled by abstract entities such as facts, events, or propositions. The frame moreover specifies that the result role is filled by the fact, event, or proposition denoted or implied by whatever linguistic or paralinguistic material follows, or is overlaid on, the connective.1 Hence, one will probably, upon hearing (8) (inspired by Némo 2006: 378), infer both that an alternative means of transportation has (or might have) been envisaged by the speaker, and that the means in question was walking, as opposed to going by car. The 1 This somewhat convoluted phrasing is meant to take into account the fact that neither the cause nor the result connected by so need be expressed by linguistic means, cf. (i) (due to Blakemore 1987: 106), where so connects the speaker’s observation of an extralinguistic fact with a proposition that she has inferred as a result of that observation, and (ii), where the marker connects a linguistically expressed event with an implied conclusion that may be inferred as a result of that event: (i) [Upon seeing the addressee loaded with parcels] So, you’ve spent all your money. (ii) A. Do you think Jonathan and Gina are going to go on dating much longer? The last couple of times I’ve seen them, they’ve been arguing non-stop. B. Well, I saw her at a restaurant the other night having dinner with Max, so… Note also that, in all the examples cited, the cause-result relationship is situated at what Sweetser (1990) calls the ”epistemic” level, that is, the use of so indicates that the speaker is drawing an inference as a result of observing some fact.

12


addressee of an utterance like (9), on the other hand, is likely to infer that the alternative means of transportation envisaged was going by car, as opposed to walking: (8) (9)

1.1

It was far, so I took my bike. It wasn’t far, so I took my bike.

Summary

In this section, I have outlined the general approach to semantics that I will be assuming in this work, namely frame semantics. Frame semantics is crucially a “semantics of understanding”, which, unlike more traditional approaches, sees neither truth conditions, feature decomposition, nor purely intra-linguistic structural relationships as central to an account of meaning. Since frame semantics is not, in the first instance, truth-conditional, and given that many frames are experiential in nature, i.e. based on encyclopedic knowledge of objects, event-types etc., it may seem unclear how the contribution made by semantics to the interpretation of utterances is to be distinguished from that made by pragmatics, or if there is, indeed, any meaningful distinction to be made between the two levels of description. Although he states (1985: 222) that the theory of frame semantics “does not begin with a body of assumptions about [such a distinction]” (his emphasis), Fillmore (1985: 233) takes pains to emphasize that a distinction is made. However, some aspects of utterance interpretation that are traditionally seen as belonging to pragmatics are seen rather as belonging to the “conventional (or ‘literal’ or ‘properly linguistic’) meaning” of sentences, i.e. to their semantics. One of the central purposes of the present study is, as already stated, to elucidate the extraordinary synchronic polyfunctionality of the four French phasal adverbs déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin, and in order not to have to postulate a potentially infinite number of different meanings of these particles, it is therefore crucial that some attempt be made to answer the question of what aspects of the meaning and function of a given item should be seen as determined by the language itself, i.e. by the semantics of the item in question in combination with that of the syntactic constructions in which it can occur, and what aspects are better seen as occasioned by more or less fortuitous aspects of its contexts of occurrence in a wider sense, i.e. by pragmatics. Accordingly, the following sections will attempt to clarify a number of salient issues relating to the study of synchronically polyfunctional lexemes within a frame semantic approach.

2 SEMANTICS VS PRAGMATICS I will follow a tradition that has been well-established in French linguistics at least since Ducrot (1980), and which is clearly also assumed in frame semantics (cf. Fillmore 1985: 233), whereby the distinction between semantics and pragmatics is not in the first instance a distinction between elements of meaning that are truth-conditional and elements of meaning that are not.2 Rather, semantic meaning is that which is – or appears to be – coded in linguistic 2 Hence, the theory of meaning elaborated by Ducrot and his collaborators, a theory which prominently includes, on the one hand, the theory of language-inherent argumentation, and on the other hand, the theory of polyphony (cf. Anscombre & Ducrot 1983, Ducrot et al. 1980, Ducrot 1984, Nølke et al. 2004), is sometimes (misleadingly to scholars grounded in the Anglo-American tradition) referred to as ”Integrated Pragmatics”, despite the fact that it is actually a theory of linguistically coded meaning, i.e. of semantics.


13

expressions3, while pragmatic meaning is the interpretative “surplus” that remains when we subtract semantic (or coded) meaning from that which is taken to be the object of a given speaker’s communicative intentions in a given context. Pragmatic meaning arises as a result of the interaction between coded meanings and the linguistic co-text and situational context in which they appear. Hearers may be assumed to arrive at an interpretation of the pragmatic meaning of a given utterance by attempting to unify the coded meanings of the words and constructions that make up that utterance with what they know (or have reason to believe is the case) about its co- and context. Although this study does not otherwise position itself within Relevance Theory, I will follow Sperber & Wilson (1986: 15) in defining context, not as an external, objectively (and exhaustively?) specifiable phenomenon (as is done by Hymes 1972: 58ff, for instance), but as a cognitive phenomenon, namely a subset of the assumptions that participants in a speech event have about the world. The relevant assumptions may change from one utterance to the next, partly as a result of being updated or changed by previous discourse, and partly by changes in what is perceived to be most salient about the situation in which the speech event takes place. Thus, in (10) (borrowed from Brown & Yule 1983: 202), the underlined it of the fourth clause, though anaphoric, should obviously not be identified with the “active, plump chicken” of the first clause, but must have its reference updated by the information provided by the intervening text. In (11) (borrowed from Blakemore 1988: 236), on the other hand, the potential for interpreting B’s utterance as a change of topic, rather than as a direct quote of what Susan said, will depend, among other things, on the location in which the speech event takes place, and on the paraphernalia – if any – that have been brought along by the participants: (10) (11)

Kill an active, plump chicken. Prepare it for the oven, cut it into four pieces and roast it with thyme for 1 hour. A. What did Susan say? B. You’ve dropped your purse.

On the picture argued for here, pragmatic meaning arises via inferential processes. Contra Sperber & Wilson (1986: 94), I will, however, assume that the type of process in question is of a non-demonstrative nature. 4 Thus, it is a defining feature of pragmatic meaning that it is defeasible. A consequence of this view is that certain types of meaning which, because they are non-truth-conditional, have traditionally been regarded as pragmatic in nature (e.g. Grice’s 1989a[1975] “conventional” implicatures), are redefined here as being semantic meanings due their non-inferential, coded nature. This will be discussed in greater depth in sect. 3 infra.

3

This is also the accepted view in Relevance Theory (cf. Blakemore 1987). It appears, at least at first blush, that pragmatic meanings may sometimes arise as the result of a deductive process. In (i) (borrowed from Carston 2002: 140), the intended interpretation ”B has invited a man to the function” is arrived at deductively via the implicit major premiss ”All fathers are men”, with B’s utterance constituting the minor premiss: (i) A. Have you invited any men to the function? B. I’ve invited my father. The question is, however, whether this interpretation is truly pragmatic in nature, in spite of its perceived indirectness. It is true that it can be explained as the result of applying Grice’s Quantity 1 and Relation maxims, and hence, as a conversational implicature. However, it differs sharply from ”normal” implicatures in not being defeasible. Even in the (pretty unlikely) event that B’s father is a transsexual or a hermaphrodite, the assumption that the fact of being a father does not semantically entail that s/he is, at some level, a man would make B’s utterance simply meaningless as a response to A’s question. 4

14 2.1

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface Content-level uses vs context-level uses of phasal adverbs

A closely related consequence of drawing the semantics / pragmatics distinction in terms of coding vs inference, rather than in terms of truth-conditionality vs non-truth-conditionality, is that a certain use (due to van Dijk 1979) of the adjectives “semantic” and “pragmatic”, which is common in the literature on adverbials and connectives, becomes infelicitous due to its potential for sowing confusion. I am referring to the usage whereby the use of the conjunction because is frequently called “semantic” in contexts like (12), and “pragmatic” in contexts like (15): (12) (13) (14) (15) (16)

(17)

Jo is applying for a job at Cambridge because she’s unhappy at the Sorbonne. Jo is not applying for a job at Cambridge because she’s unhappy at the Sorbonne, but because her husband lives in England. Is Jo applying for at job at Cambridge because she’s unhappy at the Sorbonne? Jo is in love with Max, because she prepared camera-ready copy of his 500page monograph as a favor to him. #Jo is not in love with Max because she prepared camera-ready copy of his 500-page monograph as a favor to him, but because she bought him flowers for Valentine’s Day. #Is Jo in love with Max because she prepared camera-ready copy of his 500page monograph as a favor to him?

The justification for this terminology is, of course, that the causal connection between the main clause and the adverbial clause is truth-conditional in (12), as evidenced, for instance, by the fact that it can fall under the scope of negation or interrogation, as in (13)-(14). In (15), on the other hand, the connection is non-truth-conditional (more specifically, epistemic, cf. Sweetser 1990), given that the speaker is not presenting the fact that Jo prepared camera-ready copy of Max’s manuscript as the reason for her being in love with him, but rather as an argument for the conclusion (i.e. as a reason for believing) that she is in love with him. If anything, a realworld causal connection between these two states-of-affairs would most likely go in the opposite direction (i.e. Jo’s being in love with Max might be a reason for her being willing to prepare CRC for him). Hence, as the infelicity of (16)-(17) shows, an epistemic / argumentational connection like that in (15) cannot meaningfully become the focus of negation or interrogation. However, as far as I am concerned, there is no reason to consider the epistemic use of because in (15) as any less coded, i.e. any less “semantic”, than the truth-conditional use in (12). The epistemic meaning is not inferred on the basis of the truth-conditional meaning on every occasion where it is relevant, but is better seen as an established polysemy of connectives like because in several languages. For one thing, the epistemic interpretation is not defeasible in an utterance like (15), on pain of rendering the assertion meaningless, or at least quite bizarre (based on what experience teaches us about causes and effects in the realm of affection in general). Secondly, sentences containing truth-conditional and epistemic because-equivalents, respectively, have different syntactic and prosodic properties in a number of languages. Thus, in English (as in several other languages, including French), we normally find an intonational break between the main clause and the adverbial clause when because is epistemic. This is marked by the use of a comma in (15), as opposed to (12), which may perfectly naturally feature a single, unbroken


15

intonation contour. Moreover, in languages like Danish or German (cf. Günthner 1996), where main and subordinate clauses have different word orders, the use of the equivalents of truthconditional because will result in subordinate-clause word order, whereas the use of epistemic because requires main-clause word order, cf. the Danish examples in (18)-(19): (18)

(19)

Vi kunne ingenting se fordi lyset ikke var tændt. ‘We couldn’t see anything because the lights weren’t on.’ → subordinate clause Neg-V word order in because-clause Anne var ikke kommet hjem endnu, fordi lyset var ikke tændt. ‘Anne hadn’t come home yet, because the lights weren’t on.’ → main clause V-Neg word order in because-clause

For these reasons, although many people would – by analogy – be happy to refer to the uses of the French phasal adverbs toujours and enfin in (21)-(20), for instance, as “semantic”, and to their uses in (23)-(22) as “pragmatic”, I will refer instead to the former type of uses as “content-level” uses, and to the latter type as “context-level” uses: (20)

(21) (22) (23)

Hier soir, Florence a dîné, elle a regardé un peu la télé, et enfin elle s’est couché. ‘Last night, Florence had dinner, watched a bit of TV, and finally went to bed.’ Paul habite toujours à Lille. ‘Paul still lives in Lille.’ Le film était bien – enfin, pas mal. ‘The movie was good – well, not bad, anyway.’ Téléphone-lui, toujours ! ‘Give him/her a call, anyway!’

An additional reason for this choice of terminology is that, while enfin in the content-level, properly phasal, use exemplified in (20) is truth-conditional in the strict sense of rendering the assertion untruthful if Florence went to bed before she started to watch TV, the phasal use of toujours exemplified in (21) affects the truth conditions of its host utterance only to the extent of weakly5 presupposing that Paul has lived in Lille for some time prior to the time of reference (or “topic time”, as I prefer to call it, cf. ch. 4 infra). This means that the utterance will not be false, but only misleading, if Paul is taking up residence in Lille on the very day the utterance is produced. As for the phasal use of déjà in (24) infra, it carries only a weak presupposition to the effect that the opposite state-of-affairs was actively seen by some relevant individual as at least possible (although not necessarily actual) prior to topic time, whereas other essential elements of its contribution to the meaning of the utterance as a whole have no truthconditional effects at all. Yet, intuitively, one feels that enfin, toujours, and déjà in (20), (21), and (24) have something in common semantically, and, moreover, that the difference between the two déjà’s in (24) and in (25) closely parallels that between the two uses of toujours exemplified in (21) and (23), for instance. (24) 5

Pierre a déjà déménagé à Lille.

A “weak” presupposition is defined, following Nølke (1983: 33) as one that is not necessarily shared by the interlocutor before the utterance is produced, but which the speaker has reason to assume will be accommodated (cf. Lewis 1979) by the hearer without further ado. A “strong” presupposition, on the other hand, is one that must already be shared by both speaker and hearer in order for the utterance to be felicitous. It is an empirical question whether natural-language items ever encode strong presuppositions.

16


(25)

‘Pierre has already moved to Lille.’ Téléphone-lui, déjà ! ‘Just give him a call to start with (then we’ll see what happens after that)!’

What the content-level uses of enfin, toujours, and déjà seem to have in common, is that they bear saliently either on a state-of-affairs in some real or imagined world that is referred to in their host clause or on the relation between that state-of-affairs and other (real or imagined) states-of-affairs. Their context-level uses, on the other hand, primarily express speakers’ comments on the relations between described state-of-affairs and the discourse itself (including, but not limited to, the way it is represented linguistically) or the wider speech situation (including, but not limited to, the subjective attitudes to the state-of-affairs in question that may be entertained by either the speaker, the hearer or some relevant third party). The distinction between content-level and context-level uses of a given lexeme largely corresponds to the distinction drawn by Dik et al. (1990) (see Figure 2.1 infra, borrowed from Ramat & Ricca 1998: 192, who refine Dik et al.’s model), between adverbials that belong at the “representational” level of the clause and those that belong at the “interpersonal” level. There are two reasons, however, for preferring the terms content-level vs context-level: First, Dik et al.’s model is a syntactic one which is meant to account for the structure of clauses. As Figure 2.1 shows, connective adverbials, whose role is to link syntactically independent clauses at the text level, thus fall outside the model, i.e. they belong neither at the representational nor at the interpersonal level. They are, however, very naturally conceived of as context-level items. Secondly, context-level items that function below the level of the clause, like enfin in the metalinguistic corrective use exemplified in (26), may not be very obviously “interpersonal” in nature, at least not in any interesting sense of the word: (26)

Seulement trois, enfin, quatre personnes sont venus à la reunion. ‘Only three, well actually, four people came to the meeting.’

Dik et al. (1990) moreover formulate a set of heuristic tests for determining the content-level vs context-level status of any given item. These tests will be discussed in ch. 5 infra.

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface: A Conceptual Framework 17 [Figure 2.1: Classification of adverbs, according to Ramat & Ricca 1998: 192]

2.2

Instructional semantics

It was argued above that the semantics / pragmatics distinction is orthogonal to the distinction between elements of meaning that are truth-conditional vs elements of meaning that are nontruth-conditional. Thus, to the extent that it cannot be calculated by a hearer who is ignorant of the precise meaning of the connective, the notion of adversativity expressed by the use of but in (27) is a coded element of meaning, hence, on the present view, semantic. At the same time,

18


however, most people would agree that it is not truth-conditional, given that (27) appears to have the same truth-value as (28) in all contexts:6 (27) (28)

Phil is ugly, but rich. Phil is ugly, and rich.

On the other hand, the default inference from the use of some to the meaning “some, but not all” is clearly defeasible in (29) (as shown by the complete naturalness of the alternative formulation in (30), as opposed to the infelicity of (31)). Hence, it must be classified as a pragmatic element of meaning. But note that this inferred meaning becomes truth-conditional if the discourse is continued as in (32)(cf. Levinson 2000: 219): (29) (30) (31) (32)

Some of my students understand GCI theory. Some of my students, indeed, most likely all of them, understand GCI theory. *Not all of my students, in fact, most likely all of them, understand GCI theory. Some of my students understand GCI theory. The rest will probably fail the course.

In an incremental model of utterance (and, a fortiori, discourse) processing, the basically defeasible nature of the “some, but not all” implicature at the time the first sentence of (32) is uttered, can, I think, be maintained nevertheless. What examples like (32) seem to suggest is that there is a limited window of opportunity (perhaps no more than one clause long in the default case) for both speakers and hearers to cancel or question unintended or unwarranted meanings in an interactionally neutral way, following which the context will be updated with the information thus conveyed. After this point, cancelation – although still possible – will be interactionally highly marked, because it will brand the preceding discourse as misleading, and it will therefore tend to be avoided for reasons of politeness (cf. Brown & Levinson 1987). The central point is then that there is no qualitative leap from (potentially) referential to nonreferential meanings when we move from the semantic to the pragmatic level. Indeed, the difference between (27) and (28) is non-referential in nature despite the fact that it relies on the coded meaning of the conjunctions. Conversely, the “not all” implicature conveyed by the use of some is referential in nature. Instead, the essential difference between semantic and pragmatic meanings lies in their respective degrees of “(un)avoidability” at the time the host clause is processed. Now, researchers within Relevance Theory, in particular, have argued that qualitative distinctions can, however, be drawn both among those meanings that are conceived of as semantic / coded in nature, and among those that are conceived of as pragmatic / inferential in nature. To start with the latter, Relevance Theorists, and other scholars of a radically contextualist persuasion, such as François Recanati (e.g. 2004), have argued that certain types of contextually inferred meanings are, in fact, part of “what is said” by speakers, and hence, effectively non-defeasible even when utterances are consider in isolation. I am referring to the kinds of inferred meanings that enter into what Relevance Theory calls the ”explicature” of an utterance, i.e. that uniquely and fully specified proposition which should, according to 6

See further discussion in sect. 3.2 infra.


19

contextualists, be seen as the truth-conditionally relevant one expressed by the utterance in question in its specific context of occurrence (e.g. Carston 2002: ch. 2).7 Thus, for instance, it is argued that the “explicature” of an utterance like (33) does not simply consist in the proposition that is linguistically expressed, namely “It will – at some future point in time – take the speaker, the hearer(s) and / or one or more third persons an amount of time superior to zero to get to a certain, contextually specified location, which is different from the one they currently find themselves in at the time of utterance”. That proposition is, of course, trivially true and hence uninformative in and of itself, so the explicature will consist, rather, in the inferentially strengthened proposition ”It will – at some future point in time – take the speaker, the hearer(s) and / or one or more third persons longer to get to a certain, contextually specified location, which is different from the one they currently find themselves in at the time of utterance, than the hearer(s) may think”: (33)

It’ll take us some time to get there.

An attempt at complete deconstruction of the notion of explicature in this chapter would take us too far afield. Suffice it to say, first of all, that there is, in ordinary interaction, demonstrably no ban on utterances that cannot easily be expanded inferentially into fully and uniquely specified propositions. Thus, one would be hard pressed to precisely and exhaustively specify exactly what it is that boy scouts are supposed to be prepared for, according to (34), the famous motto of the boy scout movement:8 (34)

Be prepared!

Secondly, nor is there, as (35) shows, demonstrably any ban on uttering trivially true propositions that cannot easily be expanded into uniquely and fully specifiable, more informative ones: (35)

Boys will be boys.

And thirdly, Hansen (submitted) shows empirically that the types of inferential meanings that are claimed by Relevance Theory and by Recanati to be an unavoidable part of the interpretation of certain utterances, are, in fact, systematically defeasible in various types of contexts (forensic contexts being a salient example). Hence, they actually do fulfil the central criterion for being classified as pragmatic implicatures in terms of the definition offered in the present chapter. With respect to semantic / coded meanings, Relevance Theorists draw a distinction between “conceptual” and “procedural” meanings (cf. Blakemore 1987). As the name indicates, conceptual meanings are those that map onto concepts in hearers’ mental encyclopedias. Typical examples of such meanings would be the semantic content of concrete or abstract nouns like cat or virtue, of verbs like run or believe, or of adjectives like green or disagreeable.

7

As a matter of fact, it seems that it is mainly contextualists who (sometimes) insist that propositions must be uniquely and exhaustively specifiable in order to be used communicatively. Note that it will not do to say that boy scouts must be prepared for any conceivable event or phenomenon: on the contrary, upon a moment’s reflection, one has the very strong intuition that the motto could not be intended to comprise interpretations such as ”Be prepared for George Allen to concede the 2006 election to the Democrats”, to take just one example.

8

20


Procedural meanings, on the other hand, provide instructions to hearers on how the conceptual meanings expressed in an utterance should be combined and processed. Typical examples of procedural meanings would be the semantic content of function words like auxiliaries, or of connectives such as but or after all, but also, for instance, the coded content of politeness markers such as the informal vs formal so-called “T / V-distinction” found in many languages in the subset of personal pronouns that may be used to refer to one’s addressee(s) (cf. Brown & Gilman 1972). A similar conception of linguistic meanings as processing instructions has been common in the French tradition deriving from both Ducrot (e.g. Ducrot et al. 1980: 12) and Culioli (e.g. 1990)9. The relevance-theoretical position in fact represents a retreat with respect to the French tradition, in as much as the latter sees not just some, but all, coded meanings as basically instructional. As will be seen in sect. 6 infra, such a conception of linguistic meaning can, in fact, be traced back at least to the end of the 19th century, in the work of the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce. It is, moreover, clearly compatible with the frame semantic approach, where the notion that at least some types of meaning can be viewed as instructions is mentioned in passing by Fillmore (1985: 234). The idea is that, seen from the angle of comprehension, word meanings and sentence meanings instruct hearers on how to build communicatively adequate mental representations of speakers’ meanings. Seen from the production angle, linguistic meanings can be viewed as ”traces” of the speaker’s cognitive activity in representing to herself mentally what she means to communicate (cf. Culioli 1990: 22). In some cases, it is fairly clear, even at an intuitive level, that an at least partially instructional view of linguistic meaning enables a better description than a purely conceptual view. Take the use of the quantifiers little and a little, as in the mini-exchanges in (36)-(37) (cf. Ducrot 1970): (36)

(37)

A. I’m not in the mood for cooking. Do you want to go to McDonald’s tonight? B. I have (a little / #little) money, so why not. A. I’m not in the mood for cooking. Do you want to go to McDonald’s tonight? B. I have (little / #a little) money, so I’d prefer not to.

We could choose to say that both these quantifiers, little and a little, map onto the concept of a small amount, the difference between them being that little is upwardly bounded, such that its truthful use in (37) is incompatible with a state-of-affairs in which the speaker is actually in possession of a large sum of money at the time of speaking. A little is not upwardly bounded in this way, but carries only a generalized conversational implicature to the effect that the total amount of money actually possessed by the speaker of (36) is not large. As shown by the contrast between (38) and (39), this appears to give us the truth conditions of the two quantifiers. (38) (39)

9

*I have little money – actually, if truth be told, quite a lot. I have a little money – actually, if truth be told, quite a lot.

Note that Culioli’s theory of enunciation was developed in a number of papers prior to the publication of the cited volume.


21

The problem is that – assuming a context where it is part of the common ground that McDonald’s is a cheap restaurant – such a semantic description provides no explanation of why only one member of the pair is natural in each of the above exchanges. That fact, however, can be elegantly explained in an instructional framework. Backtracking a bit, processing instructions may have many different objectives. One (no doubt prominent) objective may be to make the hearer construct a mental representation allowing him to estimate the truth value of what is said, something that evidently includes a representation of objectively verifiable relations between states-of-affairs. A different, frequently additional (although, in many contexts, far from accessory), objective might be to instruct the hearer on how to represent the speaker’s understanding of the social relationship between the two. Had A formulated her question in (36)-(37) in French, for instance, she would have had to choose between two 2nd person pronouns, an informal tu and a formal vous, when referring to the addressee, and consequently, also between a singular and a plural form of the finite verb. Her choice might, but need not, also have consequences for the choice of other linguistic forms found in the same sentence, e.g. the choice between a full vs a colloquially abbreviated form of the name McDonald’s, cf. the different possible translations in (40)-(41) (40) (41)

T’as envie d’aller au McDo ce soir ? Vous avez envie d’aller au McDonald’s ce soir ?

Yet another type of instruction is that which is expressed in the choice between little and a little in (36)-(37), namely an instruction on how to process the host clause as part of a (possibly implicit) argumentational sequence. That is, linguistic meanings may instruct the addressee on how to reconstruct the intended rhetorical relations between different parts of the discourse, between an utterance and some element of the context, or between an utterance and some inference that the speaker invites him to make. In both (36) and (37), the clause containing little / a little is presented as an argument for some conclusion. In (36), where only a little is felicitous, the intended conclusion is that expressed in the second clause, i.e. that the speaker is willing to go to a restaurant tonight, as opposed to eating at home. Due to the use of little, the first clause of (37), on the other hand, instructs the hearer to envisage the opposite conclusion. In other words, little and a little code inverse argumentational directions, as it were. They therefore belong to and evoke very different frames. Informally speaking, the quantifier little semantically instructs the hearer to process the content of a clause containing the phrase little N as having the same argumentational direction as a clause containing a similar phrase no N, while being rhetorically weaker than the latter type.10 Thus, for argumentational purposes, <no, little> form a scale of the type <strong item, weak item>, a scale which must be reconstructed by the hearer as part of correctly interpreting the utterance. Clearly, this is not an entailment scale (cf. Horn 1989: 231), as (42) does not entail, nor is it entailed by, (43), no matter whether “entailment” is understood in the strict logical sense, or in a weaker, pragmatic, sense (cf. Fauconnier 1975). Indeed, while rhetorically co-oriented, the two are logically incompatible: (42) (43)

I have little money. I have no money.

10 Witness the naturalness (on several levels…) of the exchange in (i): (i) A. So do you expect that your new position as editor of Studies in Scalar Semantics will make you wealthy? B. Hardly. I’ll probably earn little money from it – perhaps even no money at all.

22


Nor is it an ad hoc, purely contextually constructed, scale (cf. Hirschberg 1991), such as the one which, due to the presence of even, must be reconstructed by any hearer of (44) (i.e. a scale like <studying Sanskrit, studying Ancient Greek, studying Latin>), for, unlike what is the case with an utterance like He’s even studied Sanskrit, which, taken in isolation, could invoke any number of different scales constrained only by the stipulation (coded by even) that the notion of studying Sanskrit should appear at or near the top of them11, (42) appears to evoke the same scale on every occasion of its use. The existence of the postulated rhetorical scale thus appears to be an indispensable part of the coded meaning of the quantifier little. (44)

Max is quite the Indo-Europeanist. He’s even studied Sanskrit.

A clause containing a little N, on the other hand, will have the same overall direction as, but be rhetorically weaker than, one containing much N. Note, however, that as Ducrot (1970: 26) points out, a little N also differs crucially from little N in that the <W, S> scale it forms together with much N is a logical entailment scale: thus, I have a little money is both logically compatible with, and entailed by, I have much money, but, as already observed, use of the former, weaker, expression carries a generalized conversational implicature to the effect that the speaker does not vouch for the truth of the stronger expression. Hence, given an identical context, and identical continuations of the discourse, only one member of the minimal pair little / a little can be used felicitously. Exactly what conclusion is aimed at by one or the other on a given occasion of use is, however, entirely a matter of contextual inference, i.e. of pragmatics (cf. Hansen 1998a: 18ff).12 Returning to the notion of semantic instructions, it may, in the case of other types of expressions, particularly those belonging to the major parts of speech, be less obvious why a conceptual account of their meaning is inadequate. Consider, however, a pair of adjectives like economical and stingy, which, like little and a little can be used to describe what is objectively speaking the same state-of-affairs in the world, but which, much like the two quantifiers, differ

11

Thus, in a context like (i), the relevant ad hoc scale might, for instance, be something like : (i) Max is a real yoga-freak. He’s even studied Sanskrit. 12 This seems to supports the view advocated by Anscombre & Ducrot (1983: ch. 3) where the logical properties of scales are not theoretically central, whereas their rhetorical properties are. These authors (1989) even deny that truth conditions should have any status within a theory of natural-language semantics. But even if one adheres – as I will do in this book, and as is done also by Harder (1996) and Nølke et al. (2004: 36) – to a less radical version of the instructional view of meaning, in which truth conditions may be seen as an important, but nevertheless derived, feature of communicated meanings, we may assume that a great many linguistic items (including not only lexical items, but also grammatical morphemes and constructions, such as the superlative, cf. Fauconnier 1975) have the property of instructing the hearer to understand the concepts marked by them as occupying a given rung on some scale. The essential property of all such scales is that they serve rhetorical purposes, such that items higher on the scale are rhetorically stronger, i.e. constitute stronger arguments for a contextually given conclusion, than items lower on the scale. Certain items, like even, which are not themselves part of a scale, will do no more than indicate the position of the rung in question, leaving the hearer to identify the relevant scale for himself, with the aid of co(n)text (cf. Kay 1990). The scales evoked by such items are themselves purely pragmatic, ad hoc ones, but the idea that a scale should be reconstructed, and that the item marked (for instance, Sanskrit in (44)) should be construed as occupying a specific rung on it, is a matter of the semantics of the marker used. Other items, like little and a little explicitely code the nature of the scale to be reconstructed, on which they themselves occupy a rung. Among these “coded”, i.e. properly semantic, scales, some (like that coded by little) will be purely rhetorical, while others (like that coded by a little) will – in addition to their rhetorical properties – be endowed with (quasi) logical, i.e. entailment, properties.


23

in their positive vs negative evaluation of that state-of-affairs, thus being oriented towards very different sets of possible conclusions, as (45)-(46) show: (45) (46)

Severus is economical: he’ll make an excellent husband. Severus is stingy: he’ll make a horrible husband.

Thus, the use of economical in (45) semantically instructs the addressee to interpret the utterance as evoking a frame in which the urge to limit spending is conceived of as a positive quality in a person, and to identify some set of consequences potentially accruing from this quality which may be beneficial to the spouse of such a person. The parallel use of stingy in (46), on the other hand, evokes a very different frame, in which generosity is an absolute virtue, and instructs the hearer to identify a set of undesirable consequences of its absence. Even the meaning of a noun like coffee, which in and of itself appears to be argumentationally neutral, but which can be used to refer to at least five different types of things, as in (47)-(51) (cf. Hansen 1998c: 248; also Harder & Togeby 1993: 478) can usefully be described in instructional terms: (47) (48) (49) (50) (51)

They grow coffee in Nicaragua. (= the fruit of a particular type of shrub) We’re out of coffee. Could you buy a can on your way home from work? (= ground coffee beans) Coffee would keep me awake. (= hot beverage made from ground coffee beans) I’d like a two-scoop cone, please. Coffee and butter pecan. (= a flavor resembling that of a hot beverage made from ground coffee beans) This blouse comes in a variety of colors: coffee, burgundy, ivory. (= a dark brown color resembling that of ground coffee beans)

If the linguistic meaning of coffee maps directly onto a concept, then we seem to be faced with the following descriptive choice: Either we can posit the existence of one single concept which simultaneously evokes all these five types of referents in every one of the examples above. This seems counter-intuitive, as a person who utters (50) is not necessarily even thinking of fresh coffee beans still on the shrub, much less intending that the hearer represent those fresh beans in his mental discourse model. Alternatively, we can postulate that hearers have, in their mental lexica, five different concepts to choose from when interpreting the word coffee in the context of a whole sentence. In that case, the claim is that the lexeme coffee is polysemous. While I will argue in sect. 4 infra that many lexemes are, indeed, polysemous, I will also argue that distinct senses of one and the same lexeme ought not to be “multiplied beyond necessity”. In the case of coffee, the five different concepts involved in (47)-(51) intuitively seem so closely related to one another that one would prefer to describe them as different facets of what is ultimately the same type of referent. This would make the interpretative variety in (47)-(51) a matter not of coded semantic meaning, but rather of what Cruse (1986: 52) calls “contextual modulation”, i.e. a matter of pragmatic inference aimed at unifying the interpretation of coffee with that of the rest of the sentence in which it occurs. To account for this, it is useful to think of the word coffee not as directly denoting a concept, but as instructing the hearer to actively construct a co(n)textually appropriate concept of “coffee” based on a choice between the experiential frames with which coffee is associated in

24


his mental encyclopedia. It will further instruct the hearer to enter the referent so chosen into his mental discourse model. Since not only language, but also other expressive means can be used to encourage fellow interactants to access their knowledge stores and to take into account when interpreting the communicator’s intended meaning something which they find there, the instructional view is – as pointed out by Hansen (1998c: 245) – in principle able to integrate the study of linguistic meaning with that of, for instance, paralinguistic, gestural, and proxemic features of communication. This appears to be a distinct advantage of the approach, in as much as grammatically incomplete utterances may sometimes rely, for their interpretation, on being complemented by signals from substantially different semiological systems (cf. Hansen 2000: 310f), witness the perfectly common attestation of multimodal messages of the type in (52): (52)

That guy Adrienne set me up with last night was just so totally [speaker sticks her tongue way out of her mouth and makes a gagging noise]!

To summarize the main point of the discussion, in the framework argued for here, all of semantics is, in the first instance, conceived of as instructional, despite the fact that the use of an important subtype of lexemes ultimately aims at giving hearers access to conceptual information. So far, I have discussed the instructional view of semantics only at the level of individual lexemes. On the assumption made in different versions of Construction Grammar that grammatical items and syntactic constructions, too, have meanings (cf. Goldberg 1995, Croft & Cruse 2004: ch. 9), they may be thought of as conveying processing instructions, as well, namely instructions on the order in which the instructions conveyed by individual lexemes should be carried out, and how the results should be integrated in order to arrive at a coherent interpretation of the clause or sentence as a whole. For instance, hearers’ choice of the correct type of referent for a given noun phrase is surely to some extent constrained by the syntactic role played by that noun phrase vis-à-vis other elements in the clause. Thus, as Goldberg (1995: ch. 2) has convincingly argued, it is the ditransitive construction, not the semantics of the main verb, that is responsible for the fact that in (53), but not in (54) (her (49)-(50)), Chicago must be interpreted as referring metonymically to certain people in Chicago, rather than to the geographical location: (53) (54)

Joe sent Chicago a letter. Joe sent a letter to Chicago.

To take a very simple example of an instructional account of grammatical meaning, Harder (1996: 214) argues that (55) has the semantic structure in (56), the latter conveying instructions of the type spelt out in (57): 13,14 13

Without doubt, this latter kind of representation can – and should – be considerably refined. It seems possible to do so at least in part by integrating the results of work carried out in the recent dynamic semantics “tradition” inaugurated by Heim (1982) and Kamp & Reyle (1993), a framework which – although it is, of course, grounded in a truth-conditional conception of semantics – seems nevertheless to be, in principle, compatible with a view of semantics as basically instructional. Thus, Heim (1982: 276) proposes as an initial formulation of the semantic difference between definite and indefinite NPs, the following rule: ”For every definite, start a new card [in your mental discourse file]; for every definite, update a suitable old card.” As for the closely related theory of Kamp & Reyle, Klaus von Heusinger (p.c.) confirms that nothing prevents an interpretation of DRT representations in instructional terms. Other formal linguists, e.g. Chomsky (1995: 19, 23ff), quite explicitly describe linguistic


(55) (56) (57)

25

Did John go? interr(past(go(John))) Identify John and construct a mental model of him. Make the model instantiate the property ‘go’. Understand this model as applying to a certain past situation. Consider whether the model is true of that situation.

Unlike what was argued in Hansen (1998c: 244), I no longer believe that the instructional approach entails the radical position that coded meanings are not specifiable.15 On the contrary, I now believe it is indispensable to attempt to state, in terms as precise as possible, what is the range of possible coded meanings of individual linguistic items (be they lexemes, morphemes, or larger constructions), in order to explicate, and put constraints on, not only the ways in which these meanings may be unified in the context of whole utterances, but also how meanings may change over time. At the same time, however, the concept of meanings as instructional affords them greater synchronic and diachronic flexibility than a directly representational account does, for – as anyone who has tried to instruct other people to carry out some specific task will have noticed – even the seemingly most precise of instructions leave room for personal creativity. In other words, to paraphrase Ducrot et al. (1980: 33), a given set of instructions can, in practice, be carried out in a number of different ways, with slightly (sometimes even widely) different results. Specifically in respect of linguistic meaning, not only will the way a given instruction is carried out be constrained by what other – perhaps more specific, perhaps partially conflicting – instructions are or have been given in the same utterance or discourse, it will also be constrained by the larger context, including general principles of utterance interpretation, such as those expressed in Grice’s maxims (Grice 1989a[1975]), and finally, by the fact that no two people have exactly identical mental grammars (where grammar includes coded meanings), or identical knowledge and experience on which to draw in constructing concepts and identifying relevant frames with their specific details. The result of carrying out the set of semantic instructions given by an utterance will be a mental representation of what the hearer takes the speaker’s intended meaning to be. Speaker’s meaning being a pragmatic notion, the form that such representations take can only be constrained, and not actually fully determined, by the instructions provided by semantics. This is both synchronically and diachronically an advantage of the instructional approach, because it explains how language – though finite in nature – provides a means for conceptualizing and communicating novel experiences, as well as potentially infinite variations on previous experiences. In sect. 6 infra, and further in ch. 3, sect. 5, I will outline a Peircean approach to meaning which elegantly accounts for how synchronic variation and diachronic change in meaning are grounded in the instructional properties of linguistic items.

semantics as providing instructions to the conceptual-intentional systems of language users, and deny that the primary goal of such instructions is to determine truth conditions. 14 As Goldberg (1995: 13ff) points out, the notion that syntactic constructions have meanings that may coerce the interpretation of individual lexemes does not threaten semantic compositionality, except in an unrealistically strict sense. Indeed, unlike componential grammars, construction grammars provide a natural account of the fact that the majority of idiomatic expressions do, in fact, appear to be partially compositional (Cf. Nunberg et al. 1994; Croft & Cruse 2004: 249ff) 15 This assumption ultimately seems to imply that language has no semantics at all, but only a syntax and a pragmatics, a possibility that is, indeed, suggested by Chomsky (1995: 26).

26 2.3

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface Summary

In this section, I have argued that the boundary between semantics and pragmatics should not be drawn according to whether or not a given element of meaning contributes to the truth conditions of its host utterance, but rather in terms of whether or not that element of meaning can reasonably be argued to be coded in some linguistic item (be it a morpheme, a lexeme, or a syntactic construction) that is present in the utterance. Specifically with respect to the French phasal adverbs, I proposed that we distinguish broadly between their various coded – hence, on the present view, semantic – senses in terms of whether these senses were primarily operative at what I called the “content-level” or at the “context-level”. I argued further that linguistically coded meanings may usefully be conceived of quite generally as processing instructions given by the speaker to the addressee. Hence, propositional meanings, which have traditionally been regarded as central to semantic theory, are secondary, derived entities. This view allows us to give a unitary description of the meanings of linguistic items which researchers in the past few decades have been increasingly tempted to keep apart, namely, on the one hand, the meanings of those items – prominently content words like nouns and verbs – which contribute to the truth conditions of their host utterances, and, on the other hand, the meanings of those items whose principal roles appear to be played at other levels of utterance and discourse interpretation, e.g. non-truth-functional connectives, politeness markers, or certain syntactic constructions. First, so-called content words vs function words / constructions do not fall neatly into a class of purely conceptual meanings, on one side, and a class of purely procedural meanings, on the other. Frequently, one and the same item may contribute to utterance interpretation at several different levels. Secondly, as a rule, even seemingly “pure” content words occur within a variety of experiential frames, and the proper assignment of reference to such words in the content of a specific utterance will frequently depend on the hearer’s accessing the appropriate frame. The present definition of semantics and pragmatics necessitates a critical review of the types of meaning that have traditionally been regarded as pragmatic in nature, namely conventional implicature, conversational implicature (of the generalized and particularized variety), and presupposition. That will be the topic of the next section.

3 TYPES OF (ALLEGEDLY) PRAGMATIC MEANING In this section, I will examine three types of contributions to the situated interpretation of utterances that are commonly (although not invariably) classified as “pragmatic” in the literature, and to which I will need to make reference in my descriptions of the various senses of the French phasal adverbs (chs. 4, 6-7 infra). I will argue that only one of these types of meaning contribution, namely conversational implicature, actually is pragmatic, i.e. principally inferential, in nature. Given the approach to meaning argued for in this work, there is, on the other hand, good reason to consider both conventional implicatures and presuppositions as belonging to semantics.

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface: A Conceptual Framework 3.1

27

Conversational implicature

Based on his theory of conversational cooperation, Grice (1989a[1975]: 37) distinguishes two kinds of conversational implicatures, namely generalized conversational implicatures (henceforth GCI), as exemplified in (58), and particularized conversational implicatures (henceforth PCI), as exemplified in (59): (58) (59)

If you mow the lawn, I’ll give you $10. (>> If and only if you mow the lawn will I give you $10.) [In a café at 10am] A. Do you want a croissant with your coffee? B. I had breakfast just an hour ago. (>> I do not want a croissant with my coffee.)

Conversational implicatures of either type arise as a result of the interaction of a specific utterance, its context of occurrence, and the Cooperative Principle, with its four attendant maxims: Cooperative Principle: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. Maxim of Quantity: 1. Make your contribution as informative as is required. 2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. Maxim of Quality: 1. Do not say what you believe to be false. 2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Maxim of Relation: Be relevant. Maxim of Manner: 1. Avoid obscurity of expression. 2. Avoid ambiguity. 3. Be brief. 4. Be orderly. (Grice 1989a[1975]: 26f) Conversational implicatures are thus defined by the fact that they are: 1) inferential in nature, 2) calculable on the assumption that the Cooperative Principle is being observed, 3) defeasible (i.e. they can and will be canceled if incompatible with prior or subsequent co(n)text), and 4) non-detachable (i.e. they cannot be canceled by replacing the utterance on the basis of which they are calculated by a different type of expression conveying truth-conditionally identical content).16 In (58), the GCI can be argued to be conveyed thanks to the interaction of the maxim of relation with the second submaxim of quantity: if reasons other than the hearer’s mowing the lawn obtain which might, in fact, likewise prompt the speaker to give the hearer ten dollars, then uttering (58) appears at least somewhat misleading.17 Nevertheless, the inference from

16

Note that the fourth property clearly does not hold true of Manner implicatures. (58), of course, also conveys the GCI that the speaker will give the hearer no more than ten dollars for mowing the lawn. Since the example is adduced for illustrative purposes only, I will not explicate the rise of that implicature here. 17

28


“if” to “if and only if” is defeasible, as shown by the possibility of inserting (58) - without contradiction – in a context like (60): (60)

OK son, you say you need $10. Very well, if you mow the lawn, I’ll give you $10. Alternatively, you could chop some fire wood. And if you pester me long enough, I might just give it to you even if you do neither…

In (59), we may assume that the suggested PCI goes through due to interaction between the same two maxims: as Conversation Analysts have shown, a question constitutes the first part of an adjacency pair (Heritage 1984: 246). As such, it specifically projects an answer from the addressee. B’s utterance takes the form of a so-called “preferred utterance type” (Heritage 1984: 265ff), i.e. it is delivered promptly, with no preface or accounts, and there is thus no reason to assume that it is not meant precisely as a relevant answer to A’s question. We know from experience that there are limits to the amount of food that most people are capable of ingesting within a limited period of time, and so if the speaker has eaten only an hour ago, we may plausibly infer that she is not currently hungry. However, this inference, too, is defeasible, as the perfect felicity of the continuation in (61) demonstrates: (61)

[In a café at 10am] A. Do you want a croissant with your coffee? B. I had breakfast just an hour ago… But they do look good, so what the heck!

Thus, GCI and PCI are alike in being calculable via use of the Cooperative Principle and the maxims, but there is an essential difference between them, which may make it appear as if GCI were actually part of the coded meaning of utterances: whereas PCI require very specific kinds of context in order to go through (hence the term “particularized”), GCI rather require very specific kinds of context (including contexts like (60), where the speaker actively takes pains to cancel the implicature) in order to be defeated (hence the term “generalized”). That is, GCI are default meanings, which can be expected to go through in the overwhelming majority of contexts in which the linguistic item or structure they are attached to is used. In other words, the assumption is that, on most occasions, use of the conjunction if will implicate precisely the meaning “if and only if”. That meaning is thus, in the words of Geis & Zwicky (1971), an “invited inference” attached to the lexeme if. Use of the sentence I had breakfast just an hour ago, on the other hand, could implicate any number of different things (or, indeed, fail to implicate anything at all), depending on the specific context in which it is uttered. As observed in Hansen & Waltereit (2006: 256), there is good reason to think that there is another salient difference between GCI and PCI, namely a difference in cognitive status, which has so far been insufficiently appreciated in the literature: Because PCI have to be actively intended by speakers, and will only arise in very specific contexts, they will tend to constitute communicatively central messages. GCI, on the other hand, do not have to be actively intended in this way, but are merely subject to the constraint that they not be actively unintended by speakers who do not take the trouble to cancel them. This makes GCI prototypically backgrounded elements of meaning. Consider (58)-(59) again: the main message that a speaker of (58) is likely to want to communicate is the idea that mowing the lawn is sufficient to earn the hearer ten dollars. This is the arguably “literal” (i.e. linguistically coded) meaning of the utterance. The inferred meaning, that mowing the lawn is also a necessary prerequisite for getting the ten dollars, is intuitively far less central. Thus, B’s reply in (62) strikes one as rather odd. Continuing the


29

exchange in (59) as in (63), on the other hand, is perfectly natural. In both cases, of course, the imagined reply addresses itself directly to the implicature, as opposed to the “literal” meaning of the previous utterance: (62)

(63)

A. If you mow the lawn, I’ll give you $10. B. ??Oh mom, you’re so unreasonable! I was going to suggest I chop some fire wood. [In a café at 10am] A. Do you want a croissant with your coffee? B. I had breakfast just an hour ago. A. OK, I’ll just order one for myself, then.

This difference in cognitive status may explain why, in Levinson’s (1995, 2000) systematization of the notion of GCI, it is assumed that no GCI can be based on the maxim of quality: that maxim has to do with what is true and false about the world, and such matters will typically be part of the communicative foreground. The idea that GCI are backgrounded inferences may appear to be undermined by the fact that, according to Levinson (2000: 105), use of the reduplicative structure in (64) conveys a mannerbased GCI, for, according to the continuation test, this presumed GCI should be a foregrounded element of meaning: (64)

A. I had dinner with Algernon last night, and it was unbelievable. The man just ate and ate! (>> Algernon ate more than one normally would.) B. Some day he’ll explode.

However, Hansen & Waltereit (2006: 261ff) argue that many of Levinson’s examples of manner-based GCI are, in fact, problematic, and that the alleged implicatures are better seen as part of the coded meaning of certain lexemes and constructions. This seems to be the case in (64), as evidenced by the difficulty of canceling the idea that Algernon’s ingestion of food took place on a grander-than-usual scale, cf. (65): (65)

?*Algernon ate and ate, but very little.

Indeed, the category of manner-based GCI may be problematic in and of itself (as is also observed by Traugott 2004, although for different reasons): thus, Hansen & Waltereit (2006: 263) suggest that even those manner-based GCI that clearly are inferential in nature (and which can be classified as backgrounded by the use of the continuation test) may never actually be pure GCI, but seem to invariably involve the generation of a PCI in order to enable a full understanding of the speaker’s meaning.

3.2

Conventional implicature

Grice (1989a[1975]: 25f) also posits a third kind of implicature, which is not based on the Cooperative Principle, namely what he calls conventional implicatures. A classic example of a conventional implicature is the adversative notion that inheres in the English conjunction but. As I argued in sect. 2.2 supra, that notion of adversativity is part of the coded meaning of the conjunction, only it is not truth-conditional, but being truth-conditionally similar to and. In other words, because they are not based on the Cooperative Principle, but on speakers’

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knowledge of the language, conventional implicatures are non-calculable, non-defeasible, and detachable. As a consequence of the way in which semantics has been defined in the preceding section, it is fairly clear that the traditional view of Grice’s conventional implicatures as pragmatic in nature (due to their being non-truth-conditional) cannot be upheld. If linguistically coded meanings ipso facto belong to semantics, then conventionally implicated meanings are as semantic as they come. Not surprisingly, other researchers have come to the same conclusion. Thus, for instance, Blakemore (1987) argues that her “procedural meanings” (cf. sect. 2.2 supra), which seem to all intents and purposes to be identical to the class of conventional implicatures, are precisely “semantic” (not pragmatic) “constraints on relevance”. Coming from the opposite direction, as it were, Bach (1999) argues that conventional implicatures are semantic in nature because, in his view, they do, in fact, affect the truthconditions of what is said, only they express secondary assertions, i.e. ones which, informally speaking, are backgrounded with respect to the main point of the utterance.18 As evidence for this view, he adduces the fact that but can occur in indirect quotations like (66). According to Bach (1999: 339), if Marv believes that agility is directly proportional to size in the normal case, and if he actually uttered (67), then (66) is an inaccurate report of what he said. On the other hand, if Marv actually formulated his utterance as in (68), meaning to convey the idea that size and agility are typically inversely proportional, then (69) would be an incomplete report of what he said: (66) (67) (68) (69)

Marv said that Shaq is huge but that he is agile. Marv: “Shaq is huge and he is agile.” Marv: “Shaq is huge but he is agile.” Marv said that Shaq is huge and that he’s agile.

Additionally, he adduces the minimal pair in (70)-(71), arguing that “[o]bviously, the conditions under which the contrast indicated by but obtains are different from those under which the consequence indicated by so obtains. So the presence of but or so affects the truth conditions of something.” (Bach 1999: 332) (70) (71)

John is a philosopher but he is rich. John is a philosopher so he is rich.

Although I readily concur that the speaker who utters (70) is committed to a different view of the world from that of the speaker who utters (71), there are, nevertheless, several problems with Bach’s argument. The indirect-speech test seems undermined by the fact that, as Cappelen & Lepore (1997) observe, pragmatically acceptable indirect reports commonly differ widely in both form and semantic content from the reported utterance. Indeed, indirect reports may well reproduce, not the actual semantic content of the reported speaker’s utterance, but rather something that is clearly a conversational implicature of that utterance, cf. (73) as a potential indirect report of (72) (from Cappelen & Lepore 1997: 285). Thus, indirect reports do not constitute a reliable test for the precise content of the reported speaker’s explicit truthconditional commitment at the moment of utterance (cf. also Jayez & Rossari 2004). 18 To that extent Bach’s approach is, of course, in accordance with Grice’s view of conventional implicatures as a type of secondary speech act (cf Grice 1989b: 122).

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface: A Conceptual Framework (72) (73)

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[Professor H has just been asked whether Alice has passed her exam] “I didn’t fail any students.” Professor H said that Alice passed her exam.

Further, in a context where the belief that size and agility are usually directly proportional is attributed to Marv, (66) strikes me as perfectly felicitous if the reporting speaker’s aim is to convince a current interlocutor who manifestly holds a belief to the contrary that Shaq is potentially eligible for some task that absolutely requires agility on the part of the performer. Contrariwise, if Marv actually uttered (68), but it is the current interlocutor who believes that size and agility are directly proportional, then (69) is likely to be a more appropriate report than (66), in that context. As for the difference in meaning between (70) and (71), it has, in my view, little to do with truth conditions, but is rather a question of the rhetorical relations that are part of the frames evoked by different argumentational connectives such as but and so. I follow Ducrot (1980: 17) in believing that the most appropriate account of the meaning contribution of but (and its equivalents in other languages) is the one given in (74), where (fishhook) translates as “is an argument for the conclusion”: (74)

p r, q ~r, (p but q) ~r, and ◊(q = ~r)

In other words, a speaker who utters (70) presents the content of the first conjunct p, viz. the fact that John is a philosopher, as an argument for some contextually determined conclusion (perhaps “John’s income is not high”). However, she also presents the second conjunct q as an argument for the opposite conclusion, and instructs the hearer to understand q as the argument she regards as decisive in the context. Analogously, we may assume that a speaker uttering (71) presents the first clause p as a strong argument for the conclusion expressed in the second clause q. Now, clearly, a given state of affairs may well be presented as an argument for some conclusion without there being necessarily any factual relation between the two. Arguments may be valid or invalid, strong or weak, but – rhetorically speaking – anything that is presented as such is ipso facto an argument. In other words, “argumenthood” is strictly speaking independent of truth conditions. In support of this, notice that what is objectively the same state-of-affairs can be presented, by quite subtle linguistic means, as an argument for two opposite conclusions, as the following examples (adapted from Anscombre & Ducrot 1983: 80) show (cf. also (36)-(37), discussed in sect. 2.2 above): (75) (76)

It’s (almost / #not yet quite) dark. You should turn on your headlights. It’s (not yet quite / #almost) dark. You needn’t turn on your headlights.

In the frame-semantic approach advocated here, conventional implicatures can be seen as a subtype of extrathematic elements, their function being to evoke very abstract frames that take other frames as arguments.

32 3.3

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface Presupposition

Finally, we come to presuppositions. Like GCI and conventional implicatures, presuppositions are tied to the use of specific lexicogrammatical means (for a list of the lexemes and constructions that are commonly accepted as presupposition triggers, see Levinson 1983: 181ff). For this reason, they, too, have been the object of a longstanding debate as to whether they are best classified as semantic or pragmatic in nature. For instance, recent work in formal semantics prefers to see presuppositions as a particular kind of entailment, and hence as semantic (e.g. Kadmon 2001: 136), while relevance theorists (e.g. Sperber & Wilson 1986: 202ff) have argued that presuppositions are not an independent phenomenon at all, but rather a type of backgrounded implicature, and that, as such, they belong to pragmatics. The crucial defining features of presuppositions, which render their status problematical, are well-known (e.g. Levinson 1983: ch. 4): On the one hand, they affect the ascription of a truth value to their host utterances, in as much as utterances whose presuppositions are not satisfied are usually taken either to be false or (perhaps more commonly) to have no truth-value at all. On the other hand, they are not ordinary entailments, given that they remain stable under negation and interrogation, cf. (78)-(79). Finally, presuppositions resemble conversational implicatures in being defeasible, that is, they are sensitive to co(n)textual features, cf. (80): (77)

(78) (79) (80)

[A fourth millennium historian writing a monograph about the 21st century] George W. Bush stepped down as President of the United States six weeks after World War III broke out. (>> World War III broke out.)19 George W. Bush did not step down as President of the United States six weeks after World War III broke out. (>> World War III broke out.) Did George W. Bush step down as President of the United States six weeks after World War III broke out? (>> World War III broke out.) George W. Bush did not step down as President of the United States six weeks after World War III broke out – there never was a World War III!

Frame semantics (cf. Fillmore 1985: 245ff) takes the view that presuppositions belong to semantics, since they require specific linguistic triggers in order to arise. Presuppositions are assumed to be backgrounded elements of meaning, as evidenced by the marked character of discourses in which the continuation of a presupposition-bearing utterance addresses itself to the presupposition rather than to the foregrounded message (cf. also Ducrot 1991[1972]: 81, Jayez & Rossari 2004). Thus, (81) is natural, but (82) is odd, as a continuation of (77). For a sentence with the war as subject to be felicitous in this context, it needs to take a form like that in (83), where the war is referred to by a full NP, marking it as a new topic (activated, but not yet in focus, cf. Gundel et al. 1993): (81) (82) (83)

He was killed a year later in an enemy air strike. ??It lasted three years. The war lasted three years.

In frame semantic terms, presuppositions are seen as obligatory elements of the frames evoked by certain lexicogrammatical triggers. The fact that they can be explicitly denied, as in (80) above, can be explained by assuming that speakers can choose to deny, not just items in a 19 All three examples, of course, also presuppose both that the proper name George W. Bush has a referent, and that George W. Bush had, for some period prior to topic time, been President of the United States. Those presuppositions are not at issue here.


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frame, but also the applicability of the frame itself. Other forms of presupposition cancelation, such as the fact that presuppositions of simplex clauses may not survive in certain types of complex clauses, can be explained in similar ways. For instance, the failure of (85) to “inherit” the presupposition of (84), is straightforwardly accounted for by the fact that the conjunction assuming is an extra-thematic element, which evokes a superordinate “hypothesis” frame; that is, use of assuming explicitly instructs the hearer to construct a hypothetical universe of discourse having the properties specified by the frames evoked by the rest of the conditional clause, and to process the contents of the main clause within that hypothetical frame. Hence, there is no reason why hearers would assume that the properties of the hypothetical universe necessarily also characterize the real world. (84) (85)

John’s children must be grown up by now. (>> John has children.) Assuming he does, in fact, have any children, John’s children must be grown up by now.

In other words, the intuition of formal semanticists like Kadmon (2001: 136), that presuppositions are not really defeasible in the same sense as conversational implicatures, is fundamentally correct: in the case of direct denial, as in (80), it is the frame as such that is deemed inappropriate. In cases like (85), the presupposition that John has children does hold – not in the real world, to be sure, but in the hypothetical discourse model set up by the antecedent clause.

3.4

Summary

In this section, I have discussed three types of meaning that are particularly relevant to the semantics / pragmatics interface. Indeed, the status of two of these types of meaning, namely conventional implicatures and presuppositions, has been controversial for some time. I defined conversational implicatures as the only ones of these elements of meaning which are truly pragmatic, and I further argued that they differ in cognitive status, GCI being backgrounded, while PCI are foregrounded. Conventional implicatures and presuppositions, on the other hand, were classified as semantic. Conventional implicatures can be equated with entire frames evoked by specific “extra-thematic” linguistic items, frames that are normally quite abstract and often of a rhetorical / argumentational type. As for presuppositions, they are best seen as obligatory, but backgrounded, elements of the frames evoked by certain lexemes and constructions. In chs. 6-7 infra, we will see that the various senses of phasal adverbs often differ precisely in the terms of the conversational and conventional implicatures and / or presuppositions they convey. It will also be argued, in those chapters, and in ch. 3, that the foreground / background distinction that has been made use of here is highly relevant to the rise of diachronic changes in the coded meaning of lexemes. This leads to the question of whether and how various coded “senses” of lexemes can be distinguished from contextually produced variations in interpretation.

4 THE PROBLEM OF POLYFUNCTIONALITY IN SEMANTIC / PRAGMATIC DESCRIPTION It is an oft-noted fact that lexemes and constructions which can function as what is commonly known as “pragmatic markers” (cf. Fraser 1996, Hansen 2006) prototypically have

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homophonous counterparts that are not so used, but which express meanings that might informally be described as more “literal”, in the sense that these meanings tend to concern aspects of the situation described by the host utterance, as opposed to aspects of the text itself or of the larger speech situation. The contrast between the uses of too in (86)-(87),20 or between the uses of well in (88)-(89), are cases in point: (86) (87) (88) (89)

Algernon went to Cecily’s party. Ernest went, too. A. Algernon didn’t go to Cecily’s party. – B. He did, too! I thought the meeting went well, didn’t you? A. How’d the meeting go? - B. Well, not badly…

As already noted, the four adverbs that are the focus of this study are highly polyfunctional in contemporary French. It will be shown in chs. 6-7 infra that, in all four cases, the various extant functions have developed gradually over periods of several hundred years, starting from a relatively “literal” source meaning, and following a path of increasing “pragmaticalization” (in a sense to be defined in chapter 3, sect. 2.2 infra). Such a state of affairs poses a challenge to descriptions not only of the synchronic meanings of the items in question, but also of the interaction between synchronic meanings and diachronic development.

4.1

Homonymy, monosemy, polysemy

When a given linguistic form acquires new content, its previously existing meaning may either disappear, or it may continue to exist alongside the new meaning. It would appear that the latter state of affairs, known as “layering” (Hopper 1991: 22f), is by far the most common (Traugott & Dasher 2002: 11f), and as such it raises the question of how the form-meaning association following an extension of meaning is represented in the lexicon. Essentially, there are three alternative ways of conceiving of the association of a single form with several different interpretations. The simplest is to assume that the apparent unicity of form is, in fact, deceptive, and that the different interpretations are associated with different lexemes that just happen to be homophonous / homographic. If, in a purely synchronic perspective, this option is frequently less than satisfying from an explanatory point of view, it is entirely unattractive in cases where meaning change is documented, because on the homonymy assumption, one would not be dealing with semasiological change at all, but rather with word formation, a possibility which is frequently ruled out by the contexts in which new meanings first appear. The second alternative, monosemy, is a different way of preserving the one-form-one-meaning hypothesis, namely by assuming that however many different readings tokens of a single linguistic form may have in context, these different readings can all be subsumed under a single content description, a Gesamtbedeutung (cf. Jakobson 1966[1936]). This is the option traditionally preferred by linguists of a more or less structuralist persuasion. Depending on the number and the nature of the available readings, such a monosemous content description may be highly abstract and schematic, and may rely very heavily on interaction with linguistic and/or situational context in order to yield a sufficiently specific interpretation.

20

For an analysis of this type of polysemy across several languages, see Schwenter & Waltereit (2005).


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In a purely synchronic account, the assumption of monosemy is an attractive option because of its elegant and descriptively parsimoneous nature. The main problem here is to ensure that the postulated meaning does not become so abstract and schematic that it ends up generating unacceptable readings of the form in question along with the attested ones (cf. König 1991: 175), and / or becomes unlikely to be learnable by immature language users. In a fully or partially diachronic account such as the present one, monosemy is, however, a good deal more problematic, in that it assumes, for every new reading attested, a qualitative change in the representation that language users have of the meaning of the linguistic item in question. Given that the conceptual reorganization needed to accommodate new readings into a unified semantic representation will often be fairly significant, it is unlikely that such reorganization should take place on a regular basis. Moreover, the monosemy approach completely obscures the step-by-step process by which meaning extension demonstrably takes place in diachrony. The third and final alternative, and the one which will be retained in this work, namely polysemy, is to assume that most linguistic forms actually do have more than one meaning, not only at the level of parole, but also at the level of langue, and that these meanings are related to one another in ways that can at least be motivated, if not fully predicted. Given that polysemy is to a large extent the result of diachronic sense extensions, we may assume that the range of possible synchronic relations between different senses of the same form overlaps with the range of mechanisms for semantic extension, such that senses in a synchronic meaning representation may be related by metonymy, metaphor, generalization, restriction, etc. (for a discussion of the principal mechanisms of semantic change, cf. ch. 3, sect. 3.2).21 The assumption of polysemy makes it possible to account for the diachronic process of meaning change as such, and it allows for generalizations about possible and likely paths of change. The approach to polysemy taken in this work is a cognitive-functional one, which can be situated within what Kleiber (1990: ch. IV) calls the “extended version” of prototype theory. This version is concerned with the explication, not just of referential categories, but also of linguistic ones (cf. Lakoff 1987: 57). The different senses of a given linguistic form are held to constitute a type of category which may be at least partially structured by family resemblances in the sense of Wittgenstein (1971[1958]: §66f), and not just by prototypical core-periphery relations in the strict sense. In this context, it is important to point out that the extended version of prototype theory has a significantly different focus as compared to the “standard” version (cf. Kleiber 1990; Koch 1996): in so far as it is of direct interest to lexical semantics (as opposed to cognitive psychology or anthropology), the standard approach is essentially onomasiological, i.e concerned with the elucidation of how cognitive categories are lexicalized, and of the principles that allow language users to refer to specific entities and notions as members of a 21

Note that this does not entail that if language users perceive two synchronic senses of a given item to be related by, say, metaphor, then metaphor must necessarily also have been the diachronic mechanism by which one sense gave rise to the other. Synchronic senses can often be construed as related in more than one way, as is evidenced, for instance, by scholarly debates over whether deontic and epistemic senses of modal verbs are related via metaphor or metonymy. Thus, according to Sweetser (1990: 60), the epistemic reading of Peter may go to the party, paraphrasable as “It is possible that Peter will go to the party”, would be related to the deontic reading, “Peter is allowed to go to the party”, by the transfer of a metaphor of absent barriers from the socio-physical domain to the cognitive domain. In the opinion of Bybee et al. (1994: 197f), however, the two readings are more likely to be related by metonymy, because hearers will commonly infer from the fact that someone is allowed to go to a party, that it is also possible that s/he will, indeed, go.

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given lexical category. Extended prototype semantics, on the other hand, reverses this direction of analysis, approaching matters from a semasiological angle. In other words, it is concerned with the principles that allow speakers to use a particular linguistic item to refer to cognitively different entities and notions. Moreover, as is strongly implied by both Kleiber (1990: 153ff) and Koch (1996: 232f), the term “prototype semantics” is actually inappropriate with respect to the extended, semasiological version, since it is frequently argued in analyses of linguistic items carried out within this framework, that linguistic categories are precisely not structured in terms of a single prototypical use, with which all other uses must have at least one trait in common, but rather – as mentioned above – in terms of family resemblances, where no one member of the category need in principle be more central than any other, and where two randomly chosen members need not have any common properties at all. Thus, despite its name, the extended version actually does not so much extend the standard version as it constitutes a substantial revision of it (Kleiber 1990: 149ff), one which in many ways represents a return to the central insights of pre-structuralist historical semantics (as also noted by Geeraerts 1997: 176ff, and by Traugott & Dasher 2002: ch. 2). However, given that the term “prototype semantics” is the established name for the approach, I will retain it in the remainder of this work, with the proviso that it be understood as referring to the extended version as laid out here. The extended prototype approach implies that, rather than adhering to the one-form-onemeaning principle, natural languages in fact have a tendency to enhance polysemy (Traugott & Dasher 2002: 123). This strikes me as an intuitively plausible assumption: the communicative needs of language users are continually evolving as those users adapt to new contexts and situations, and it seems far more economical for lexical items to be flexible enough to support gradual extension of their range of meaning than for users to be obliged to constantly innovate (and subsequently, remember) new expressions, which may differ only slightly in meaning from already existing ones.

4.2

Constraints on polysemy

However, one aspect of extended prototype theory which has frequently been criticized is precisely its tendency to multiply coded meanings of the linguistic items analyzed. In his study of the English preposition over, Lakoff (1987: 420ff) explicitly favors what he calls a “full specification interpretation” in the lexical representation of this preposition, with the result that two different senses of over are said to be in play in (90) and (91), because hill in (90) denotes an extended vertical landmark, whereas wall in (91) denotes a landmark, which – although likewise vertical – is not extended: (90) (91)

The plane flew over the hill. The bird flew over the wall.

While such a full-specification approach may be heuristically highly useful, as a procedure for revealing the usage potential of a given form, it has struck a number of people – even among cognitive linguists – as implausible as a hypothesis about speakers’ actual mental representations of word meanings (e.g. Vandeloise 1990; Tyler & Evans 2001). At the same time, it has been vigorously – and convincingly – argued in various quarters that language quite generally underspecifies meaning, leaving the derivation of a significant portion


37

of the content communicated by utterances up to hearers’ inferential capacities (although the precise degree of underspecification and the manner in which the derivation of the communicated content takes place is subject to no little disagreement)(e.g. Garfinkel 1984[1967]; Fauconnier 1984; Sperber & Wilson 1986; Levinson 2000; Carston 2002, Recanati 2004). On the other hand, Sandra & Rice (1995) provide experimental evidence that speakers actually do discriminate fairly subtly, and on non-arbitrary grounds, among different senses of prepositions, while still perceiving relationships between the senses. What this suggests is that the polysemy approach is fundamentally on the right track, but that it may be useful to attempt to constrain the multiplication of independent senses in a principled way. In the present study, I will broadly adhere to Foolen’s (1993: 64) principle of “methodological minimalism”, whereby we should not “multiply senses beyond necessity”. How might this be achieved in practice? In the first instance, we have available a number of standard tests for discovering ambiguity (i.e. polysemy / homonymy) vs simple vagueness in lexical items. It is likely that the most ancient test is that proposed by Aristotle (Topica I.15), namely that one check if two different uses of the same word have one and the same term as their opposite, or rather two different terms. Thus, he says, the opposite of sharp is flat when we are speaking of musical notes, but dull if we are talking about knives. for instance, and from that we may infer that the word sharp is polysemous. As pointed out by Geeraerts (1993: 231), however, this test gives counter-intuitive results in at least some cases. Thus, the word fresh has rotten as an antonym if the entity it applies to is meat, but stale if the talk is about bread, and yet, most people would probably be reluctant to say that fresh had clearly different meanings in the phrases fresh meat and fresh bread. Another, more recently formulated, test is Quine’s (1960: 129) “differential truth-value test”, according to which a given lexeme is polysemous if it can be both true and false of the same referent at the same time. Otherwise, it is likely to be merely vague. This test allows us to analyze the verb run in (92) as polysemous between the senses “drip with” and “move rapidly on one’s legs”, but indicates that cousin in (93) might rather be vague with respect to the gender of the referent: (92) (93)

Victor’s nose is running [with snot], but it isn’t running [away]. ??Anne is Felix’s [female] cousin, but she isn’t his [male] cousin.

A third standard test is the “identity” test due to Lakoff (1970), whereby the coordination of two different readings of an ambiguous lexeme will result in zeugma, whereas vagueness in the lexeme tested will not affect the felicity of the coordination. When applied to run and cousin, respectively, this test gives the same results as the truth-value test: (94) (95)

??Victor’s nose is running, and so is Fred. Anne is Felix’s cousin, and so is Sebastian.

As shown by Geeraerts (1993) and Tuggy (1993), these tests resemble the negation/antonym test in not being as decisive as they may appear. For one thing, they may give conflicting results: as Tuggy (1993: 276) points out, (96) seems deliberately misleading if the speaker has been painting his house, while Jane has been painting a portrait in oil, indicating that the verb paint is ambiguous. However, (97) strikes me as self-contradictory:

38

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface (96) (97)

?I spent the weekend painting, and so did Jane. ??I spent the weekend painting [my house], but I didn’t spend it painting [portraits].

Secondly, the tests are subject to contextual manipulation; thus, (98) would indicate that the noun race is ambiguous, but when contextualized as in (99), the coordination of the two readings is perfectly acceptable: (98) (99)

??The Kentucky Derby is a race, and so are Caucasians. A. Daddy, what precisely is a race: a group of people with the same type of body, or a competition in which you try to be the fastest? – B. Well, darling, a competition in speed is a race, and so is a group of people with the same type of body. (from Geeraerts 1993: 245f)

A third problem is that different readings of a given lexical item may appear in such different contextual environments that it is difficult to think of test sentences that might be even potentially meaningful; hence, the tests may be largely inapplicable in such cases. The different readings of phasal adverbs are, in fact, good examples of this. In other words, the three tests in question may, at best, constitute useful heuristics for deciding whether two uses of the same lexeme actually instantiate separate senses or not.22 The fact that we do not have a single decisive criterion for polysemy suggests that it might be wise to work with a bundle of different criteria, no single one of which will be either necessary or sufficient, but which, when taken together, may point in one or the other direction. In previous work, I have varyingly applied a number of different heuristics, some synchronic, others diachronic, in the semantic / pragmatic analysis of the French phasal adverbs. Synchronically, different ways of negating different readings of the adverbs (or the possibility vs impossibility of negating them at all) is indicative of (although certainly not criterial for) polysemy. Substantially different logical and / or argumentational properties likewise suggest the existence of independent senses. Conversely, if a given reading can systematically be derived from another reading using salient features of the context together with pragmatic principles of general application, then this will argue in favor of subsuming both these readings under a single sense in langue. At the diachronic level, I will assume, as a working hypothesis, that if reading B appears in the data at a substantially later date that reading A, then A and B are separate senses. Conversely, if readings C and D appear to co-exist at any historical stage, and the interpretative difference

22

There is, in fact, a fourth criterion for polysemy / monosemy, also due to Aristotle (Posterior analytics II.13). This is a definitional criterion, according to which a word is ambiguous if its various uses cannot be brought under a single unified definition, and monosemous if they can. Riemer (2005: 150) argues that this is, in fact, the only truly useful test of the number of lexical meanings of any given item. I cannot agree with Riemer’s assessment, however. The heuristic value of the definitional criterion strikes me as limited, given that it is the result of the semantic analysis that is supposed to provide an answer to the question of whether or not a single semantic representation will suffice to cover all and only the existing uses of a given lexeme. Making the definitional criterion the input to semantic analysis would therefore ultimately be questionbegging, and, indeed, Aristotle himself does not present it as a test, but precisely as the result of the analytic process.


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between them can systematically be attributed to contextual factors, then C and D are likely to be different contextual modulations of one and the same sense.23 As argued in Hansen & Strudsholm (2008), contrastive synchronic analysis may also constitute a useful tool: thus, if two or more languages that are relatively closely related, genetically and areally, have corresponding lexical items which share one or more salient uses, then it is tempting to suppose that any uses of those same items that are not so shared must have the status of independent senses. Thus, for instance, detailed contrastive analysis reveals that the phasal uses of French déjà and the cognate Italian adverb già have essentially the same properties as the corresponding uses of English already, German schon, or Danish allerede. As a foreign-language learner and teacher, I cannot recall ever having had any trouble mastering, or getting my students to master, the phasal use of these adverbs in any of these languages. This suggests that the representation of that particular sense is likely to be similar for speakers of the languages in question. However, both déjà and già have another aspectual reading (described as the “iterative” reading in chapter 6 below) which has no parallel in any of the three Germanic languages mentioned, and which tends to be puzzling to learners when they first encounter it. Now, if the five adverbs are monosemous, their semantic representations in French and Italian must be substantially different from the ones they have in the three Germanic languages, an assumption which leaves unexplained the ease with which the phasal sense, but not the iterative sense, of the Romance adverbs is acquired.

4.3

The notion of “basic sense”

To sum up, the present study takes the stance that phasal adverbs are polysemous, and that they have a “basic sense”, or Grundbedeutung, which motivates subsequent extensions of meaning. The term Grundbedeutung, is, however, open to at least two distinct interpretations, a synchronic and a diachronic one. On the synchronic definition, the Grundbedeutung is that sense (if any) of a polysemous item which is cognitively most important, or salient, to language users, and to which they would presumably intuitively relate others senses of the same item.24

23

This having been said, two facts about diachronic data should, of course, be borne in mind: 1º The question of genre looms very large in diachronic research, given that certain types of meanings may be more or less likely to occur in certain types of texts (Jacobs & Jucker 1995: 6ff; Traugott & Dasher 2002: 45ff). Thus, to take a simple example, the phasal reading of déjà may occur in practically any type of text, but a clearly ”interpersonal” use such as that in (i) is unlikely to be found in, say, formal prose, and will rather turn up in drama texts, for instance. In other words, the genre parameter needs to be taken into account when drawing conclusions about monosemy vs polysemy based on the attestation of specific readings of lexical items in diachronic corpora, (i) Il est où, Pierre, déjà ? ’Where is Pierre, now?’ 2º Writing tends, as is well known, to be a good deal more conservative than speech. This means that certain readings of a given items may have been around in the spoken vernacular for quite some time before they were first attested in writing (Chafe 1985: 114; Jacobs & Jucker 1995: 6ff; Hansen 1998a: 100). When dealing with time depths of more than – at most – fifty years (i.e. before it became common to record spoken language data on tape), I see no way to control for this, other than by attempting, as far as possible, to include less formal, and more interactive, genres such as plays and personal correspondence in one’s data base. For further discussion, see ch. 5 below. 24 Such a “synchronically basic” sense may or may not also be that sense which is most frequently instantiated in actual language use. While far from being uninteresting or unimportant, the relative text frequencies of different senses of a given item are, however, likely to be subject to extralinguistic factors such as subject-matter, genre, register, and stylistic preferences, and they do in any case pertain squarely to the domain of parole, and can at best only indirectly affect langue, which with I am primarily concerned here.

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On the diachronic definition, on the other hand, the Grundbedeutung is rather the “original sense”, i.e. that sense of the item in question which can be reasonably assumed (whether by a study of extant source material or by internal semantic reconstruction [cf. Traugott 1986]) to have been diachronically prior, and to have given rise – in the history of the language – to more recently evolved senses. It goes without saying that “naïve” language users cannot be expected to be able to reliably identify the Grundbedeutung of a given item on this interpretation of the term. The two types of Grundbedeutung may, of course, happen to be coextensive in specific cases, but logically they are distinct. In actual fact, they may often be so as well, given that, even where a clear and uncontroversial diachronic path of semantic evolution exists for a given linguistic item, a more recently evolved sense may well have superseded its historical forebear as the sense which is perceived as synchronically central by speakers. In the present study, the term Grundbedeutung, or “basic” sense, will henceforth be used with the latter, diachronic meaning Thus, where nothing else is indicated, I refrain from taking a stance on exactly which senses of the adverbs under investigation may be synchronically more salient to speakers.

4.4

Summary

In this section, I have discussed the problem of polyfunctionality with respect to lexical items. I have argued that there is good reason to assume that lexical items may, and very often do, have a number of independently represented senses in langue, but that these senses will be linked to one another in motivated ways, such that the semantic representations of individual lexemes can be conceived of as networks of variously interconnected nodes. I have also proposed a set of heuristics for determining when a given use in parole does (or does not) correspond to a separate node of meaning in langue. It was noted that none of the proposed criteria could, in and of themself, settle the issue, but that, when taken together, they may provide a good indication. In the next section, I discuss a different type of relations between the meanings of lexical items, namely so-called “paradigmatic” relations, and the theoretical status (if any) that should be attributed to them.

5 THE PROBLEM OF PARADIGMATICITY IN LEXICAL SEMANTICS By choosing to refer to déjà, encore, toujours and enfin, as well as to ne…plus and ne…pas encore, as “phasal adverbs”, and treating them in a single monograph, I am, of course, suggesting that they have some salient semantic properties in common, and I have already sketched the nature of these properties in ch. 1. This naturally raises the question of whether these items can be conceived of as constituting a semantic field or paradigm, and if so, what precisely is the status of such a field or paradigm. The answer to these questions involves a further question about the nature of word meanings as such. In this section, I will discuss the notion of paradigmatic relations among lexical items in relatively general terms, paving the way for subsequent discussion of the paradigmaticity of phasal adverbs more specifically. The latter discussion will, however, be postponed until ch. 4, sect. 3 infra.


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Semantic fields and paradigmatic relations between lexical items

It is probably entirely uncontroversial that, in any given language, most – if not all – words can be grouped together with other words on the basis of certain meaning relations that are perceived to obtain among them. At the most basic level, such relations can be broadly divided into syntagmatic and paradigmatic ones. Thus, a prototypical syntagmatic meaning relation may be said to obtain between the verb gnash and the plural noun teeth, because they occur together in the phrase to gnash one’s teeth, where the content of the object noun is in a sense already contained in the verb, and therefore redundant, in so far as the only thing one can gnash is precisely one’s teeth. Paradigmatic relations, with which I will be centrally concerned in this section, can initially be subdivided into grammatical and lexical ones. The system of nominal cases in a language like Latin may serve as a textbook example of the former type: any given noun may appear in one of five (in certain instances, six) possible cases according to its grammatical role in the clause, as illustrated in (100): (100)

…nam simul te[acc.sg.], Lesbia[nom.(voc.)sg.], adspexi, nihil[nom.sg.] est super mi[dat.sg.] vocis[gen.sg.] in ore[abl.sg.],… (Catullus, Carmina 51, vv. 6-8) ‘…for as soon as I have noticed you, Lesbia, my voice disappears (lit.: nothing remains for me of voice in the mouth),…’

Paradigmatic relations of the lexical type, on the other hand, prototypically hold among items that may occupy the same grammatical slot. Four major kinds are traditionally recognized (cf. Lyons 1977: ch. 9; Cruse 1986), namely synonymy (cf. (101)), oppositeness / antonymy (cf. (102)), inclusion (cf. (103)), and meronymy (or part-whole relations)(cf. (104)), although these may be further subdivided in ways that are to some extent particular to individual researchers, just as additional relation types may be distinguished. (101) (102) (103) (104)

hide – conceal war – peace yellow – ochre house – roof

It is moreover frequently assumed that vocabulary items which stand in paradigmatic lexical relations to one another can often be grouped into larger semantic fields structured precisely by these same relations. A classic example of such a field is the set of color terms in various languages, which, although not identical from one language to the next, nevertheless have in common that they are related to one another by opposition (e.g. black – white), and, in cases of more highly developed systems, also by inclusion (e.g. (103)). While it seems fairly clear that grammatical paradigms must be linguistic in nature, and must to at least some extent be independent of the particular words that instantiate them in any given utterance, the status of lexical paradigms is a good deal more controversial: When we talk about “lexical paradigms”, should the term “lexical” be understood as “pertaining to, and represented in, the mental lexicon” or should it be understood simply as “involving words”? Are relations such as the ones mentioned above actually “lexical” in either of these two senses? And last, but not least, are lexical relations derivable from word meanings, or does the fact that individual words in a language are perceived as having meaning rather result from the

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networks of paradigmatic (and syntagmatic) relations they enter into? The answers to these three questions are largely interdependent. In the literature, two extreme positions can be discerned: atomism vs holism. In nuce, the atomist viewpoint is that words have inherent meanings that are essentially independent of the meanings of other words, and which can therefore be defined without taking into account any of the semantic relations the words might enter into. To a holist, on the other hand, words can have no meaning at all in isolation from the linguistic system of which they are a part, and the meaning of any given word can thus be determined only by means of a thorough examination of the structure of the semantic field that subsumes it (and ideally, of course, of the entire vocabulary of the language in question). As pointed out by Murphy (2003: 21) these should be seen as endpoints on a continuum, such that, currently, few – if any – researchers espouse the undiluted version of either. That, however, was not always the case. Thus, the European structuralist revolution in the first half of the 20th century represented in large measure a reaction to the perceived atomism of 19th-century historical linguistics, and Saussure (1972[1916]: 157) defines his notion of linguistic “value”, valeur, in opposition thereto: C’est une grande illusion de considérer un terme simplement comme l’union d’un certain son avec un certain concept. Le définir ainsi ce serait l’isoler du système dont il fait partie ; ce serait croire qu’on peut commencer par les termes et construire le système en en faisant la somme, alors qu’au contraire c’est du tout solidaire qu’il faut partir pour obtenir par analyse les éléments qu’il renferme. [emphasis mine] ‘It is a great illusion to consider a term simply as the union of a certain sound with a certain concept. To define it thus would be to isolate it from the system of which it is a part; it would be to think that one can begin with the terms and construct the system by adding them together, whereas, on the contrary, it is from the solidary whole that one must start in order to arrive, by analysis, at the elements it contains.’ While Saussure himself did not delve very deeply into questions of semantics, his notion of linguistic value has profoundly influenced the way in which the study of word meaning has been conceived by later scholars. The position that structural relations are primary, and that the meaning of individual lexemes must be derived therefrom, has probably been most forcefully defended by Trier (e.g. 1973[1931]), for whom the notion of “word meaning” simply had no theoretical status. To support his case, Trier (1973[1931]: 45) adduces – among others – a simple example like the grading system used in German schools in his day, claiming that one cannot grasp the content of a grade like mangelhaft (‘flawed’) at all unless one knows that it is the fourth of a descending scale of five possible grades, including sehr gut, gut, genügend, mangelhaft and ungenügend (‘very good, good, sufficient, flawed, insufficient’). Intuitively, however, the argument is unconvincing: while it is no doubt true that one needs to be familiar with the entire system of grades in order to fully appreciate the evaluation implied by mangelhaft (thus, for instance, the fact that the scale has five, rather than four or six, rungs will evidently be a factor in assigning a definite meaning to mangelhaft), it is nevertheless highly unlikely that anyone who knew what Trier calls the “etymology” of the word would interpret the note as evidence of praise for the student’s performance.25 25

As a counterexample, Volker Gast (p.c.) has pointed out to me that, in Germany, the Latin prepositional phrase cum laude (”with praise”), is actually the lowest possible grade that can be conferred on Ph.D.-thesis. I would, however, venture the guess that this may be due to its being a loan phrase from a dead language, which – although its literal meaning is presumably accessible to the relevant group of language users – is nevertheless likely to be


43

Similarly unconvinced, Fillmore (1985: 229) argues that there is no reason to assume that the English word hypotenuse has a different meaning from its German cognate Hypothenuse, just because the German language possesses a contrasting item, Kathete, from the same semantic field, whereas English does not. Nor is it plausible that a German child who has learned the word Hypothenuse, but not the word Kathete, would have a different meaning for the former than those of his peers who know both words. Although Trier’s strong version of semantic field theory has subsequently been shown to be untenable (cf. Lyons 1977: 250ff), a weaker position continues to inform much research on lexical semantics up to the present. Thus, according to Lyons (1995: 77ff), the meaning of a word consists in a denotation and a sense, where “[t]he sense of an expression may be defined as the set, or network, of sense-relations that hold between it and other expressions of the same language” (1995: 80). Lyons moreover emphasizes that sense defined in this way is “a matter of interlexical and intralingual relations” and, as such, “wholly internal to the language system” (1995: 80). Hence, knowledge of sense relations among words must be part of language users’ specifically linguistic competence, and such knowledge must therefore be assumed to be explicitly represented in the mental lexicon. Currently, few people would probably deny that word meanings affect and constrain one another within a given language system. Thus, Clark (1992, 1993) has convincingly argued that in both acquisition and mature language use, speakers’ and hearers’ choices and interpretations of lexical items are guided, among others, by a pragmatic Principle of Contrast, according to which any two forms are presumed to contrast in meaning on some dimension (Clark 1992: 172). Clark (1993) demonstrates in some detail how children acquiring their mother tongue will gradually adjust their semantic representations of vocabulary items as they learn new words from the same semantic domain.26 Moreover, innovative expressions will in principle only be coined, and will – we may assume – a fortiori only take hold within the wider language community, if the same semantic content is not already covered by a competing conventional expression.27 Similarly, as has frequently been noted in the literature at least as far back as Bréal (1897: 30), potential synonyms will tend to be confined to different registers or dialects, without which one member of a potentially synonymous pair of words will instead be assigned a new, contrasting meaning (or, alternatively, disappear from the language). Indeed, Hansen (2005a) provides evidence that not only do the near-synonymous French phasal adverbs enfin and finalement mutually constrain one another’s synchronic use potential, but that they may also have influenced one another’s semantic / pragmatic evolution.

less than indissociably associated with positive meaning for native German speakers. In any case, the grade cum laude does express the fact that the thesis has passed, and as such, it may be seen as essentially positive in meaning. 26 It is probably safe to assume that the same is true of adult second-language learners and of adults learning new domain-specific (e.g. technical) vocabulary in their first language. 27 Degree adverbs like really, terribly, awfully,… may strike the reader as an obvious counter-example, since they appear to be continuously replaceable, and indeed replaced, by new coinages. However, this pattern is due to the expressive nature of degree adverbs, which is a central feature of their use: it is well-established that linguistic items serving expressive purposes generally undergo weakening as they become progressively more routinized. Once this weakening of their impact has been carried far enough, they are therefore likely to be superseded by new items, which, due to their very novelty, may better serve the original purpose. In other words, for a new ”synonym” to appear, some change must have taken place in the meaning of the older term.

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Finally, Lehrer (2002: 505) notes that a more or less conventionally established relation of semantic contrast between a pair of words in one of their senses is capable of carrying over to other, for instance metaphorical, contexts where only one member of the pair possesses an established sense. Thus, she argues that, in an example like (105), it is the conventional opposition between the concrete “temperature” senses of hot : cold that allows the hearer/reader to interpret the nonce metaphorical use of cold to mean “legally acquired” (as opposed to the corresponding, but conventionalized, use of hot with the meaning “stolen”). (105)

He traded his hot car for a cold one.

Although Lehrer concludes from the possibility of using cold as in (105) that antonymy must be intralexically specified, none of the above actually entails that semantic contrasts among expressions must necessarily be represented in the lexicon as such. As a matter of fact, in Hansen (2002: 47), I suggested, in a discussion of certain extended uses of déjà, encore, and toujours, that it might be metalinguistic (or pragmatic), rather than specifically linguistic (or semantic), knowledge of the contrast between the phasal uses of these particles that was responsible for the perception of a related contrast in non-aspectual contexts (cf. also ch. 7 infra). Indeed, it seems intuitively plausible to assume that the underlying rationale for coining new expressions is, as Bybee (1988: 253) puts it, that “people want to say something over and above what the default case signals, not [that] they want to express a new contrast”, and that, in semantic description, the inherent semantic substance of expressions might ultimately take precedence over the relations they contract with other expressions. As argued by Harris (1987: 219ff), a fundamental problem with the Saussurean assumption that the value of any lexeme is uniquely determined by the position it occupies within a larger network of interrelations, is that it excludes the possibility of linguistic variation: if different speakers and hearers do not operate with exactly similar values for the signs they use in communication, then we must infer that they are operating with dissimilar relational networks, and the entire notion of a supra-individual langue as constituted by the interrelated sum of those very networks becomes vacuous. Frame semantics offers an attractive solution combining the more important insights of the holist view with the idea that words do have at least some inherent meaning, independently of their paradigmatic alternatives. As we saw in sect. 1 supra, within frame semantics, the use of any lexical item is seen as evoking a structured set of background assumptions about particular domains of experience that speaker and hearer are presumed to share. We grasp the meaning of a word through our knowledge of the frame to which the word belongs. In a great many cases, groups of words will evoke one and the same frame, denoting various facets of that frame as well as their interrelations. Thus, although some frames (such as grading system frames, cf. supra) may most relevantly be described as created by language, rather than reflected by it, perceived semantic relations among words are prototypically grounded in conceptual knowledge about the world, and not in intra-lingual structures. At times, new coinages may appear whose meaning emerges from an explicit contrast with existing lexical items: for instance, when first introduced into the language, a name such as analog watch for what used to be simply a watch will only be meaningful if interpreted against the backdrop of the term digital watch. Importantly, however, the new lexical contrast does not create, but is rather motivated by, an antecedently


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perceived difference between two real-world phenomena belonging to the same experiential frame. To put it bluntly, there is typically little point in naming a category that does not contrast with anything; but this is fundamentally a matter of conceptual, and not of linguistic, knowledge. The fact that the introduction of new words to describe previously unnamed facets of a given frame may well result in at least some reorganization of the semantic content of existing neighboring words28 – a classic example being Trier’s (1973[1931]: 55ff) analysis of diachronic changes in medieval German words for different kinds of knowledge – can be explained by linguistic economy. The more clearly lexical items are differentiated, the fewer individual items will be needed to cover the same field of experience. In a recent monograph, Murphy (2003) presents a strong case for what she calls a “metalexical” treatment of semantic relations among words. On her view, awareness of such relations at best29 constitutes conceptual knowledge about words, as opposed to specifically linguistic knowledge of words. She convincingly shows that judgments of synonymy, opposition, inclusion etc. are highly context dependent, and argues that they are predictable by means of a pragmatic principle dubbed the Relation-by-Contrast Principle. This principle very simply states that lexical items are perceived as related if they are minimally different in contextually appropriate ways. In the case of synonymy, this minimal difference will involve linguistic form, in the case of other relation types, it will by default involve content properties, for instance polarity or level of categorization. Further, since the required difference is specified as a “contextually appropriate” one, there is in principle no requirement that any lexical item be perceived as related to the same set of paradigmatic alternatives in different contexts. Thus, for instance, one context may privilege sad as an appropriate antonym of happy, while a different context might rather evoke angry. Nevertheless, in the case of antonyms in particular, speakers may – in the absence of a context, and due to their frequent co-occurrence – recognize certain binary pairings (e.g. happy : sad) as “canonical”. Murphy’s treatment has several advantages: For one thing, it is simple and encompasses a wide range of data. Secondly, it is compatible with the frame semantic approach advocated above, in that it defines the knowledge of semantic relations as a subtype of encyclopedic knowledge, which may in some cases involve only concepts, and in others a combination of word forms and their associated concepts. Moreover, like frame semantics, but unlike holist approaches to word meaning, Murphy’s metalexical treatment provides for the possibility that language users may function adequately with a vocabulary in which some lexical items do not contract any very obvious relations with other lexical items, either because no synonymous or contrasting terms exist, or because a given language user possesses an (as yet only) imperfect knowledge of the target idiom. Thirdly, by not listing semantic relations in the lexicon, Murphy’s model accommodates the observable open-endedness and context dependence of word senses. No matter whether senses or relations are seen as primary, any theory that requires semantic relations to be listed in the lexicon will have to countenance the potential explosion of the latter unless senses are defined as fixed once and for all, because for any potential new sense, there is an equal potential for

28

A fact of which even pre-structuralist semanticists were aware, cf. Bréal (1897: 32). Murphy (2003: 216) argues that, while perceptions of synonymy and antonymy involve metalinguistic judgments, there is little evidence that other traditionally recognized relations such as hyponymy and meronymy actually involve knowledge about words at all, as opposed to knowledge about the concepts they denote. 29

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new semantic relations to be listed. The metalexical treatment is thus capable of dealing with both the synchronic and the diachronic dynamicity of word meanings.

5.2

Summary

In this section, I have critically discussed the notion of lexical-semantic paradigms. This is of importance to the study of phasal adverbs in as much as these items have – as we shall see in greater detail in ch. 4 infra – been described by some scholars as forming one or more perfect structuralist paradigms, where the sense of one item is essentially defined by the relations of opposition that it contracts with other items of the same paradigm. I have argued, contra this approach, that lexical “paradigms” are not semantic, but rather pragmatic in nature, that is, they are the object of metalinguistic knowledge about uses of words, not of linguistic knowledge of the senses of words. In that connection, I briefly discussed different approaches to lexical semantics and meaning relations in general, rejecting so-called “holist” approaches based on the Saussurean notion of linguistic valeur in favor of the cognitively and experientially based approaches found in Fillmore’s (1982, 1985) frame semantics and in Murphy’s (2003) metalexical treatment of semantic relations. Thus, although I would never deny the importance of keeping the systemic point of view in mind, I prefer to think of lexical items – including phasal adverbs – as having at least some inherent semantic content, which may or may not predispose them to enter into perceived (partial) relations with other lexical items. Such perceived relations will perhaps not infrequently give rise to default inferences which may over time crystalize into conventional elements of coded meaning, and may therefore lead to (partial) reorganization of the semantic field to which the items in question belong, but it is then the inherent meaning of the items, and not their interrelations, that are the prime movers in this process.

6

A PEIRCEAN APPROACH TO MEANING

The approach to (lexical) meaning that has been laid out in this chapter has the advantage of being dynamic at several levels. First, both the instructional approach to semantics and the notion of polysemy coupled with “methodological minimalism” are synchronically dynamic in that they allow for contextual modulation of the meaning of a given item. This is an important advantage of the approach, given that, as has been repeatedly pointed out by researchers in conversation analysis, the interpretation of any linguistic production is necessarily situated, and that no two actual situational contexts are exactly identical (e.g Schegloff 1978: 101, Heritage 1984: 283, 290). Lexical representations must be flexible enough to allow for this. Secondly, my approach is dynamic in another sense, too: namely to the extent that it allows for the conventionalization of new senses of morphemes and constructions based on frequently occurring contextual modulation of situated occurrences, these new senses being themselves subject to contextual modulation and subsequent conventionalization of the latter, such that the most recently created sense of a given item may in principle be quite far removed from the meaning of its ultimate diachronic origin. Here, polysemy stands in opposition to monosemy, which, although it allows for contextual modulation, is nevertheless an essentially static way of


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viewing meaning, capable only of comparing successive, but independent, synchronic stages of the language, in which the dynamic diachronic process of change as such can have no theoretical status (cf. Traugott & Dasher 2002: 11). In accordance with the above, it seems to me that the idea of the primacy of inherent word meanings over the perceived paradigmatic relations between lexemes, which I argued for in the preceding section, is better suited to accommodate the both synchronically and diachronically dynamic interplay between contexts of occurrence and interpretations of the meaning contribution of individual words to the meaning of utterances than is the essentially negatively defined structuralist concept of valeur. In a broader perspective, the present approach also points to a conception of the linguistic sign which is different from the binary one which is commonly accepted, and which – like the concept of valeur – is due to Saussure (1972[1916]). It seems to call, instead, for a triadic conception of the sign, such as is found in the works of the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1931-35, 1958), and which crucially defines signs as vehicles of actual communication, thereby incorporating the notion of situated interpretation into the sign function itself. Structuralist semiology, as is well known, posits an essentially static sign function consisting of two solidary parts, a “signifier” (signifiant) and a “signified” (signifié) (cf. Saussure 1972[1916]: 99). In opposition to this, Peircean semiotics operates with a pragmatic and dialogal sign relation holding between three entities, a “representamen” (i.e. an expression, or vehicle), an “object” (i.e. that which is represented), and an “interpretant” (i.e. an interpreting thought, or further, equivalent, sign, evoked in the mind of the comprehender by the original sign) (cf. CP2.22830).31 As Deledalle (1979: 66) points out, the ”object” is not necessarily a thing, nor even an event or a situation. Indeed, Peirce distinguishes two types of objects: 1° an ”Immediate Object”, which inheres in the sign itself, and which is described as a ”seme” (CP4.539), and 2° a ”Dynamic Object”, which exists outside the sign and determines it (CP4.536). The latter can never be expressed, but only indicated, by the sign (CP8.314). As such, it will not concern us further in this study. Importantly, the sign does not represent its object in all its aspects, but only with respect to a so-called “ground”, i.e. a particular frame of reference (CP2.228-229).32 This is illustrated in figure 2.2:

30 As is common in the literature on Peirce, ’CP’ refers to his Collected Papers, the number before the full stop refers to the relevant volume, and the number following the full stop refers to the paragraph cited. 31 I will only be concerned here with signs of a “symbolic” nature (i.e. signs where the relation between representamen and object is established in virtue of some convention, conceived of procedurally, as a habitual mode of action), and principally, of course, with linguistic signs. Peirce also operates with a variety of nonsymbolic (purely iconic or indexical) signs, whose meanings do not rely on convention. 32 It should be noted that the notion of ”ground” is controversial, and that Peircean scholars do not agree on how precisely it should be understood. My interpretation follows that of Hookway (1985: 123ff) and Dinesen (1991: 102).

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[Figure 2.2: The sign according to Peirce] Representamen

Δ

Ground Object

Interpretant

It should be noted that, for Peirce, signs can be of any size, from morphemes and words, through constructions, and up to entire utterances and texts. In the latter cases, one may, if need be, speak of “macro-signs”, to distinguish them from more elementary semiotic units. Lastly, and in line with the view of linguistic semantics presented in sect. 2.2 supra, for Peirce, the sign constitutes an action precept (CP2.330). The representamen (i.e. the specific linguistic form) may thus be seen as conveying a set of instructions (i.e. the object) which the hearer must carry out in order to grasp the intended meaning of the sign, while the interpretant can be understood as the result of the hearer’s having carried out these instructions, i.e. as a mental representation in the form of a new and more developed sign, which itself has the status of an action precept. This has two consequences: 1º Interpretation (or semeiosis) does not necessarily stop when the first interpretant has been produced – theoretically, it can continue indefinitely (CP1.339); 2º Given that any given instruction can, in principle, be carried out in a number of different ways (cf. Ducrot et al. 1980: 33 and sect. 2.2 above), the representamen does not determine a unique interpretant that is valid for all contexts – rather, it should be seen as offering a more or less restricted range of possible interpretations. The interpretant being itself subject to potential further interpretation, the correctness of the different possible interpretations of the sign is thus open to intersubjective evaluation. Consequently, Peirce operates with three types of interpretants (CP8.343): 1º An “immediate” interpretant, constituted by the conventionally established range of potential interpretations of the sign as such. This, in other words, is the level of “literal” meaning. 2º A “dynamic” interpretant, which is the effect actually produced by the sign on its recipient in a given context. In other words, the dynamic interpretant represents what is actually understood by the comprehender. This is not a matter of simple decoding, but of active construction of the intended meaning of the sign. According to Andersen (1984: 38), the dynamic interpretant is the result of an abductive process; hence, it has the status of a hypothesis. In other words, the situated comprehension of signs involves a form of inference which – contrary to deduction – is of an analog and merely potential nature, and which draws heavily on implicit knowledge (be it linguistic, contextual, or encyclopedic). This, then, is the level of context-dependent meaning. Given that hypotheses may, by definition, be modified or even rejected in the light of subsequent information, this brings us to the third, and last, type of interpretant, namely: 3º The “final” interpretant, which is the effect that would be produced by the sign in question on any recipient whose circumstances were such that he was able to grasp the full meaning of the sign. This final interpretant may only be reached through a process of intersubjective negotiation. Thus, the Peircean conception of the sign incorporates the notion that meanings


49

are negotiated in interaction, and is thus compatible with the idea that not only speakers, but also hearers, play an active role in the creation of meaning. Corresponding to the first two types of interpretants, I suggest that we may posit two different types of “grounds”: Thus, at the level of the immediate interpretant, we may understand the ground as the linguistic code (or system). It should be noted that, on the present view, this code contains an encyclopedic, and in many cases non-referential, dimension, namely the interpretative frames that are evoked by signs “as such”. As argued above, many such frames will be essentially non-truth-conditional, but nevertheless fully conventional, in nature. More specifically with respect to the latter, I am thinking, not only of conventional implicatures such as the adversative element inherent in the connective but (cf. sect. 3.2 above), but also of the fact that a noun such as bachelor evokes a socio-cultural context which will normally exclude its felicitous use with respect to, say, a 16-year-old boy, the Pope, or a grown man living alone on a desert island (cf. Fillmore 1982). At the level of the dynamic interpretant, on the other hand, the ground represents the concrete context in which the sign is actualized in the dialog between linguistic code and situated use. This interpretation of the role of the ground, and of its relation to the semiotic triad is illustrated in figure 2.3: [Figure 2.3: Two levels of interpretants and grounds] Representamen 1 = the sign “as such”

Ground 1

Δ

= the linguistic system

Object 1

Interpretant 1 = immediate interpretant

Representamen 2 Ground 2

Δ

= specific context

Object 2

Interpretant 2 = dynamic interpretant

What figure 2.3 shows is that the (initial) dynamic interpretant is arrived at through a dialogic interplay between the sign and its context of appearance: On the one hand, the sign “as such” will convey a certain image of the context, by way of the conventional interpretative frames contained in what I call “ground 1” (and which we might perhaps call the “immediate” ground). On the other hand, the manner in which speaker and hearer conceive of the specific context in which the sign appears, and which forms the content of “ground 2” (by analogy, the “dynamic” ground), will influence the way in which the sign is comprehended. As a simple example of how the model works, consider a slightly more complicated version of the imaginary dialog already adduced as (59) in sect. 3.1 supra: (106)

[In a café at 10am] A. Do you want a croissant with your coffee? B. I’ve had breakfast. (>> implicature 1: B has had breakfast earlier on the day the utterance is produced.) (>> implicature 2: B does not want a croissant at the moment of speaking.)

50


As indicated, this version of B’s utterance carries two implicatures. Its “literal” meaning, derived on the basis of what is linguistically coded in her utterance, is simply that “B has had breakfast at some pointing her life prior to the moment of utterance”. This proposition represents the immediate interpretant of her utterance. However, given the context, this is hardly sufficient to ensure current relevance, so based on this new sign and its interaction with the dynamic ground, the hearer will be invited to derive the first of the two implicatures in (106) as a dynamic interpretant. Now, this is where the idea of the unlimited nature of semeiosis becomes relevant, for in order to ensure full coherence with previous discourse, we need to derive a further, more developed dynamic interpretant from the new, third sign and its interaction with the dynamic ground, namely the second of the two implicatures in (106). The process as a whole is illustrated in Figure 2.4 infra. The “dynamic interpretant 2” in this figure probably represents the point at which the derivation of presumed speaker-intended meaning stops. Nothing, however, prevents the hearer from deriving a whole series of further inferences, which are not necessarily intended, nor assumed to be intended, by the speaker, such as “B is concerned about her calorie intake” > “B is someone who obsesses about her figure” > “B is vain and shallow” etc., on the basis of the dynamic interpretant 2. [Figure 2.4: A Peircean account of the interpretation of B’s utterance in (106)] Representamen 1 Immediate ground

Δ Object

Immediate interpretant = “literal” meaning

Representamen Dynamic ground

Δ Object

Dynamic interpretant 1 = implicature 1

Representamen

Δ

Dynamic ground Object

Dynamic interpretant 2 = implicature 2

This understanding of the semiotic process has implications not only for the synchronic interpretation of utterances, but for diachronic change as well. In the following chapter, which deals with the semantics/pragmatics interface in diachronic change, I propose a model of semantic change that incorporates the triadic sign function presented here.


51

Summary

In this section, I have argued that a dynamic model of meaning, such as the one outlined in the present chapter, may profitably make use of the triadic Peircean conception of the linguistic sign, as a substitute for the traditionally accepted dyadic conception inherited from Saussurean structuralism. The advantage of the Peircean sign function for my purposes is that it incorporates a pragmatic dimension, and hence the seeds of synchronic variation and (emergent) polysemy, as an integral part of any given symbolic sign. In contrast, the Saussurean sign function is suited only for the study of langue as an abstract, relational system “où tout se tient” (Meillet 1964[1922]: ix; cf. also Saussure 1972[1916]: 124). Hence, language variation and polysemy remain essentially mysterious entities on that conception.

7 GENERAL SUMMARY The present chapter has outlined the approach to meaning that will be assumed in the remainder of this study. Some of the salient characteristics of that approach are the following: • The semantics/pragmatics distinction is drawn, not in terms of whether meanings are truth-conditional or not, but in terms of whether or not they are coded in specific linguistic items (including syntactic constructions). • All coded meanings are assumed to function, at the most basic level, as processing instructions to the hearer, directing him in his efforts to construct a mental representation of what the speaker means. • It is assumed that linguistic items frequently have more than one coded meaning, and that this is typically a result of diachronic extensions. This is to be expected, as linguistic signs are not dyadic, as in structuralist conceptions, but fundamentally triadic, incorporating the communicative dimension that is crucial in explaining variation and change. • Coded meanings are inherent in the signs that carry them, i.e. they do not, in the first instance, emerge as the result of those signs entering into networks of contrasting relations with other signs, as structuralist semantics would have it. In the following chapter, I will present a complementary approach to diachronic sense change.


3 A FRAMEWORK FOR DESCRIBING THE DIACHRONIC EVOLUTION OF PHASAL ADVERBS

1 INTRODUCTION The descriptive aim of this study consists not only in the elucidation of the synchronic meanings and uses of the four French phasal adverbs déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin, but also in uncovering their diachronic semantic and pragmatic evolution. In the present chapter, I present the theoretical and methodological framework that I will be assuming in chapters 6-7 below, and discuss my position with respect to a number of questions that are currently salient in the study of meaning change. My point of departure being the specific set of forms mentioned, the exposition will be oriented towards semasiological issues, i.e. issues relating to changes in linguistic forms that are held (relatively) constant.1 The chapter is rounded off by an outline of how the semiotic model of meaning presented in chapter 2, sect. 6 above can be applied to semasiological change.

2 DIACHRONIC PROTOTYPE SEMANTICS In chapter 2, sect. 4 above, I argued for the usefulness of describing the synchronic semantics of lexical items partially in terms of the so-called extended prototype theory. In accordance with this, I will broadly adopt the framework of diachronic prototype semantics as presented in Geeraerts (1997) in accounting for the diachronic evolution of the French phasal adverbs.

1 Semasiological research, of course, allows for certain changes in form, such as phonological attrition, coalescence of neighboring words, loss of regular morphological alternation etc.

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Like synchronic prototype semantics (of both the standard and the extended kind) this framework takes its point of departure in the idea that linguistic categories are basically analog in nature, which implies the following four characteristics: 1. Degrees of typicality obtain between readings. 2. The internal semantic structure of a category consists in clustered and overlapping readings. (This applies both at the level of different senses of the same form, and within a single sense.) 3. Categories are blurred at the edges. 4. They cannot be defined by means of a single set of necessary and sufficient characteristics (Geeraerts 1997: 11). To each of these four characteristics, it is claimed, corresponds a specific implication for the structure of semantic change, viz.: 1. Changes in the meaning of a given item are likely to take the form of modulations on presumably more salient, and hence more stable, core cases. 2. Such changes will have the structure of a clustered set. Hence, new readings may originate in several older meanings at the same time. 3. Changes may be incidental and transient. 4. They will be encyclopedic in nature, such that even readings which do not constitute separate senses as such may nevertheless be structurally important (Geeraerts 1997: 23ff). As also discussed in chapter 2, sect. 4, a central assumption in prototype semantics is that lexical items tend to be polysemous. As is amply supported by both older and more recent work in historical semantics, lexemes do not typically start life as polysemous; rather, polysemy results, in the normal case, from stepwise extensions of the diachronically older, “basic” sense of an item. We have thus arrived at a point where some discussion of how such basic, or “original”, senses historically evolve into extended senses is in order. What kinds of processes may be at work? How do extensions take place, and why do they take place? These questions will be the subject of the remainder of this chapter.

3 THE EVOLUTION OF PHASAL ADVERBS: GRAMMATICALIZATION OR NOT? Among functionally oriented linguists, in particular, (e.g. Lehmann 1985, Heine et al. 1991, Hopper & Traugott 1993, Bybee et al. 1994), the past few decades have seen a wave of interest in language change in general, in particular in Meillet’s (1921) notion of grammaticalization, understood as the gradual, and (supposedly) largely unidirectional2, evolution of lexical items into grammatical items, or of grammatical items into more grammatical items.3 These two processes are sometimes referred to as, respectively, ”primary” and ”secondary” 2

A major issue in grammaticalization research of the past few decades has been precisely this so-called unidirectionality hypothesis, whereby the direction of grammaticalization spelled out in (1) is not reversible. If unidirectionality is posited as a matter of principle, it constitutes a very strong hypothesis, which is no doubt untenable, given that a large number of apparent counter-examples have been adduced in the literature (cf. Hopper & Traugott 1993: 126ff; Newmeyer 1998: 263ff; Campbell 2001). However, if ”degrammaticalization” is defined as the reverse of grammaticalization, i.e. as the gradual lexicalization of a grammatical form, then hardly any documented changes appear to fit the pattern (Brinton & Traugott 2005: 103f). If instantaneous changes are admitted as examples of degrammaticalization, a weaker form of the hypothesis, whereby unidirectionality would simply be a very strong statistical tendency, is perhaps more viable (cf. Heine et al. 1991: 4f). 3 Here I follow, not Meillet’s (1921: 131) definition of grammaticalization, which takes into account only the former type of process, but rather Kuryłowicz’s (1975[1965]: 52) by now almost canonical definition.

A Framework for Describing the Diachronic Evolution of Phasal Adverbs

55

grammaticalization (cf. Brinton & Traugott 2005: 77). In order to be meaningful, the notion of secondary grammaticalization, or of an already grammatical item becoming even more grammatical, of course presupposes an agreed-upon scale of ”grammatical-ness”. As noted by Newmeyer (1998: 227), for most people in the field, the scale in question looks as follows (going from less to more grammatical items): (1)

lexical categories > functional categories and pronominal elements > clitics > derivational affixes > inflectional affixes.

During approximately the same period, the study of so-called “pragmatic” markers (or, according to the terminology established in ch. 2, sect. 2, markers with context-level functions) of various kinds has soared. In so far as it is a quite generally made assumption that pragmatic markers derive ultimately from formally largely identical, but more “literal” expressions (cf. chapter 2, sect. 4 above), scholars have taken an interest in the possibility that pragmatic markers might represent instances of grammaticalization. This issue is highly relevant to the French phasal adverbs treated in this book, given that, as we have seen, they possess a range of uses in which they can be categorized as different types of pragmatic markers.

3.1

Parameters of grammaticalization

I will define grammaticalization as the rise of productive morphosyntactic structures out of lexemes and ad hoc constructions as used in discourse (e.g. Traugott & Heine 1991: 2f). Thus, when function words evolve out of content words, when independent words are reduced to clitics and morphemes, and when creatively used and largely compositional discourse constructions turn into fixed syntactic structures, the resulting items and constructions have been subject to grammaticalization. This definition is intended to be neutral with respect to the question whether grammaticalization is a distinct process of language change, such that the notion should be credited with explanatory value and afforded independent theoretical status, or whether it denotes simply a possible end result of the convergence of a number of independent changes (cf. the discussion in Harris & Campbell 1995: 20; Newmeyer 1998: ch. 5; Campbell 2001). Importantly, no item undergoing grammaticalization is compelled to travel the entire path from free lexeme to inflectional affix (cf. (1) above). Moreover, the status of any specific linguistic item as grammaticalized at any given synchronic stage of the language is a matter of degree. First, because full implementation of the new morphosyntactic potential of a grammaticalized item may lag behind the functional change in that item (Brinton & Traugott 2005: 26), and secondly, because it is likely that, in the early stages of change, the representations that different speakers have of the item will vary. At any given time, for any given language, a great many items will thus appear to have an intermediate status, seeming in some ways grammaticalized, and less so in other ways. Some such items will retain this intermediate status until they eventually become obsolete. In a seminal paper, Lehmann (1985) proposes a set of parameters that characterize grammaticalized items, and by which the degree of grammaticalization reached by a given individual item can be measured. Importantly, none of these parameters can, in and of itself, be considered criterial for classifying a given linguistic item as grammaticalized or not. When considered in conjunction, however, they constitute a useful diagnostic tool.

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Lehmann distinguishes three parameters, weight, cohesion, and variability, each of which has specific reflexes on the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic axis, respectively, and with each of which there is associated a specific type of gradual diachronic change (summarized in Table 3.1 below): [Table 3.1: Parameters of grammaticalization]

Paradigmatic axis

Syntagmatic axis

Weight Integrity Process: Attrition

Cohesion Paradigmaticity Process: Paradigmaticization

Scope Process: Condensation

Bondedness Process: Coalescence

Variability Paradigmatic variability Process: Obligatorification Syntagmatic variability Process: Fixation

I. Paradigmatic axis: a. Integrity. This concerns the “size” of the item in question, in terms of both phonological and semantic substance. A greater degree of phonological attrition and/or so-called semantic “bleaching” is thus said to correlate with more significant degrees of grammaticalization. The specific process leading to stronger grammaticalization is called “attrition” here. b. Paradigmaticity. This concerns the degree to which the item in question is integrated into a small, tightly constructed lexical or morphological paradigm. The greater the integration into such a paradigm, the greater the degree of grammaticalization. The associated diachronic process is called “paradigmaticization”. c. Paradigmatic variability. This has to do with whether, and to what extent, choice among members of the paradigm to which the item belongs is constrained by grammatical rule. The more constrained the choice, the more advanced is the process of grammaticalization. The associated change is one of “obligatorification” of the item involved. II. Syntagmatic axis: a. Scope. This has to do with the size and complexity of the constituents with which the item can combine. More grammaticalized items typically scope smaller, less complex constituents. Lehmann calls the shrinking of syntagmatic scope a process of “condensation”. b. Bondedness. This concerns the degree of independence of the sign vis-à-vis neighboring signs. The tighter the syntagmatic fusion, the more advanced is the grammaticalization of the item. The process of change involved is called “coalescence”. c. Syntagmatic variability. This last parameter has to do with the place that the item occupies in a syntagmatic string, and whether, and to what extent, that place is fixed by grammatical rule. The less freely the item can be shifted around in the string, the more grammaticalized it will be. The diachronic process, not surprisingly, is one of “fixation”. A standard example of grammaticalization in terms of these parameters would be the formation of the French future tense, which – as is well-known – developed out of a Vulgar Latin


57

construction in which the lexical verb HABEO expressed obligation when used in association with an infinitive. In French, HABEO in this construction evolved into a mere tense inflection, expressing a neutral prediction about the future, cf. (2): (2)

cantareinf. habet3p.sg.pres.ind. (“s/he chantera3.p.sg.fut.ind. (“s/he will sing”)

is

obliged

to

sing”)

→

il/elle

From HABEO to the French future-tense inflection –ai etc., there is significant phonological attrition, and the deontic meaning component has been bleached out completely leaving only the notion of future relevance. The future-tense suffix is fully integrated into a morphological paradigm of tense suffixes, and its use is to a large extent constrained by syntactic rules. Whereas semi-auxiliary HABEO scopes the entire infinitival clause, the future-tense suffix scopes only the verb itself, and it has become completely bonded to the verb stem, with respect to which it appears in a fixed position. When we turn to pragmatic (or “context-level”) markers as a functional class, on the other hand, they do not, as pointed out by Waltereit (2002b: 1005) and by Eckardt (2003: 42), seem to fulfil Lehmann’s criteria to any noteworthy extent. It is true that many pragmatic markers exhibit some degree of phonological attrition (e.g. the temporal adverb enfin [ãf] > the repair marker ‘fin [f] / [fε], whose vowel is very frequently denasalized, cf. A.B. Hansen 1998: 187n) and/or result morphologically from coalescence of neighboring items (e.g. the prepositional phrase en fin > the adverb enfin), but this is far from true of all of the items and constructions classified as markers in the literature (e.g. and that sort of thing, cf. Aijmer 2002, ch. 64). The applicability of Lehmann’s remaining parameters to the case of pragmatic markers is even more problematical. First of all, markers appear, quite generally, to be characterized, not by scope decrease, but by scope increase and/or variability, as illustrated by the contrast between (3), where instead of functions as a complex preposition and has scope only over the following NP, and (4), where instead functions as a adversative discourse connective, having scope over the entire following clause (cf. Tabor & Traugott 1998): (3) (4)

Gwendolen ate an apple instead of the candy. Gwendolen didn’t want the candy. Instead, she ate an apple.

Further, although specific items may have a preferred slot, pragmatic markers frequently have great freedom of position within the host utterance, and are thus syntagmatically variable, cf (5)-(7): (5)

(6) (7)

4

A. non mais c’était une position encore une fois fondée sur des principes, je les ai rappelés tout à l’heure B. donc vous avez changé de principes (VS2: 18) ‘A. no but it was a position once again based on principles, I mentioned them a moment ago. B. so you’ve changed your principles’ vous avez donc changé de principes vous avez changé de principes donc

Markers like and that sort of thing may even, as Aijmer (2002: 224) points out, be formally variable. In this particular case, we find for instance and (all) that / this sort / kind / type of thing / stuff.

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They can, as a rule, be deleted or replaced by other markers without consequences for the grammaticality of the host, and paradigmatic variability is therefore high, cf. (5) vs (8)-(9): (8) (9)

[Ø] vous avez [Ø] changé de principes [Ø] alors / eh bien vous avez changé de principes ‘then/well, you’ve changed your principles’

Indeed, the notion that pragmatic markers form paradigms in any interesting sense of the word is, in my opinion, dubious, in as much as the meanings of markers which may appear in the same slot syntactically do not necessarily have anything much in common, and do not seem to emerge from contrasting relationships with a clearly circumscribed set of alternatives, cf. (4) and (10) (cf. Hansen 1998a: 68f): (10)

Gwendolen didn’t want the candy. However / So / You see / …, she ate an apple.

Finally, with respect to semantic integrity, it is widely recognized these days that the notion of “bleaching” is not useful when describing the semantic evolution of pragmatic markers. While it is undeniable that lexemes and constructions gradually lose concrete, truth-conditional content as they develop marker functions, these losses are offset by corresponding gains in “pragmatic” import, i.e. contextualizing potential, as Elizabeth Traugott was probably the first to point out (cf. Traugott 1989). Moreover, given that the present study defines semantic content as whatever meaning is coded in language, be it truth-conditional or not, as opposed to pragmatic meaning, which is inferred from the interaction between language use and context (cf. ch. 2), and given that I choose to approach the polyfunctionality of markers and their source items as a matter of actual polysemy, as opposed to mere contextual modulation of a single abstract Gesamtbedeutung (cf. chapter 2, sect. 4 supra), the notion of bleaching is hardly meaningful at all. Indeed, rather than markers being gradually emptied of semantic content in the course of their diachronic development from the source items, what takes place is simply a change in the nature of that content.

3.2

Pragmaticalization

The upshot of the preceding discussion is that the development of pragmatic markers in general, and of what I will call the various “context-level” uses of déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin in particular (see chapter 7 infra), is not a subtype of grammaticalization, but rather the result of only partially identical kinds of changes. In contrast to grammaticalized items, whose meaning prototypically relates to the (sub)propositional level of utterances, the meaning of contextualizing markers by definition relates their host utterances to the larger co- and context. Following Erman & Kotsinas (1993) and Dostie (2004), I will speak of this type of language change as “pragmaticalization”. The history of specific linguistic items may display evidence of both grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, either simultaneously or at different stages, but in principle the two processes are distinct. Thus, for instance, a few of what I will call the extended ”content-level” uses of the phasal adverbs may be analyzed as cases of grammaticalization. Yet other of these uses, on the other hand, do not seem to have arisen by processes of either grammaticalization or


59

pragmaticalization in any meaningful sense of those terms. These will be treated simply as meaning extensions, with no concomitant change in either grammatical or content-level vs context-level status. 5 Contrary to grammaticalization, pragmaticalization is prototypically associated with a greater degree of syntactic freedom, and with an increase in the scope of the item concerned. It is not characterized by the “bleaching” of the semantic content of the source items, but rather by “pragmatic strengthening” (Traugott 1988) in various forms (see below). It is also characterized by the optionality of the items in question: pragmatic markers are, in an important sense, “outside” the grammar, given that they are typically not in construction with any other element of their host clause. Consequently, speakers are not structurally compelled to use pragmaticalized items (although, communicatively, they are likely to be more successful if they do). Like grammaticalization, pragmaticalization is typically associated with decategorialization of the source item. Thus, for instance, as Dostie (2004) shows, verb forms undergoing pragmaticalization (possibly, but not necessarily, as part of a parenthetical clause construction) will tend to lose morphological variability, and be restricted to appearing in a specific tense, aspect, mood, number and/or person, cf. the contrast between the standard imperative use of the verb tenir in (11) and the pragmaticalized form in (12). At the same time, they lose the valency properties of their source items (cf. (13)), and gain in positional variability within the host utterance (cf. (14)). In other words, they come to resemble adverbs in terms of both morphology and syntax:

(11) (12) (13) (14)

5

Tiens2.p.s. / Tenezpolite 2.p.pl. cette note un peu plus longtemps ! ‘Hold this note a bit longer!’ Tiens2p.sg. / *Tenezpolite 2.p.pl., vous chantezpolite 2.p.pl. bien ! ‘Ah [lit.: hold!], you sing well!’ Tiens (*ça), vous chantez bien ! Lit: ‘Hold (that), you sing well!’ Vous chantez bien, tiens ! ‘You sing well, I must say!’

The so-called ”modal” particles that are characteristic of the continental Germanic languages (cf. (i)) are very interesting in this respect, for they constitute a prominent, but typologically highly restricted, example of a set of linguistic items with clearly contextualizing functions, but which nevertheless appear to fulfil several of the central criteria for grammaticalization. (i) (Danish) Finn kommer jo / da / vel / vist / nok / nu / … i morgen. ’Finn is MP coming tomorrow’ In contrast to other types of pragmatic markers, modal particles constitute a formally definable class of very limited productivity; they form small, circumscribed paradigms, the members of which tend to be constrained to certain sentence types; they occupy a specific syntactic slot, and their semantic scope is fixed at the level of the proposition (cf. Hansen 1998a, ch. 3). Although both English and the Romance languages possess linguistic items and structures that fulfill largely similar functions (cf. Weydt 1969, Hansen 1998b, Waltereit 2001, 2002a), they do not possess an identifiable class of modal particles as such. The existence of such a class of particles in at least some languages appears to support the view (defended, among others, by Newmeyer 1998: ch. 5 and Campbell 2001) that grammaticalization (and, by extension, pragmaticalization) are not unique types of structural change, but that their results (increased grammatical status or increased contextualizing potential of an item) are focal points of a prototypical nature, upon which clusters of smaller, independent changes tend to converge.

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Further, similarly to grammaticalization, pragmaticalization is a matter of degree (in the sense defined in sect. 3.1). If the French imperative tiens as a pragmatic marker is constrained to appear in the 2nd person singular, the imperative of the verb dire, in contrast, remains morphologically variable when used as a marker, cf. (15):6 (15)

Dis2.p.sg. / Ditespolite 2.p.pl. donc, on est pressé ! (As said to a single addressee who has just jumped ahead of the speaker in a line) ‘Well, we are in a hurry, aren’t we?’

Finally, either process can happen more than once to the same source item, giving rise to separate grammaticalization/pragmaticalization chains. In such cases, we may speak of “polygrammaticalization” (cf. Craig 1991) and “polypragmaticalization” (cf. Dostie 2004: 33), respectively. A simple example of the latter (borrowed from Dostie 2004: 34) would be the French verb aller (‘to go’), different inflectional forms of which have given rise to the different pragmatic markers in (16)-(18). It will be seen in later chapters that all four French phasal adverbs have been subject to such polypragmaticalization. (16) (17) (18)

Allons1.p.pl.imperative donc ! Vous n’êtes pas sérieux ?! ‘Come on [lit.: let’s go then]! You’re not serious?!’ Ne pleure pas, allez2 p.pl. imperative, ce n’est pas si grave… ‘Don’t cry, now [lit.: go], it’s not that bad…’ Ça va3p.sg. pres. ind., je m’en occuperai. ‘It’s OK [lit.: it goes], I’ll take care of it.’

Since pragmaticalization is primarily a process that takes place at the level of lexical or constructional semantics, as opposed to the level of morphosyntax, the existence of polypragmaticalization provides an additional reason to prefer the extended version of prototype semantics, which allows for network-style relations of arbitrary complexity between the different senses of polysemous items.

3.3

The role of reinterpretation / reanalysis

A prerequisite of both grammaticalization and pragmaticalization is reinterpretation of the meaning contribution made by the linguistic item or construction that is undergoing change. Such reinterpretation also constitutes the very essence of a great many semantic changes that do not instantiate either of these processes, prominently metonymically-based changes (but excluding metaphorically-based ones). In much of the existing literature, semantic reinterpretation goes by the name of “reanalysis”. As I will use the terms, however, they are not equivalent. Rather, it seems more appropriate to regard semantic reanalysis as a subtype of semantic reinterpretation. To my knowledge, the term “reanalysis” was first used by Langacker (1977) and Timberlake (1977), to denote resegmentation of the underlying morphosyntactic representation of a given string which – at least initially – does not involve any changes in the surface manifestation of 6

Note, however, that while number variability remains possible in the case of dis / dites, it is not obligatory. The singular form dis (donc) can, in fact, be felicitously used in an utterance directed at a plurality of addressees (or at one addressee with whom the speaker is on formal terms). In other words, dis (donc) does appear to be in the process of losing its original part-of-speech affiliation.


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that string. As I will be using the term, it refers, rather, to a semantic phenomenon. To that extent, I follow the usage of, for instance, Detges & Waltereit (2002) and Eckardt (2003). Reinterpretation occurs when an innovative semantic representation of a given utterance or utterance-part(s) appears – for pragmatic reasons – to result in at least as plausible an interpretation of what the speaker means in a given speech situation as the conventionally established representation would. Reinterpretation thus takes place as a result of the “tension between literal meanings and understood meanings of utterances” (Eckardt 2003: 77), and it can be compared to solving a mathematical equation with one unknown element (Eckardt 2003: 12). As I prefer to use the terms, a reinterpretation is sometimes also a reanalysis, in the sense that the semantic representation constructed by the hearer is not only innovative in terms of its content, but is also structurally different from what would be the result of a conventional analysis. The distinction can be illustrated with the aid of the following examples: Detges & Waltereit (2002: 164), following Koch (1999: 145) adduce the metonymical extension of the Latin noun FOCUS from meaning “fireplace” to meaning “fire”, plausibly due to its use in ambiguous contexts like (19). Here, there is no structural difference between the original and the innovative representation, in so far as FOCUM plays the same semantic role (namely, that of “theme”) with the respect to the verb in both cases. This, then, would be a case of simple semantic reinterpretation of an element: (19)

Incendamus focum! ‘light up’1p.pl.pres.subj. – ‘fire(place)’masc.sg.acc. ‘Let’s light up the fireplace!’ > ‘Let’s light up the fire!’

Similarly, the difference in the meaning of encore in (20) and (21) would be a matter of simple reinterpretation (from phasal to “categorizing” adverb, cf. chs. 6-7 below), in as much as neither the syntactic role (sentence adverbial), the scope (the whole predication), nor the position (immediately after the finite verb) of encore has changed: (20) (21)

Alexis est encore là. ‘Alexis is still here.’ Un pingouin, c’est encore un oiseau. ‘A penguin is still a bird.’

On the other hand, Detges & Waltereit (2002: 152f) offer the example of the Spanish middle construction in (22), which has been reanalyzed as an impersonal SVO construction, as shown in (23). Here, we are dealing with reanalysis in the strict sense that I prefer, given that the semantic relation between the verb vender and its arguments, the noun cerveza and the reflexive se, has changed, resulting in structural resegmentation: (22)

(23)

Se vende cerveza en el patio. refl.pr.3.p.sg./pl. – V3p.sg.pres.ind. – N – prep. – def.det.masc.sg. – N ‘Beer is sold on the terrace.’/’Theygeneric sell beer on the terrace.’ [se vende] cervezatheme/grammatical subject > seagent/clitic subject [vende [cerveza]theme/grammatical object]

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Similarly, encore in (24) has not only been reinterpreted as a degree adverb (cf. ch. 6, sect.6.2), but has also undergone reanalysis, from sentence adjunct to phrasal adjunct, with a concomitant decrease in scope and change of syntactic position, such that it is, in this use, constrained to move with the adjective or adverb phrase that it specifies: (24)

Voilà un tableau encore plus beau que le premier ! ‘Here’s an even more beautiful painting than the first one!’

In other words, semantic reinterpretation of an element may or may not result in reanalysis of the underlying semantic structure of the string. Where the latter type of change is involved, it may ultimately lead to morphosyntactic changes that are perceptible in surface structure. Such changes will, according to Detges & Waltereit (2002), be the result of language users’ attempts to match identical functions with identical forms. It is thus the semantic representation that language users attribute to an item or construction at any given time that will pose constraints on its morphological form and syntactic behavior, not the other way around. It has been observed by a number of people (e.g. Diewald 2002, Heine 2002, Traugott & Dasher 2002: 35, Eckardt 2003: 9) that the possibility of reinterpretation normally relies on the existence of (ideally relatively frequent) types of context in which both the source meaning and the target meaning are possible interpretations of the utterance hosting the element that is reinterpreted.7 I will refer to such contexts as “bridging contexts”. In this, I take my point of departure in the model of the contexts of grammaticalization proposed by Heine (2002: 86), who identifies the following four contextual stages in the process of semasiological change: • Stage I: The expression appears only in contexts where it clearly has its source meaning. • Stage II: The expression starts to appear in bridging contexts, where, in addition to its source meaning, it allows an inference to an alternative interpretation, the “target” meaning. I differ from Heine, however, in assuming that this target meaning may, at this stage, remain backgrounded with respect to the source meaning (see further below). • Stage III: The expression is now found in “switch contexts”, where the new target interpretation is not only clearly the intended, and hence foregrounded, one, but is also incompatible with its source meaning. This stage thus corresponds to what, in sociolinguistic terms, has been called the “innovation” stage in language change (cf. Coseriu 1973[1957]: 78, Croft 2000: ch. 7, also Weinreich et al. 1968). • Stage IV: The target meaning is fully conventionalized. In between Stages III and IV, we thus find what has been called the “propagation” (cf. Croft 2000: ch. 7), “adoption” (Coseriu 1973[1957]: 78), or “actualization” (Timberlake 1977: 141, Harris & Campbell 1995: 77ff), stage of linguistic change, that is, the stage where the new meaning not only spreads to more and more users within the community, but also to more and

7 Certain, presumably mainly metaphorical, instances of semantic change are. however, not plausibly attributed to the existence of bridging contexts. Intuitively, for instance, the change in Latin MUSCULUS ”little mouse” > ”muscle” could hardly have come about as a result of its use in contexts where it was truly unclear whether the speaker was referring to a rodent or to a anatomical part. Nevertheless, such instances are probably in the minority.


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more contexts, as language users become aware of the full range of applicability consistent with the meaning in question (cf. also Weinreich et al. 1968). As briefly suggested above, the above account differs from Heine’s in so far as he requires that the target interpretation be the most plausibly intended one already at Stage II. Based on what I have found in my own data, I prefer to weaken that requirement, such that the alternative interpretation of the expression in question should simply be possible in addition to, and not necessarily in place of, its source meaning. So, where Heine posits the target interpretation as foregrounded in bridging contexts, my claim is that, while new, this interpretation is still backgrounded with respect to the source meaning, and only moves into the foreground when we reach Stage III. The reason is that bridging contexts are not, in and of themselves, evidence that reinterpretation has, in fact, taken place. Such contexts allow for innovative interpretations, which hearers may or may not bring to bear, let alone choose to subsequently exploit in their role as speakers. Evidence of actual reinterpretations is therefore found only when innovative meanings occur in contexts where the source meanings are highly implausible or even impossible. Such is the case in (21), for instance. Encore in that sentence cannot plausibly be interpreted as conveying its basic phasal sense, in which case the sentence as a whole would mean that penguins have been birds for a while, and continue to be so at the time of utterance, but may stop being birds at some point in the future (cf. ch. 6, sect. 4.2). Rather, (21) should be interpreted as a suggestion that penguins are a marginal kind of bird (see further ch. 7, sect. 2.2). Importantly, given this model of the contexts of change, not any arbitrary target meaning will be available as a result of reinterpretation. What the idea of bridging contexts implies is that whether a given item or construction will be subject to grammaticalization, to pragmaticalization, or to neither, might, to at least some extent, be predictable from its source meaning (cf. Visconti 2005, 2006), in as much as any changes will be motivated – and hence, constrained – by that source meaning. It also means that semantically similar items in different languages should, in principle, be subject to similar types of diachronic change (which is emphatically not to say that speakers of any and all languages will actually choose to exploit this potential). Phasal adverbs are, indeed, a good example of this, as they tend not only to be polysemous across languages, but also to feature similar types of meaning extensions. This is illustrated. among others, in Hansen & Strudsholm’s (2008) analysis of déjà and its Italian cognate già. I will return to this in my discussion of the notion of “persistence” in sect. 5 infra. A final issue to be mentioned is that of the gradualness vs abruptness of the changes resulting from reinterpretation / reanalysis. The so-called Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change (IITSC) formulated by Traugott & Dasher (2002) relies on the idea that, in the normal case, semantic change happens gradually. Inspired by Levinson (1995: 95, 2000: 263), these authors posit a diachronic cline of conventionalization of meaning extensions, as in (25), arguing that semantic changes start out as inferences that are closely tied to specific contexts (analogously to Grice’s [1989a(1975)] particularized conversational implicatures), become increasingly independent of such contexts, while still being defeasible (much like Grice’s generalized conversational implicatures), and end up being fully conventionalized, i.e. coded, and hence non-cancelable, elements of meaning:

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Particularized invited inference > generalized invited inference > coded meaning

However, as argued in Hansen & Waltereit (2006), this hypothesis is not tenable on either conceptual or empirical grounds (for further discussion, see sect. 4.1 below), and I will therefore follow Eckardt (2003: 49), who points out that …the speaker [at the stage where reinterpretation has occurred] is not uncertain about the nature of the new entry or has to develop the new entry “gradually” from the older one. The only uncertainty s/he experiences is of a sociological nature: Do other speakers actually possess and use this new entry, or not? While the speaker may be gradually more and more convinced that the new item is indeed part of the common language, they [sic] do not, according to this picture, gradually develop the meaning and grammar of the new entry. What does take place gradually is the extension of the reinterpreted item to more and more relevant contexts, as speakers realize the full potential of the new item. In this stage, known as the “actualization” stage (cf. Timberlake 1977, Harris & Campbell 1995: 77ff), multiple interpretations of the item are available, and language users can be expected to avail themselves of the different alternatives at different times, making it appear as if the process of reinterpretation itself were a gradual one.

3.4

Summary

In this section, I defined grammaticalization and pragmaticalization as distinct results of the convergence of different, but partially overlapping, processes of language change. I concluded that the evolution of pragmatic markers represented an instance of pragmaticalization, not of grammaticalization, in as much as it is characterized by features such as scope increase, syntagmatic and paradigmatic variability, and pragmatic strengthening, although it may also – like grammaticalization – be accompanied by phonological attrition, morphological coalescence, and decategorialization of the source item. I noted that, like grammaticalization, pragmaticalization is a matter of degree, and, moreover, that one and the same source item might give rise to two or more pragmaticalized items, in which case we may speak of “polypragmaticalization”. Finally, it was pointed out that reinterpretation of the semantic contribution of the source item was a prerequisite not only for pragmaticalization, but also for grammaticalization and any metonymically-based semantic change. In the next section, I will discuss three issues that are central to the study of semantic / pragmatic change from a semasiological point of view, namely paths, mechanisms, and motivations.

4 TRACING SEMASIOLOGICAL CHANGES When studying semantic / pragmatic change from a semasiological angle, it is first of all important to point out that no extension of the meaning of a given form necessarily results in semanticization. Diachronic semantics therefore needs to operate with two levels of change, namely on the one hand micro-dynamics, i.e. the short-term innovation of a new meaning within the context of a single speech event, and, on the other hand, macro-dynamics, i.e. the


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long-term propagation, by new speakers, of such innovations (e.g. Nerlich & Clarke 1992: 127; Traugott & Dasher 2002: 34f; Enfield 2003: 11). In principle, any meaning extension may stop short of ever reaching the macro-level, that is, it may remain a nonce formation (or at least an idiosyncratic feature of the innovating speaker’s language). Furthermore, at the macro-dynamic level, the conventionalization of a new meaning may in principle take two different forms: the extended meaning may either become entrenched as what Blank (1997: 119) calls a “discourse rule”, possibly operative only within a specific genre or tradition, and hence defeasible, or it may become fully semanticized as an independent sense of the item in question. An example of the former would be a rule of metonymic reference which appears to be in use among restaurant personnel, such that the name of a dish may stand for a patron who has ordered that dish (cf. Nunberg 1978: 22): (26)

The coq au vin has asked for some more bread.

In the context of (neo-)Gricean pragmatics, which takes up a central place in contemporary historical semantics / pragmatics due, in large part, to the work of Elizabeth Traugott, the distinction between nonce extension, discourse rule, and semanticization appears to a certain extent to overlap with the distinction between particularized implicature / invited inference (PCI / PIIN), generalized implicature / invited inference (GCI / GIIN), and coded content (including both truth-conditional content and conventional implicature), respectively. However, the parallelism between the GCI-level and that of discourse rules, in particular, is far from complete: thus, for instance, the “name of dish → patron” discourse rule mentioned above could not plausibly be a GCI, in as much as its applicability is entirely dependent on a very specific type of context, whereas a GCI will, in principle, go through by default whenever a given linguistic item or construction is used. Whatever the frequency of the discourse rule in question within the restaurant context, it must, in Gricean terms, constitute a PCI (the more so as, even within that type of context, the majority of mentions of names for dishes are surely not intended to designate patrons instead). It is important to keep this lack of a direct fit between the two distinctions in mind when discussing the so-called “transition” question, to which I turn presently. Whoever wishes to chart lasting changes at the macro-dynamic level, needs to address three central questions (cf. Traugott 2004: 548, also Weinreich et al. 1968): 1. The “transition” question: what is the path of change in each case? With respect to déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin, this addresses the question of which senses of each adverb are original (or “basic”) and which are derived, and how the various extensions of meaning are ordered with respect to one another. 2. The “actuation” question: what mechanisms of semantic / pragmatic change are involved in the extensions? 3. The “motivation” question: what probable motivation can we find for each of the extensions charted?

4.1

Transition

With respect to the transition question, the null hypothesis would be that the path of meaning change followed by any individual lexical item is essentially arbitrary and unpredictable, and, indeed, that appears to have been the accepted view throughout most of the history of modern linguistics (cf. Traugott & Dasher 2002: 60).

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It is true that, particularly in the latter half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th (before research into semantic change was made unfashionable by the advent of generative linguistics), several attempts were made to arrive at workable classifications of semantic change (e.g. Bréal 1897, Meillet 1975[1905-06], Nyrop 1913, Stern 1932, Darmesteter 1937, Ullmann 1957). However, these do not necessarily identify typical paths, but may rather consist in classifications of possible motivations for change (Meillet 1975[1905-06]), of possible mechanisms (Stern 1932, Ullmann 1957), or of several of these at a time (Bréal 1897, Nyrop 1913, Darmesteter 1937), and such paths as are identified may point in opposite directions (e.g. Bréal’s pejorative vs meliorative tendencies; or his generalization of sense vs restriction of sense), or they may be very restricted in scope (e.g. Stern’s [1932: 185ff] law concerning the evolution of English adverbs of the rapidly class). However, semantic change being – as we saw above – a prerequisite for grammaticalization, discussions of the nature of the changes involved (bleaching or not? subjectification or not? metaphorization vs metonymization?) have, in the past couple of decades, led to a renewed focus on meaning change more generally. Of particular theoretical importance is the question of whether it is possible to identify both universal and unidirectional tendencies of semantic change, independently of whether such changes are part of a process of grammaticalization or not. As briefly mentioned in the previous section, at the most abstract level, Levinson (1995: 95, 2000: 263) suggests the existence of a general diachronic sequence of meaning changes as in (27). Traugott & Dasher (2002: 38) revise this sequence as in (28), to constitute the centerpiece of their Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change (IITSC). Note that instead of PCI and GCI, these authors speak of (G)IIN, i.e. “(generalized) invited inferences”, where “invited inference” is basically an alternative name for “implicature”, although Traugott & Dasher emphasize the role of the interactive negotiation of meanings to a greater extent than Levinson does.8 Moreover, they explicitly restrict the domain of application of the sequence in (28) to metonymically-based changes (cf. infra). (27)

(28)

Utterance-token meaning (primarily PCI) > Utterance-type meaning (primarily GCI, but also, for instance, presuppositions) > Sentence meaning (including, but limited to, conventional implicature) IIN > GIIN > coded meaning (i.e. new polysemy)

The tenability of this hypothesis is, however (as argued in Hansen & Waltereit 2006), open to debate, on both theoretical and empirical grounds. What seems intuitively uncontroversial is that innovations must start out as particularized to a specific context of utterance. Whether or not they must necessarily go through the intermediate stage of generalization before becoming fully lexicalized is much less clear. First of all, there seems to be no principled reason why particularized inferences could not become semanticized straightaway. For instance, it seems unlikely that the Italian expression brava donna, literally translatable as “good / honest woman”, but which has subsequently acquired the additional meaning “prostitute” (cf. Blank 1997: 224), should have had the latter as its default interpretation across a range of contexts (this being the definition of a GCI as opposed to a PCI, cf. ch. 2, sect.3.1) before it eventually became lexicalized as a polysemy. 8

Invited inferences in the stricter sense first defined by Geis & Zwicky (1971) correspond quite closely to Grice’s (1989a[1975]) generalized conversational implicatures.


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Secondly, as we have just seen in sect. 4, there seem to be cases in which a given type of inference has been standardized as a discourse rule, while retaining the status of PCI, as opposed to GCI. Thirdly, specifically with respect to the sequence in (27), the assumption of a necessary intermediate stage would seem to preclude the eventual semanticization of PCI based on Grice’s (1989a[1975]) maxims of quality or relevance, given that Levinson (1995; 2000: 35ff) defines all GCI as based on inferential heuristics equivalent to Grice’s maxims of either quantity or manner. This essentially eliminates the possibility of semantic change based on metaphor, in as much as metaphor, on the Gricean view, relies on an ostensive flouting of the maxim of quality. This latter objection does not apply to (28) to the same extent, given that Traugott & Dasher’s (2002) GIIN constitute a more inclusive and more loosely defined category than Levinson’s GCI, a fact which, on the other hand, makes the postulated sequence of evolution less falsifiable. Finally, the account of GCI in ch. 2, sect. 3.1 above, as well as in Hansen & Waltereit (2006) gives reason to think that, in those cases where a former GCI does seem to have been lexicalized, that GCI used to constitute a backgrounded inference. Consequently, it must first have been foregrounded through a PCI in order to accede to the status of a new polysemy (see also below for an account of the role of foreground and background in metonymic change). For these reasons, this particular macro-path will not be retained as a working hypothesis in the present study. At a more concrete level, major contributions in the area of predicting macro-paths of semantic change have been made, among others, by Heine et al. (1991: 48ff), who put forward the hypothesis of a generalized metaphorical chain operative in grammaticalization, reproduced as (29), whereby any of the categories in the chain may serve as a vehicle for conceptualizing any category on its right, and by Sweetser (1990), who identifies the metaphorical chain in (30) as relevant to extensions of the meanings of verbs of perception, modal verbs, and sentence connectives: (29) (30)

PERSON > OBJECT > ACTIVITY > SPACE > TIME > QUALITY CONTENT LEVEL MEANING > EPISTEMIC MEANING > SPEECH ACT MEANING

However, specifically with respect to the field of adverbials and discourse markers (including connectives), the framework developed by Elizabeth Traugott, and which has been continually revised over the years (e.g. Traugott 1986, 1990; Traugott & Dasher 2002), is no doubt by far the most comprehensive one currently on the market. In its most recent manifestation, found in Traugott & Dasher (2002), it comprises the following nine diachronic tendencies in the semantic-pragmatic evolution of lexical items from four different notional areas, viz. modality, discourse marking, performativity, and social deixis (2002: 281): 1. Meanings tend to become increasingly subjective (i.e. explicitly grounded in the speaker’s subjective perspective), and possibly even intersubjective (i.e. explicitly grounded in the relationship between speaker and hearer). 2. Meanings that were contentful at the outset tend to become increasingly procedural in nature, where the distinction between contentful and procedural is not seen as

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

absolute but rather as a matter of degree (pace Relevance Theory, e.g. Blakemore 1987: 144).9 Items that originally had scope within the host proposition tend to progressively enlarge that scope, possibly even up to the discourse level. Meanings that were truth-conditional at the outset tend to become non-truthconditional. Meanings that originally made reference to the described event progressively come to refer to the speech event itself (once again, the distinction is a matter of degree). Modal meanings tend to develop in a sequence from pre-modal to deontic to epistemic. Manner adverbials tend to evolve into adversatives, subsequently into elaboratives, and finally into hedges. Speech act verbs tend to develop in a sequence going from pre-speech-act verbs to speech act verbs to performatives to parentheticals. Social deictics tend to evolve from pre-honorifics through referent honorifics to lexical addressee honorifics, and finally to affixal addressee honorifics.

Of these, tendencies 1-5 are of relevance to the four phasal adverbs with which I am principally concerned, and in the descriptive part of this study, the five tendencies in question will indeed be shown to be operative in the evolution of French déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin. The tendencies posited are broad, but nevertheless on the whole fairly clearly identifiable, and they are claimed to be unidirectional, a claim which is amply supported by empirical data from two genetically and areally quite different languages, namely English and Japanese. Three main criticisms have, however, been leveled against the framework from a purely theoretical point of view (cf. Visconti 2004: 824): Firstly, the fact that the tendency towards subjectification, in particular, appears difficult to quantify, and hence, also difficult to falsify. Secondly, that the evolution from subjective to intersubjective may “[seem] to counter the trend towards an increasing degree of interiorization of the perspective expressed on the described event, a feature intrinsic to subjectification”. The third objection concerns the fact that the IITSC does not speak of exceptionless “laws”, but merely of “tendencies”, the question here being the precise statistical frequency with which a phenomenon must occur before it can usefully and justifiably be called a tendency. I do not think these objections vitiate the theory: as for the first, Traugott & Dasher (2002: 22) actually do make at least an informal attempt at quantifying subjectivity when they define “those expressions [as] most objective that require the fewest inferences depending on [the speaker-hearer dyad]”, this being spelled out as involving minimal modal marking, maximal expression of event structure participants in surface structure, minimal deictic marking, and maximal contextual determination of meanings. Moreover, recent work by Torres Cacoullos & Schwenter (fc), using the evolution of the Spanish concessive connective a pesar de (“in spite of”) as a test case, shows that the notion of subjectification can, indeed, be operationalized, their results appearing to uphold the tendency proposed by Traugott & Dasher (2002).

9 In the framework argued for in this study, all meanings are considered to be instructional, hence procedural, at the most basic level, as laid out in ch. 2, sect. 2.2 supra. In a subset of cases, however, the semantic instructions coded by a linguistic item or construction involve the identification or construction of conceptual material. This conceptual material may play a greater or smaller role in the interpretation process, and the present framework is thus compatible with Traugott & Dasher’s model.


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Visconti’s (2004) second criticism seems to rely on a Langackerian definition of subjectification as interiorization of the perspective (Langacker 1991), whereas Traugott (1999) actually defines it as a process whereby meanings come over time to encode or externalize the speaker/writer’s perspectives and attitudes as constrained by the communicative world of the speech event, rather than by the so-called “real world” characteristics of the event or situation referred to. (emphases mine) In this formulation, there is no obvious contradiction involved in the claim that intersubjectification, defined as externalization of the speaker’s attention to the hearer within the framework of the speech event, is a natural outgrowth of subjectification. (Whether or not intersubjectification is also a strong tendency in semantic change across expression types is another question, the answer to which is less clear.) As for the third point, the tendencies are – as far as I can tell – defined as regular in the sense of being unidirectional, i.e. reverse orders of development are hypothesized to be ruled out unless very special circumstances obtain (Traugott & Dasher 2002: 281). Whether or not they actually are unidirectional is an empirical question, which does not undermine the theoretical foundations of the framework. In sum, the IITSC appears to provide good indications of where to look for plausible paths of change in the semantic evolution of the four French phasal adverbs with which I am concerned. One question which raises itself, however, is whether, if the paths identified are supposed to be unidirectional, they must therefore also be linear. That is, supposing that a given lexical item has developed a new extended sense from an originally unique sense, and has thus become polysemous, in case a further sense develops, will this third sense necessarily be an extension of the second, or might it be traced directly back to the original sense, such that senses 2 and 3 would be extensions based on different aspects of this original sense? There does not appear to be anything in the formulation of the IITSC to preclude such a scenario, and we would, in that case, simply be dealing with two different paths of extension from a single original meaning, a phenomenon which – in the context of the evolution of pragmatic markers – was identified in sect. 3.2 above as “polypragmaticalization” (cf. Dostie 2004: 33), but which might more generally be termed “polysemanticization”. This would mean that the hypothesized senses 2 and 3 might subsequently become the bases for two independent further extensions of meaning, which might well be conceptually quite far removed from one another. The descriptive part of this volume will show – particularly in connection with the analysis of enfin – that, indeed, the possibility of highly complex networks of senses should be envisaged.

4.2

Actuation

Having formed a hypothesis about the paths that extensions of the meaning of phasal adverbs are likely to take, we come now to the actuation question, i.e. the question of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the extensions. Significant attempts at exhaustive classification of possible mechanisms of change have been made, among others, by Stern (1932), Ullmann (1957), and Blank (1997). The approaches of these three authors are markedly different: Stern’s study is empirical and inductive, drawing heavily on psychological and pragmatic notions. Ullmann’s classification is purely theoretical

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/ deductive, and is based strictly on the dualistic Saussurean concept of the linguistic sign. Blank’s is likewise a semiotic approach, but his model of the linguistic sign is a far more comprehensive one than Ullmann’s, and psycholinguistic and pragmatic adequacy figure prominently in the exposition. Going into detail about the specifics of each of the three classifications would take us too far afield with respect to the main purpose of the present study; what is of primary interest here is the fact that, despite the differences in their models, all three authors appear to agree that diachronic sense changes are ultimately based on patterns of association either between aspects of different linguistic signs or between linguistic signs and aspects of the cognitive or realworld entities they stand for. The two principal patterns of association identified are similarity and contiguity, both of which may apply on the content side and / or the expression side of lexemes undergoing semantic change.10 That this should be so is hardly surprising, because, as pointed out by Nerlich & Clarke (1992: 137), speakers will only use words with new meanings if they trust they will nevertheless make themselves understood, and the two main ways to achieve that is to either “use words for near neighbors of the things you mean” or “use words for the look-alikes of what you mean”. Traditionally, the latter strategy, similarity – particularly on the content side, where it manifests itself as metaphor – has been regarded as the most important mechanism, not just in lexicalsemantic change, but also in grammaticalization, which (as discussed above) is always accompanied by some degree of semantic change in the item or construction concerned (cf. Blank 1997: 361; Traugott & Dasher 2002: 78). This view has tended to be perpetuated within the framework of Cognitive Semantics, a prominent example being the work of Eve Sweetser (e.g. 1990), and in cognitively-oriented historical linguistics more generally (e.g. Heine et al. 1991: 45). In the last decade or so, contiguity – or “metonymy” in a typically very broad sense of the term – has come to the fore, and it has been argued that it is as important a mechanism as, and may even be more important than, metaphor (e.g. Hopper & Traugott 1993: 81; Bybee et al. 1994: 24f; Blank 1997: 259; Barcelona 2000; Radden 2000; Traugott & Dasher 2002: 9). While it is observed that the two may be difficult to distinguish in concrete cases, and consequently, that it may be more fruitful to conceive of the clear cases as opposite poles on a continuum (e.g. Bybee et al. 1994: 24f; Barcelona 2000; Radden 2000), it is argued that metonymy is the more likely candidate for pre-eminence.11 The reason is that, with respect to the core cases, at least, metaphor relies on a qualitative leap from one conceptual domain to another (from “source” domain to “target” domain)(cf. Lakoff & Johnson 1980), and is based on factual incompatibility between these two domains, such that a given lexeme or construction must be understood either literally or figuratively (cf. Blank 1997: 161). Thus, (31) for instance, may either be understood as referring to a concrete cup which is too full, or as meaning that the speaker is overwhelmed by her good fortune, but not simultaneously as both. In other words, out of context, innovations based on metaphor will be ambiguous, the context determining one or the other interpretation. Metaphorical changes

10 In the spirit of Blank (1997: ch. 2), ”content” is here to be understood broadly, to include for instance encyclopaedic knowledge of concepts and referents. 11 In accordance with this, the hypothesized continuum is conceived of as having metonymy-based metaphors in the middle, not metaphor-based metonymies, and ”metaphors which are grounded in metonymy are more basic and natural than those which do not have a metonymic basis” (Radden 2000: 93).


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must therefore be conceptualized as abrupt and discontinuous (cf. Traugott & Dasher 2002: 77). (31)

My cup runneth over.

Metonymy, on the other hand, is based on the simultaneous or sequential co-presence of elements within the same conceptual frame (cf. Panther & Thornburg 2003: 7). The elements in question are therefore mutually compatible, such that one may not only be able to slide from literal to metonymic meanings (or vice versa) within a short stretch of text (cf. Blank 1997: 243ff; Fauconnier 1984: 18), as in (32) infra – a possibility which is normally excluded in clear cases of metaphor – but in many instances, the addressee need not even choose between the two possible meanings, given that both may be germane to the interpretation of the utterance.12 Such is the case, for instance, in (33), in respect of which one can imagine a great many contexts in which both the temporal and the causal interpretation of since will be simultaneously applicable. Rather than exhibiting ambiguity, innovations based on metonymy will therefore, if anything, be interpretatively vague. The effect of metonymy thus lies mainly in a more or less perceptible figure-ground shift, i.e. a reversal of those aspects of the content that are, under normal circumstances, respectively foregrounded and backgrounded within the relevant frame (cf. Blank 1997: 243; Panther & Thornburg 2003: 7; Waltereit 2006). (32)

(33)

On va boire une bouteille. Quand elle sera vide, on en ouvrira une autre. (from Blank 1997 : 244) ‘We’re going to drink a bottle. When it’s empty, we’ll open another one.’ Since Susan left him, John has been very miserable. (from Bybee et al. 1994: 197)

It would seem that, when diachronic sense changes are carefully charted in a chronologically continuous body of texts, the investigator is, in fact, highly likely to come across “intermediate” examples like (33), which precisely instantiate what was called “bridging contexts” in sect. 3.3 above. (Indeed, my own analyses in chapters 6-7 infra will bear witness to this.) That is so even in the case of changes which might otherwise be analyzed as metaphorical in nature (e.g. Traugott & Dasher 2002: 80, Bybee et al. 1994: 198), which suggests that the mechanism actually relied on by the language users may rather have been metonymy. This is further supported by the fact that metonymy may be conceptually simpler than metaphor due to its fundamentally indexical nature, which exploits factual, rather than imaginative, associations (cf. Blank 1997: 234f). I mentioned above that the notion of metonymic change employed in much recent work on meaning change is a very broad one. Thus, Koch (1991: 295), for instance, uses the term “speech act metonymy” (Sprechaktmetonymie) to denote delocutive change in the sense of Benveniste (1966[1958]) and – more particularly – Anscombre (1979, 1985), that is, cases where an expression that is typically used in the performance of a specific type of speech act eventually comes to denote (some aspect of) that same speech act. A standard example of this 12

It is true that, as observed by Koch (2001), certain metonymies, such as the metonymic change in Latin and Romance words for ’tongue’ > ’language’, may exhibit no referential overlap, either. However, the fact that the different senses of words like French langue are part of the same frame means that contexts can be found in which either interpretation might be meant: (i) [In reference to a speaker of a foreign language, whose speech has an unpleasant sound] Sa langue est un peu rude. ’His / her tongue is a bit rough.’ or ’His / her language is a bit harsh.’

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process is French merci (“thanks”), which originates in a late Latin noun meaning “favor” or “mercy”, and which is assumed to have taken on its currently more salient meaning as a result of frequent, more or less formulaic, use in utterances expressing gratitude. In a similar vein, Traugott & Dasher (2002: 78ff) take metonymic change to include the conventionalization of all manner of contextually invited inferences. This broad sense is the one in which I will be using the term in this work, and I will show in chapters 6-7 infra that the history of the French phasal adverbs supports a metonymical analysis of the meaning changes they have undergone. Now, clearly, the frame- and Gestalt-based nature of metonymic change, and the interpretative vagueness of examples such as (33) above, raises the question of the status of the different readings of lexical items whose interpretation in specific utterances appears to involve metonymic processes. Given, for instance, that the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy is an implicature of a large number of utterances involving the temporal succession of events, whether or not they contain the conjunctive since, what allows us to say that the causal reading of since is an actual sense to be listed in the lexicon, as opposed to its being simply a (more or less systematic, but nonetheless defeasible) conversational implicature? I take the view that, as long as an innovative interpretation of the meaning contribution of a given item cannot occur independently of the source meaning of that item, and as long as hearers continue to attribute the new meaning to the item by default at best, i.e. in contexts where such an interpretation does not conflict with what was otherwise asserted or known, the new meaning in question has the status of a (more or less generalized) pragmatic inference. As argued in Hansen & Waltereit (2006: 254), semanticization can, as a rule, only take place once the new meaning occurs without the old one being plausibly intended. By this criterion, since is, indeed, polysemous between a temporal and a causal sense in contemporary English, given the possibility of its marking a purely causal relation between propositions, as exemplified in (34): (34)

Since Peter arrived early, I asked him to help me peel the potatoes.

Once this stage has been reached, however, the status of the causal interpretation of utterances like (33) becomes problematic, in as much as it remains defeasible here. Claiming that since has become semantically ambiguous between a temporal and a causal sense is not really a viable option, given that the two readings are not mutually exclusive. We must, therefore, assume that polysemy networks allow the simultaneous activation of several senses of a lexeme where these are not incompatible with one another.

4.3

Motivation

Finally, we need to address the question of why semasiological changes occur at all. Except for the possibility that language communities may sometimes need to lexicalize concepts that are new to their culture, there is no logical necessity for languages to change, and yet we know that any natural, living language invariably does so, not just intermittently, but continuously. As noted by Blank (1997: 345), the mechanisms of change identified in 4.2 clearly do not constitute a full explanation, since language use is rife with associative possibilities that go unexploited. What is more, that fact is itself in need of explanation: not only should our


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theory be capable of accounting for why languages change; ideally, it should also explain how it is, given the inevitability of change, that they nevertheless also remain – to a large extent – stable (cf. Keller 1994[1990]: 95). In order to properly address the question of motivation, a number of important distinctions must be drawn. The most basic of these is that when we say that “language changes”, what we really mean is that “language users change their language”: languages are not living entities that exist and evolve independently of their users. So what we will be concerned with are the motivations of language users. But as soon as we use the verb change transitively, and furthermore speak of users’ motivations, we imply that intentional action is involved, so a second distinction is in order, namely that between intentional actions that actually have language change as a goal, and intentional actions that are geared toward some other goal, but which have language change as an unintended by-product. Language changes due to the first type certainly do exist, and may be observed in cases of conscious language planning on the part of, for instance, various (semi-)official agencies, but also on the part of individual language users in a micro-setting (cf. Fasold 1984, ch. 9). Usually, such changes will be made, not for their own sake, but with a more long-term goal, possibly of a socio-political nature, in mind. Within the field of lexical semantics, planned changes may for instance aim at raising the status of members of oppressed sub-communities (e.g. certain ethnic groups) by encouraging users to refer to them with certain types of expressions rather than others (cf. Murphy 1997). In the unmarked case, however, changes of this type probably constitute a very small minority. My exclusive concern here is, therefore, with changes of the second type, i.e. long-term changes that Keller (1994[1990]: ch. 4) defines as non-intended social consequences of individually intentional actions directed toward some other, more immediate, result. The intentionality – and hence, the motivation – involved in this type of changes thus belongs firmly to the communicative micro-level.13 At the macro-level, there is no intentionality, and the stabilization and conventionalization of any given change can be regarded as an “invisiblehand” phenomenon as defined by the 18th century economist Adam Smith (apud Keller 1994[1990]: 37). Invisible-hand phenomena can be aptly illustrated by the non-linguistic example of a traffic jam (Keller 1994[1990]: 63): Suppose that one driver on a busy one-lane road suddenly brakes, with a micro-level intention to, say, avoid hitting an animal that is crossing the road. The drivers that follow her will also brake, not because of the crossing animal, but because they see the first one braking, their individual micro-level intentions being to avoid a car crash. As the following drivers will probably each tend to reduce their speed too much rather than too little, to be on the safe side, the whole lane will gradually slow down, eventually coming to standstill. This unintended standstill constitutes a macro-level invisible-hand phenomenon. Analogously, the micro-level innovations that ultimately result in language change may, as a rule, be assumed to be motivated by individual, context-dependent communicative goals of which language change as such does not form a part. As to the types of motivations that language users may have for either innovating new meanings or for adopting (and thereby contributing to the propagation of) innovations initiated by others, various proposals have been 13 Hence, there is, as far as I can tell, no reason to insist (as is done by Blank 1997: 371) on a strict distinction between the goals of innovating speakers and the goals of propagating speakers, as these can be expected to be quite similar.

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made in the literature, but the more recent ones – although not identical – all seem to converge on a communicative cost-benefit analysis (e.g. Keller 1994[1990]: 101; Blank 1997: 369ff; Geeraerts 1997: 104ff; Croft 2000: ch. 4). Such an analysis takes its point of departure in the asssumption that the most fundamental purpose of language is communication. Moreover, in keeping with speech act theory, it is taken for granted that communication (understood as intentional communication in the sense of Grice 1974) aims at modifying the relationship between speaker and addressee in some way, for instance (in the case of assertions) by committing the speaker to the truth of some piece of information in order that the addressee may accommodate it into his short- or long-term memory, or (in the case of directives) by inducing the addressee to carry out some action in the world (cf. Searle 1976). Because communication thus involves a desire to make some kind of impact on hearers, speakers must respond simultaneously to a set of partially conflicting constraints: On the one hand, they orient to a principle of “saying no more than one must”. In part, this constraint is no doubt speaker-based, in as much as it enjoins speakers to express themselves with as little expense of effort as possible. Levinson (1995: 96, 2000: 6) has hypothesized that a very basic problem of communication is what he calls the “articulatory bottleneck”, or the fact that human beings think a good deal faster than they are capable of articulating their thoughts. Consequently, a speaker who aimed at making her thoughts entirely explicit (assuming that such a thing is all possible)14 might very easily take a disproportionately long time to make a relatively minor impact on her addressee. The existence of such an articulatory bottleneck would therefore encourage speakers to rely instead on hearers’ inferential abilities in order to derive the full meaning of the utterances they hear.15 This constraint is largely the equivalent of Grice’s (1989a[1975]) second maxim of quantity, and Horn’s (1989: 194) R-principle, just as it subsumes Levinson’s (2000: 37) I-heuristic. Its operation is exemplified by the PCI in (35), and by the GCI in (36): (35)

(36)

A. It’s 10 o’clock. Shouldn’t the bride have been here by now? B. I saw her a couple of hours ago with a boarding pass. (>> The bride got cold feet and left the country.) If you give me a bite of your ice cream, I’ll give you a bite of mine. (>> If and only if you give me a bite…)

However, as both these examples suggest, such a “say-no-more-than-you-must” principle is no doubt also partially hearer-based. That is, for reasons of tact and politeness, it will, in a great many cases, be more expedient not to make one’s meaning entirely explicit. Thus, in (35), 14 There is good reason to think that such a thing is not possible. As the experiments reported in Garfinkel (1967) show, the pursuit of complete explicitness in everyday interaction in practice results in communicative breakdown. 15 Richard Waltereit (p.c.) has suggested to me that the putative bottleneck could as well be circumvented by exploiting more fully the phonemic potential of languages. That is, most languages have been shown to possess 30-50 distinct phonemes, but the distinctions offered by the articulatory system allow for as many as 150. With more phonemes, words could be shorter, and speech consequently faster. As far as I can tell, this does not undermine the basic cost-benefit analysis, however, since it would take greater effort on the part of speakers to clearly articulate very subtle phonemic differences, particularly in less-thanoptimal acoustic conditions. Moreover, given that hearers are not always as attentive as speakers would like, and that faster speech is typically harder to process, it is likely that speakers would try to ensure the correct transmission of their messages by a greater amount of expressive redundancy.


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speaker B states only what she has observed prior to the exchange, but carefully refrains from stating, and hence committing herself to, the implicated conclusion, not only because it is less effortful, but also because that conclusion (whether true or not) may be hurtful or otherwise offensive to either the addressee or some third person (saliently, the bride and/or the groom). Similarly, in (36), using if instead of if and only if is not only less effortful, it is also more polite, in as much as stating something as a merely sufficient (as opposed to necessary and sufficient) condition for the speaker to undertake some action on behalf of the addressee at least nominally leaves the addressee alternative options for obtaining what he wants. On the other hand, speakers are also operating under a different, and clearly hearer-based, constraint according to which they must at the same time orient to their addressees’ interests in order to be communicatively successful. It seems to me that there are several aspects to this constraint. At the most basic level, it is presumably indispensable for speakers to express themselves with sufficient clarity that hearers will actually be able to understand both what they mean and why it needed to be said. In other words, speakers should “say as much as they must”, which, among other things, entails that they should make their statements as strong as they possibly can under the circumstances (“the circumstances” of course including interactional considerations, such as tact and politeness). This part of the hearer-oriented constraint is largely equivalent to Grice’s (1989a[1975]) first maxim of quantity, to Horn’s (1989: 194) Q-principle, and it subsumes Levinson’s (2000: 36ff) Q- and M-heuristics. It is illustrated by the PCI in (37) and by the GCI in (38): (37) (38)

A. Do you know Professor Jones? B. I’m familiar with his work. (>> I haven’t actually been introduced to Professor Jones.) Some of my undergraduate students understand GCI theory. (>> Not all of my undergraduate students understand GCI theory.)

Beyond that, however, speakers may sometimes find it opportune to either “say more than they must, or less than they should”, that is, in order to make what they have to say even more interesting and more memorable, or to avoid hurting or offending their hearers, they may have recourse to (over- or under-)expressive rhetorical strategies of various kinds. This corresponds, not to observing, but to infringing, in a benign way, one or more of the maxims of quantity, quality and manner. Such expressive strategies may be exemplified, among other things, by the hyperbolic use of intensifiers, as in (39), by live metaphors, as in (40), by downtoners, as in (41)16, or by euphemisms, as in (42) : (39) (40) (41) (42)

A. Do you really think Joan will divorce Max? B. No, despite all their quarreling, she’s still desperately in love with him. You’re the jelly on my peanut butter. A. Anne is pretty smart, isn’t she? B. Yeah, I’d say she has half a brain. I’m sorry to tell you that your husband has passed away.

Speakers constantly seek to balance these constraints, and will frequently be pushed towards linguistic innovation in order to comply with them. The example of the acquisition of causal meaning by English since is a perfect example of meaning change that can be attributed principally to the action of the “say no more than you must” constraint.

16 Note that, as the example shows, downtoners are not necessarily used to soften messages that might offend the hearer and / or a third party, but may be a way of calling attention to the message by antiphrasis, rather than via exaggeration.

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The expressiveness constraint is the origin of a great many meaning changes, and, as argued by Waltereit (2002b, 2006), it is likely to be a prime factor in the evolution of discourse markers. Thus, for instance, an inherent function of imperatives of perception verbs such as look, listen etc. is to draw the hearer’s attention to an interesting phenomenon in the immediate environment. Waltereit (2002b, 2006) plausibly attributes the rise of the discourse marking uses of such forms, uses that are found in many languages, to speakers’ desire to mark the content of their utterances as worth attending to, a desire which leads them to a “rhetorical overuse” that is frequently unwarranted by the original semantics of the forms. The “say as much as you must” constraint, on the other hand, is probably less a factor of change than a stabilizing one, and it is difficult to think of examples of meaning changes, especially in the domain of adverbials and connectives / discourse markers, that would be clearly attributable to this particular constraint (cf. Levinson 2000: 70, and Traugott 2004: 560, who both note that the Q-heuristic will, indeed, normally retard change). In all cases of linguistic innovation, speakers must, of course, make at least some effort to ensure that they are not misunderstood. In principle, the situational context alone may make the intended interpretation clear, but Traugott (2004: 560) observes that, in actual fact, innovations are typically introduced in linguistically “harmonic” contexts, i.e. contexts where other items express meanings similar to the intended innovative one. In other words, the contexts in which meaning changes are first introduced are characterized by a certain redundancy. This creates a problem for the analyst, in that it may, in some cases, be difficult to determine with any certainty whether a given lexeme is, indeed, being used innovatively, or whether what one perceives as a change in the use of that item is simply the unintended interaction of an already extant sense with a context that is biased in a certain direction. This leads directly to the question of whether meaning changes are ultimately speaker-based or hearer-based. Traugott & Dasher (2002: 7) argue that the speaker’s role is central because not only is it speakers who innovate, but even if innovations need to be understood as such by hearers, it is in their role as speakers that the latter take it upon themselves to propagate those innovations that have appealed to them. To some extent, this is a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Nevertheless, I believe that it is possible to clarify our concepts in a way that shows the role of hearers in meaning change to be at least as important as that of speakers. Thus, inspired by Detges & Waltereit (2002), we may distinguish between two facets of semanticization, namely “reinterpretation” and “propagation”. As discussed in sect. 3.3, the activity of reinterpretation is crucial to language change, and it rests very firmly with hearers: speakers may innovate as much as they please, but if hearers do not perceive those innovations, they obviously will not take hold. Conversely, hearers may well be responsible for reinterpretations that were entirely unintended by the speaker. This is particularly important in the context of a theory of meaning change that regards metonymic processes as central, since, as observed in sect. 4.2 above, literal and metonymic meanings are often mutually compatible, so reinterpretations of this type will be particularly prone to arise as the result of actual misunderstandings, rather than being attributable to speakers’ intentions (cf. Nerlich & Clarke 1992: 134).17 17 As an example of this, Koch (2004: 16f) hypothesizes that the Latin noun TESTIMONIUM (’testimony’, ’evidence’) evolved into French témoin (’witness’) because it was used by judges in courtroom contexts like (i), where both meanings are contextually possible, and equally likely, while only the former can be assumed to have been intended: (i) Audiamus testimonium proximum! ’Let’s hear the next piece of testimony!’ → ’Let’s hear the next witness!’


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The process of propagation, on the other hand, relies on language users who reproduce a reinterpreted item in their role as speakers; yet, given that propagation is necessarily a gradual – and often quite protracted – process, the addressees of the propagating speakers will need to continue to reinterpret the item undergoing change on a large number of individual occasions before the new meaning can be considered to have become entrenched in the language.

4.4

Summary

In this section, I have discussed three issues that are crucial to any account of semantic change, namely the transition question, i.e. the nature of the paths followed by items that have undergone or are currently undergoing changes of meaning; the actuation question, i.e. the nature of the mechanisms involved in such changes; and the motivation question, i.e. the psychological factors responsible for the initiation and propagation of change. With respect to the issue of transition, I rejected the hypothesis, due to Levinson (1995; 2000) and to Traugott & Dasher (2002), that semantic change tends to follow a macro-path from PCI > GCI > coded meaning. On the other hand, I retained Traugott & Dasher’s (2002) hypothesis that there are nevertheless some observable regularities in semantic change, which these authors spell out in nine unidirectional tendencies pertaining, among others, to the evolution of pragmatic markers. It will be shown, in the descriptive part of the present book (chs. 6-7), that the existence of a subset of these tendencies is supported by the evolution of the French phasal adverbs. As for the issue of actuation, I mainly discussed the mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy, and argued that metonymy, understood lato sensu as Gestalt-shifts within a given conceptual or experiential frame, constitutes the prime mechanism in the types of semantic / pragmatic changes with which I am concerned in this book. Finally, with respect to the motivations for change, I distinguished between a macro- and a micro-level, and I defined the kind of changes studied here as being, at the macro-level, invisible-hand phenomena. At the micro-level, on the other hand, it was argued that they could be attributed to speakers’ attempting to comply simultaneously with conflicting communicative constraints, related, respectively, to economy / restraint and to expressiveness. Finally, I emphasized the crucial role played by hearers in the process of semantic / pragmatic change, arguing that while speakers are responsible for innovation and propagation, hearers are responsible for reinterpretation, without which there can be no actual change.

5 THE NOTION OF “PERSISTENCE” IN SEMASIOLOGICAL CHANGE In chapter 2, sect. 5 supra, I argued that linguistic items crucially possess inherent meanings (rather than their meanings being determined by the structural oppositions into which they enter with other similar items). Earlier in the present chapter, I argued that semantic reinterpretation was typically facilitated by the existence of “bridging contexts”, i.e. contexts where both the established meaning of an item, and an innovative meaning were potentially applicable. This suggests that the inherent meanings of linguistic items constrain the directions that semantic / functional extensions can take, and how far extensions can go.

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As mentioned in ch. 1 supra, it is well-known in the grammaticalization literature that grammaticalized items usually retain some aspects of the meaning of their diachronic source items, a phenomenon known as “persistence” (cf. Hopper 1991). Indeed, this appears to be true of items that undergo semantic / functional change more generally, including (but not limited to) pragmaticalization. However, in the bulk of the literature, persistence is considered in a “backwards” perspective, that is, it is observed mainly as a fact about the target item. It will be argued here that persistence is also relevant in a “forwards” perspective: contextual inference, and in particular frame-based metonymies, being a prime motor in semantic / functional change, meaning extensions are, to a significant extent, motivated by contexts that are compatible with the inherent source meanings of the items undergoing extension, but which at the same time point to the target meanings. This requirement of compatibility with the source meaning in at least the initial stages of metonymic change means that a given existing form cannot be recruited to express just any arbitrarily chosen new meaning. In other words, if persistence in the “backwards” perspective is meant to explain the partial identity of features of an old and a new meaning of a linguistic item, persistence in the “forwards” perspective amounts to the hypothesis that there are constraints on the kinds of differences that can arise between the old and the new meaning. A corollary of this is that two source items may seem largely synonymous in a number of contexts, and yet differ on one salient dimension, such that a particular meaning / usage extension becomes possible – perhaps even likely – for one of the two items, but not – or at least much less so – for the other. This point is nicely argued and illustrated in Visconti’s (2005) fine-grained analysis of the development of Italian scalar particles perfino and addirittura (both similar to English even) from prepositional phrases meaning, respectively “through to the end” and “in a straight line”, and it will receive further support from the analyses of the evolution of the French phasal adverbs in chapters 6-7 infra. In other words, the notion of persistence might have greater explanatory power than has thus far been assumed, and perhaps even some predictive power, both in respect of meaning changes that can and do take place, and in respect of those that do not – and perhaps cannot. Of course, if explaining why something happens is often a complicated task, attempting to explain why something does not happen is no doubt even more so. In the case of semantic / functional changes like the ones charted here, the factual non-existence of any logically possibly use of a lexical item may be due to any number of factors.18 Nevertheless, provided that one possesses a thorough enough analysis of existing uses of a set of lexical items with comparable functions, an analysis which reveals the commonalities between the uses both of each individual lexeme and of the different lexemes, and hence those elements of meaning that may be assumed to be most salient to language users, it is not unthinkable that one might account for at least some functional gaps in the semantic representation of individual lexemes. In the next, last section, I will sketch how the issues discussed in the preceding sections fit into the dynamic conception of the linguistic sign that was laid out in chapter 2, sect. 6 supra.

18 For instance, Hansen (2005a) argues that phonetics and morphology may have played a role in constraining the extensions of French finalement (”at last”) in comparison with the semantically closely related enfin.


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6 A PEIRCEAN APPROACH TO MEANING CHANGE In that chapter, I discussed the philosopher Charles S. Peirce’s dynamic conception of the linguistic sign, and of the semiotic process, contrasting it with the essentially static conception inherited from Saussurean semiology. I argued that Peircean semiotics constituted a better framework for an approach that takes the notion of lexical polysemy seriously. As Traugott & Dasher (2002: 16) point out, if monosemy and, more marginally, homonymy are viable approaches in synchronic lexical semantics, polysemy becomes a necessary assumption if one wants to account for semantic change. As an at least potentially dynamic notion, polysemy allows for the conventionalization of new senses of morphemes and constructions based on frequently occurring contextual modulations of situated occurrences, these new senses themselves being subject to contextual modulations and subsequent conventionalization of the latter, such that the most recently created sense of a given item may in principle be quite far removed from the meaning of its ultimate diachronic origin. Here, polysemy stands in opposition to monosemy, which, although it allows for contextual modulation, is nevertheless an essentially static way of viewing meaning, capable only of comparing successive, but independent, synchronic stages of the language, in which the dynamic diachronic process of change as such can have no theoretical status. The Peircean understanding of the semiotic process, which – as we saw in chapter 2, sect. 6 supra – posits a dialogic interplay between the (linguistic) sign and its context of use, has implications not only for the synchronic interpretation of utterances, but for diachronic change as well. For should a sufficiently large number of comprehenders produce more or less similar chains of inference when interpreting the situated uses of a given linguistic sign in a sufficiently large number of contexts, the speaking community may well end up establishing a new interpretative habit which will henceforth form part of the meaning range of the sign “as such”. In other words, thanks to the frequency of a particular kind of dynamic interpretants, level 1 of the sign in question may be abductively modified, resulting in either polysemy or actual semantic shift. A simple example will, hopefully, suffice to clarify what is meant: Waltereit (2002b) argues that discourse-marking uses of imperatives such as Look! and its equivalents in other languages arose as a result of a figure-ground shift. Imperatives of this kind carry a conversational implicature to the effect that the object to which the hearer’s visual attention is directed is worthy of that attention. Such a “canonical” semeiosis is diagrammed in Figure 3.1:

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[Figure 3.1: A “canonical” understanding of Look!] Representamen 1 Symbolic form: [luk]

Immediate ground

Δ

Includes grammatical oppositions between moods, and semantic oppositions between various verbs of perception

Object

Immediate interpretant

Symbolic content: Process the sign as a request to direct visual attention to something

S wants me, H, to look at something in the environment

Representamen 2 Dynamic ground There is something worth looking at in the immediate environment of H

Δ

Object

Dynamic interpretant

Process the sign as a request to identify something worthwhile in the environment and direct visual attention to it

I, H, should look at this thing

However, speakers who wish to exploit that implicature may “overuse” such imperatives for rhetorical purposes when there is actually no particularly interesting object to look at in the hearer’s immediate environment. Such abuses will give rise to a semeiosis of the type diagrammed in figure 3.2, in which the precise form of perception is backgrounded, while the idea that a noteworthy feature is present in the context becomes foregrounded (cf. also Hansen & Waltereit 2006):


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[Figure 3.2: A possible understanding of an innovative use of Look!] Representamen 1 Symbolic form: [luk]

Immediate ground Includes grammatical oppositions between moods, and semantic oppositions between various verbs of perception

Δ

Object


Symbolic content: Process the sign as a request to direct visual attention to something

S wants me, H, to look at something in the environment

Representamen 2 Dynamic ground There is nothing relevantly worth looking at in the

Δ

immediate environment of H. The currently most salient feature of the environment is the discourse itself

Object

Dynamic interpretant (1)

Process the sign as a qualityflouting request to look at something that is not there

S is pretending that there is something worthwhile for me, H, to look at

Representamen 3

Δ Object


Process the sign as a request to turn attention to some non-visual phenomenon in the environment

S wants me, H, to turn my attention to some other salient, but non-visual phenomenon that is worthwhile

Representamen 4

Δ Object


Process the sign as an indication that the current discourse is worthwhile

I, H, should turn my attention to the current discourse

If this happens often enough, it will result in reanalysis of Look! as a discourse marker aimed at gaining the floor for the speaker’s own upcoming discourse instead, by conventionally (i.e. no longer merely conversationally) implicating that this discourse will be worthwhile. In other

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words, the speaking community will establish a new interpretative habit, which now forms part of the sign “as such”, and which is represented in figure 3.3: [Figure 3.3: Look! reanalyzed as a discourse marker] Representamen Symbolic form: [luk]

Immediate ground

Δ

Includes knowledge of other DMs

Object


Symbolic content: Process the sign as a request to direct attention to the current discourse

S wants me, H, to turn my attention to the current discourse

In sum, a dialogic process has taken place between the level of the sign “as such” and that of a particular dynamic interpretant, which originally was part of the actualized sign, but which, by abduction, has been incorporated into the conventionally established content of the sign.

6.1

Summary

In this section, I have argued that a model of meaning change like the one outlined in the present chapter, may profitably make use of the triadic Peircean conception of the linguistic sign that was presented earlier. By explicitly incorporating a pragmatic dimension, the Peircean sign function also implicitly incorporates the seeds of diachronic meaning change, in marked contrast to the dyadic Saussurean sign, where the notion of valeur makes both variation and change (where the former is a prerequisite for the latter) essentially inexplicable.

7 GENERAL SUMMARY This chapter has dealt with a number issues of general theoretical and methodological interest to the study of meaning change in general, and of the evolution of pragmatic markers in particular. I discussed the nature of the process whereby context-level markers evolve out of erstwhile content-level items, concluding that the relevant process is not grammaticalization, but pragmaticalization. I also pointed out the importance of reinterpretation of the original meaning of the source items, a factor which highlights the crucial role played by so-called “bridging contexts” in the process of diachronic sense change. Subsequently, I reviewed the three central aspects of language change in general, namely the paths, the mechanisms, and the motivations of change. Following up on the discussion of inherent meanings in ch. 2, I suggested that the idea that elements of diachronically older source meanings persist in newer, extended meanings might have greater explanatory force in diachronic semantics than it is usually credited with. Finally, I sketched a Peircean approach to meaning change which matches the synchronic approach also presented in ch. 2.


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In short, I have outlined an approach that takes the notions of contextual inference and of inherent meanings very seriously, and which is capable to elucidating the details of the rise of context-level markers as a specific type of language change. We are now in a position to proceed to a fine-grained analysis not only of the synchronic semantics and pragmatics of phasal adverbs more generally, and of the French phasal adverbs more specifically, but also of the gradual diachronic evolution of the French phasal adverbs from temporal / aspectual markers to ever more interactionally-oriented items. That will be the subject of the following four chapters. Ch. 4 discusses cross-linguistically relevant properties of phasal adverbs. Following a methodological excursion in ch. 5, ch. 6 analyzes the contentlevel uses of the French phasal adverbs both synchronically and diachronically, while ch. 7 does the same for their context-level uses.


4 GENERAL PROPERTIES OF PHASAL ADVERBS ACROSS LANGUAGES

1 INTRODUCTION In this chapter, I will present and discuss what I see as the main points that have been and / or should be made with respect to the more or less general syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of phasal adverbs across languages, and examples will therefore be drawn from several European languages (although the bulk will be provided from French and English). Subsequent chapters will deal specifically and in much greater depth with the four French particles that are the focus of this study, and mention of very (language-)specific or detailed aspects of the French items in particular will be postponed until then.

2 THE ASPECTUALITY OF PHASAL ADVERBS It appears immediately obvious that the meaning of phasal adverbs has to do with notions of time. More precisely, the preliminary definition of these adverbs given in chapter 1 supra, and which involves actual or potential transition between different phases of a state of affairs (SoA), suggests that they can be conceived of as expressing some form of aspectuality. However, the linguistic expression of notions of time and aspectuality is recognized as spanning several different, although clearly related areas, the traditionally most important ones being tense, aspect and Aktionsart. In this section, I will be concerned with elucidating the relations obtaining between adverbs like déjà, encore etc. and these more traditional areas of inquiry.

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Note that while the broader notion of “aspectuality” is intended to comprise that of “aspect”, the two are not co-extensive: As the terms are used here, “aspect” is, in the first instance, a morphosyntactic phenomenon that characterizes finite verb phrases, and which may be more or less grammaticalized in different languages. “Aspectuality”, on the other hand, is a semantic phenomenon that characterizes whole clauses, and which is largely compositional in that it is standardly taken to result from a combination of different factors, including, prominently, verbal aspect and Aktionsart, but also the number and (in)definiteness of the arguments of the verb, as well as any relevant adverbials present in the clause.

2.1

The linguistic expression of time: tense, aspect, Aktionsart

The issue of how to define tense, aspect and Aktionsart in relation to one another, and how the three categories interrelate on the formal level, both within specific languages and more generally, has caused a great deal of ink to flow over the past century. Currently, however, there appears to be a widespread agreement on at least the following points: In accounts of the linguistic expression of time, a broad distinction must be made between situation-external and situation-internal time (cf. Comrie 1976: 5). The former is concerned with the temporal location of SoAs with respect either to the moment of utterance or to other SoAs, while the latter is concerned with the internal temporal constituency of SoAs. In Klein’s (1992) model of tense and aspect, both of these categories crucially relate to a notion of “topic time” (henceforth TT), understood as the time with respect to which the main point of the utterance is made. TT, which is conceived of as an interval (as opposed to a point in time), and which is normally coded in the tense of the finite verb of the clause, but also at times by adverbials of temporal location, is an alternative to the more common, but vaguer, Reichenbachian term “reference point” (cf. Reichenbach 1947: 287ff). Although Klein himself does not discuss it, it will be assumed in the present study – in line with current thinking in, for instance, Discourse Representation Theory (e.g. Kamp & Reyle 1993: 523ff) – that TT is a dynamic entity, which, particularly in narrative contexts, may be continuously reset, thus accounting for any temporal progression that is understood to obtain among sequences of events recounted in the same tense. Of the three traditionally recognized categories, tense expresses situation-external time, while perfective / imperfective aspect and Aktionsart are traditionally held to express situationinternal time (cf. Comrie 1976: 5). In Klein’s (1992) model, this is reflected in a modified form by the fact that tense is analyzed as expressing the relation between TT and the time of utterance, while perfective / imperfective aspect expresses relations of inclusion between TT and the time at or during which the SoA denoted by the clause takes place (the “time of the situation” or TSit in Klein’s terminology). This difference in focus does not, however, preclude formal overlap between the categories, and in particular between tense and aspect, in the morphosyntax of specific languages. Thus, in French, the perfective and imperfective past necessarily always express tense and aspect simultaneously, cf. (1)-(2).1 On the other hand, the future tense in French, for instance, is

1

De Swart (1998) convincingly argues that the French perfective and imperfective past tenses are not aspectual operators as such, but rather aspectually sensitive tenses, which select for telic or atelic SoAs, respectively (1998: 369). If the inherent Aktionsart of the SoA conflicts with the constraints imposed by the past tense form, aspectual coercion will take place (see below).

General Properties of Phasal Adverbs Across Languages

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incapable of expressing aspectual distinctions, although it can be combined with an imperfective periphrasis if the speaker wishes to insist on that aspect, cf. (3)-(4): (1) (2) (3) (4)

L’été dernier, Pierre lut[perf. past] Guerre et paix. ‘Last summer, Pierre read War and Peace.’ L’été dernier, Pierre lisait[imperf. past] Guerre et paix. ‘Last summer, Pierre was reading War and Peace.’ L’été prochain, Pierre lira[fut.ind.] Guerre et paix. ‘Next summer, Pierre will read War and Peace.’ L’été prochain, Pierre sera[fut.ind.] en train de lire[progr. periphrasis] Guerre et paix. ‘Next summer, Pierre will be (in the process of) reading War and Peace.’

Within the category of situation-internal time, Aktionsart expresses relatively objective distinctions between types of SoAs, such as the Vendlerian categories of states, activities, achievements and accomplishments (Vendler 1968, Hoepelman & Rohrer 1980) and modifications thereof (e.g. Comrie 1976: ch. 2; Moens & Steedman 1988; Smith 1991: ch. 2), according to parameters like dynamicity, telicity (i.e. orientation towards a specific goal), and durativity of the SoA. Thus, states are non-dynamic, atelic, and durative, cf. (5); activities are dynamic, atelic, and durative, cf. (6); accomplishments are dynamic, telic and durative, cf. (7)(8); while achievements are dynamic, telic, and non-durative (i.e. punctual), cf. (9). A fifth category may be distinguished, namely semelfactives, which are dynamic, atelic, and nondurative, (cf. Smith 1991: 30), cf. (10). Note that, as (6)-(8) show, it is not the verb itself that determines the Aktionsart of the SoA, but rather what Smith (1991: 7f) calls the entire “verb constellation”, consisting of the verb, its arguments, and any relevant adverbials. (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10)

Jean a les yeux bleux. ‘Jean has blue eyes.’ Jean a couru. ‘Jean ran.’ Jean a couru le marathon. ‘Jean ran the marathon.’ Jean a couru jusqu’à la porte. ‘Jean ran to the door.’ Jean a gagné le marathon. ‘Jean won the marathon.’ Jean a éternué. ‘Jean sneezed.’

Perfective / imperfective aspect, on the other hand, expresses the speaker’s more or less subjective perspective on the SoA, in terms of whether she envisages the SoA as an indivisible whole, in which case she will use perfective aspect, or rather wishes to focus on some part of it that is presented as on-going at TT, in which case imperfective aspect will be chosen (e.g. Comrie 1976: 4, Smith 1991: 6), cf. (1)-(2) above. As already implied in connection with exx. (1)-(4), any given clause will be endowed with a specific Aktionsart, but depending on the language in question and/or the tense used, it may or may not express aspectual distinctions. Moreover, as pointed out above, Aktionsart will be determined by a composite of the verb, its arguments, and any relevant adverbials, and it can thus be said to be expressed lexically. Aspect, on the other hand, will typically be expressed by morphosyntactic means, prominently involving modifications of the verb stem.

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The two situation-internal categories are, however, conceptually related in as much as the basic Aktionsart types may be broadly divided into two groups, namely events and states (Herweg 1992; Michaelis 1998: 6), where the former are conceived as individuals, and thus comprise accomplishments, achievements, and semelfactives, whereas the latter – comprising Vendler’s (1968) states and activities – are not. Basically, sentences in the perfective aspect present the denoted SoAs as individuals, as (if they constituted) events, whereas sentences in the imperfective aspect present SoAs as non-individuated, i.e. from an essentially stative viewpoint. Indeed, aspect (or aspectually sensitive forms) may in some cases be instrumental in coercing a derived interpretation of an SoA, i.e. forcing its transition from one Aktionsart type to a different type (Moens & Steedman 1988; Smith 1991: 27; De Swart 1998). For instance, in (11), the imperfective past is responsible for coercing the interpretation of an SoA denoting an accomplishment [WALK TO SCHOOL]LUC as a derived state, namely an habitual (cf. Kleiber 1987):2 (11)

Luc allait à l’école à pied. ‘Luc used to walk to school.’

Now, the precise classification of certain forms in at least some languages with respect to the three categories tense-aspect-Aktionsart has been the subject of much debate in the literature. The English present perfect is one of the most important examples (e.g. Comrie 1976: ch. 3; Kortmann 1991: 17f, Smith 1991: 146ff, Herweg 1992: 390; Klein 1992; Harder 1996: 323, Michaelis 1998: 3f): should this form be considered an aspect, a tense, or neither? At the most basic level, the present perfect can be analyzed as denoting a current state resulting from some completed past event, so if one focuses on the notion of completion of the past event, then the perfect will seem to belong with aspect, whereas if one focuses on the location of the past event relative to the current state, the perfect will appear to be a tense. Both Kortmann (1991: 20) and Michaelis (1998: 4) choose to consider the perfect a thing apart from either tense or viewpoint aspect as traditionally conceived: thus, Michaelis places it, along with the English progressive (be V-ing) and inceptive (e.g. start V-ing) constructions, in a separate category of “phasal aspect”. While she does use the term “aspect”, this type is crucially distinct from the more traditional category, which (following Smith 1991) might more precisely be termed “viewpoint aspect”, and which comprises the perfective and imperfective subtypes. The phasal aspects in Michaelis’ system are held to be relational, in as much as they indicate a relationship between a particular TT (or, in her terms, “reference time”) and the degree of development of the verbal process (Michaelis 1998: 4).3 As such they indicate situation-external time. At the same time, they also express situation-internal time, in as much as they habitually map event propositions onto state propositions or vice versa. Thus, for instance, the present perfect is, as we will see below, basically an imperfectivizing operator denoting a present state resulting from a past event. Hence, they count, according to Michaelis 2

Co Vet (p.c.) points out that the usual test for state-hood vs event-hood, namely combinability with a durational adverbial in pendant or en, does not work here, as the imperfective past is not compatible with the expression of temporal boundedness, cf. (i): (i) * Luc allait à l’école[imp. past] à pied pendant trois ans. ’Luc walked to school for three years.’ This incompatibility is accounted for in De Swart’s (1998) model, where the imperfective past is – as already mentioned in note 1 above – analyzed not as an aspectual operator in the strict sense, but as an aspectually sensitive tense form. As such, it takes wide scope over durational adverbials, and the use of the imperfective past in (i) thus forces the absurd interpretation that the habitual duration of Luc’s walk to school was three years. 3 Klein (1992: 537) analyzes perfect aspect in general as indicating that TT is posterior to TSit.


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(1998: 69), as “override constructions”, in that they will systematically shift the Aktionsart value of the lexical material in the clause in case of conflict. Kortmann (1991: 24), for his part, proposes a four-way distinction within the domain of time between tense, aspect, Aktionsart and “orientation”, the latter category comprising the present perfect (which he prefers to call “anterior”) and the “posterior”, or prospective, construction (e.g. be going to V). He then posits the existence of two separate continua, which he defines with the aid of three parameters: grammatical / lexical, deictic / non-deictic, and situationinternal / situation-external, and whose endpoints are constituted by the four notional categories mentioned. Thus, tense and orientation form the endpoints of a continuum of situation-external time, and both are, prominently, expressed by grammatical means,4 but while tense is deictic, orientation is non-deictic (i.e. relational in Michaelis’ terms). Aspect and Aktionsart, on the other hand, form the endpoints of a continuum of situation-internal time, and both are non-deictic in nature, aspect being grammatically expressed, and Aktionsart lexically expressed (Kortmann 1991: 19ff). Although, at the extensional level, the category of orientation and that of phasal aspect are held by their inventors to have partially different membership, there are nevertheless obvious similarities between them from the intensional point of view, given that both are said to express situation-external time in a fundamentally relational manner. For present purposes, I will therefore treat these categories as conflatable, and refer to them as phasal aspect in the remainder of this study.5 This choice of terminology is, of course, intended to suggest that phasal aspect is relevant to the analysis of phasal adverbs, as, indeed, is also the position of Michaelis (1998: 177ff) and – although they do not use the terms – of a number of authors preceding her.

2.2

The linguistic expression of time: adverbials

Notions of time can, of course, also be expressed in language through the use of adverbials. Various broad distinctions between semantic classes of adverbials have been proposed in the literature (e.g. Quirk et al. 1972: 482ff; Allerton & Cruttenden 1978: 156f; Vet 1980: 105; Grevisse 1988: 1464). The taxonomies are not precisely identical from one author to the next, but they do tend to overlap to quite a large extent. Here, I will follow Quirk et al. (1972: 482ff) in assuming the existence of four classes as follows: 1. Adverbials of temporal location, which denote the topic time TT of the SoA denoted by the clause. As (12)-(13) show, adverbials of temporal location may be deictic or non-deictic. They may also denote either a point in time at which the SoA takes place or a temporal interval within which the SoA is situated, cf. (14) vs (12): (12) (13)

En novembre 2003, Arthur Duschnok a réussi la quadrature du cercle. ‘In November 2003, Arthur Duschnok succeeded in squaring the circle.’ Avant-hier, Arthur Duschnok a réussi la quadrature du cercle.

4 Kortmann (1991) is principally concerned with verbal categories, and therefore classifies both tense and orientation as grammatically expressed, without qualification. However, clearly, situation-external time may be coded by adverbials, i.e. lexically, as well. 5 I will deliberately eschew a detailed discussion of whether or not certain specific forms, such as the inceptive construction, properly do or do not belong in the category, as this does not appear to be of crucial importance to the present study.

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(14)

‘The day before yesterday, Arthur Duschnok succeeded in squaring the circle.’ A exactement 15h42, Arthur Duschnok a réussi la quadrature du cercle. ‘At exactly 3 :42 pm, Arthur Duschnok succeeded in squaring the circle.’

2. Durational adverbials, which denote the length of the interval during which a given SoA holds. Some of these may also wholly or partially indicate the “time-when” of the SoA, cf. (16)-(17): (15)

(16)

(17)

Pendant deux heures, Arthur Duschnok a essayé de résoudre la quadrature du cercle. ‘For two hours, Arthur Duschnok tried to solve the problem of squaring the circle.’ De 1998 à 2003, Arthur Duschnok a passé tout son temps à essayer de résoudre la quadrature du cercle. ‘Between 1998 and 2003, Arthur Duschnok spent all his time trying to solve the problem of squaring the circle.’ Depuis 1998, Arthur Duschnok essaye désespérément de résoudre la quadrature du cercle. ‘Since 1998, Arthur Duschnok has been desparately trying to solve the problem of squaring the circle.’

3. Adverbials of quantification, which denote the frequency of occurrence of the SoA (cf. de Swart 1991). This frequency may be definitely or indefinitely specified, cf. (18)-(19): (18)

(19)

Arthur Duschnok a essayé de résoudre la quadrature du cercle trois fois. ‘Arthur Duschnok has tried to solve the problem of squaring the circle three times.’ Arthur Duschnok a souvent essayé de résoudre la quadrature du cercle. ‘Arthur Duschnok has often tried to solve the problem of squaring the circle.’

4. “Relational” adverbials, comprising sequential adverbials (cf. (20)) and our phasal adverbs, both types expressing, in different ways, relations between at least two SoAs (the precise way in which phasal adverbs are relational will be discussed more fully below): (20)

D’abord, Arthur Duschnok a réussi la quadrature du cercle ; ensuite il est passé à l’étude de la mémoire de l’eau. ‘First, Arthur Duschnok succeeded in squaring the circle; next, he went on to study the memory of water.’

The relational, as opposed to absolute, nature of the meaning of phasal adverbs is no doubt responsible for two properties noted by van Baar (1990: 4, citing Vandeweghe 1978), namely the fact that: 1. They can never by themselves be the answer to a when-question: (21)

A. When did you see him? − B. *Already / Still / Finally.


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2. They do not change the temporal reference point of the host clause, and they do not help to fix it either. 6 These four categories of adverbials can be paired two by two, according to whether they have to do with situation-external or situation-internal time. Thus, adverbs of temporal location and “relational” adverbs denote situation-external time, whereas durational adverbials and adverbials of quantification denote situation-internal time.

2.3

Interaction of phasal adverbs with aspect and Aktionsart

Although some later authors (e.g. König 1977, Vet 1980) still refer to them as adverbs of time, the aspectual nature of phasal adverbs is emphasized at least as early as Traugott & Waterhouse (1969: 287), who note the existence of a close connection between verbal aspect and the possibility of occurrence of English already and yet, a line of inquiry that is further developed by Martin (1980), Hoepelman & Rohrer (1980), and Michaelis (1992, 1993, 1996). Thus, it is observed (Traugott & Waterhouse 1969: 287; Michaelis 1992: 322) that already is closely connected with the perfect, in particular the so-called resultative perfect, which most directly denotes a present state resulting from a past event (Michaelis 1992: 324; Comrie 1976: 56).7 Indeed, already and its counterparts in other languages appear at first sight to carry a necessary implication of a change of state, as evidenced by the fact that they do not felicitously occur in gnomic, i.e. eternally true, statements: (22) (23)

Two plus two (?already) make four. Deux plus deux font (?déjà) quatre.

However, the apparent infelicity of (22)-(23) does not entail that such sentences can never occur: indeed, as (24) shows, if a special universe of discourse is created such that the gnomicity of such statements is qualified or actively canceled, then they will be perfectly acceptable: 8 6 Van Baar (1990: 4) argues further that phasal adverbs are distinct from other adverbials of time in not influencing the truth value of the host clause. Thus, he says, if (i) is true, then (ii) is true as well: (i) He’s already/still/finally here. (ii) He’s here. Actually, in that direction, the implication would seem to hold of a great many adverbials, temporal or not, so the real question is whether the opposite implication, i.e. from (ii) to (i), also holds. That, however, is much less clear; especially, perhaps, where already and finally are concerned. Personally, I tend to find it true, but in most contexts strongly misleading, to say He’s already here, even if the referent of the subject pronoun has been present at the speaker’s location for quite some time, and has not arrived prior to the expected time. In the same way, it will be true, but misleading, to say that He’s finally here, even if the referent of the subject pronoun has again been present for some time, and the time of his arrival is in no way late as compared with a set of contextually relevant expectations. In the contexts sketched, I would certainly preface such utterances with a # designating pragmatic infelicity, but an asterisk seems too strong. 7 The so-called experiential perfect (cf. (i)), on the other hand, denotes a past event that might conceivably recur at present, while the continuative perfect denotes a past state that continues into the present (cf. Michaelis 1998: 9f). Note that this latter variant is not found in the Romance languages, which prefer to use an inclusive present tense in such cases, cf. (ii)-(iii), which have the same meaning: (i) I have been to China [at some time in the past]. (ii) J’habite[pr.ind.] à Londres depuis cinq ans. (iii) I have lived in London for five years [and I still live there now]. 8 What already does in this example is, of course, to point out a discrepancy between Smith’s belief world and what speaker B takes to be reality.

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(24)

A. Smith believes that whoever devises a theory of mathematics in which two plus two make four will get the Nobel Prize. B. But two plus two already make four!

On the other hand, in languages like French and Italian, which distinguish not only between perfect and past, but also between perfective and imperfective aspect within the past tense, phasal déjà and già normally occur only with the imperfective (Martin 1980: 176; Hoepelman & Rohrer 1980: 128): (25) (26) (27) (28)

?* Il travailla[perf.past] déjà. ?* Già lavorò[perf.past]. ‘He already worked.’ Il travaillait[imperf.past] déjà. Già lavorava[imperf.past]. ‘He was already working.’

This means that, in these languages, where the perfect (or passé compose / passato prossimo) doubles, as is well known, for the perfective past in less formal registers, the presence of déjà/già in a clause whose verb is in the passé compose / passato prossimo will normally disambiguate the verb form and impose the perfect, rather than the perfective past, interpretation. To the extent that utterances like (25)-(26) are found at all in actual discourse (and rare examples do exist), the particle will either scope a constituent smaller that the sentence, not including the verb, and it will thus be functioning as a focus particle rather than as a standard sentence adverbial (cf. (29)-(30) where the temporal adverb can be argued to constitute the scope of déjà/già; see further ch. 6, sect. 6.1); or else the combination of particle and perfective aspect will imply at least virtual iteration of the SoA in question (cf. (31)). (29) (30) (31)

Il naquit[perf.past] déjà en 1900. Naquè[perf.past] già nel 1900. ‘He was born as early as 1900.’ J’étais encore dans ma tendre enfance, et aux bras de ma nourrice, quand ma nature cruelle et farouche montra[perf.past] déjà sa barbarie. (Camus, quoted in the Trésor de la langue française 1978: 1005) ‘I was still in my infancy, and hanging on the arms of my nurse, when my cruel and unsociable nature already began to show its barbarity.’

As for encore, Martin (1980: 176) observes that, basically, the continuative (or “phasal”) reading of that particle is compatible only with atelic predicates in imperfective aspect, cf. (32). Encore-sentences with telic predicates in the imperfective (cf. (33)), or with predicates of either Aktionsart type bearing perfect (cf. (34)) or perfective (cf. (35)) aspect, will thus be interpreted iteratively, he says. Vet (1980 : 154) notes that the same holds for telic predicates in the present tense, cf. (36): (32) (33)

Les enfants dormaient encore. ‘The children were still sleeping.’ Pierre sortait encore avec Jeanne. ‘Pierre still went out with Jeanne.’

General Properties of Phasal Adverbs Across Languages (34) (35) (36)

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Pierre était encore sorti avec Jeanne. ‘Pierre had once again gone out with Jeanne.’ Pierre sortit encore avec Jeanne. ‘Pierre once again went out with Jeanne.’ Pierre sort encore avec Jeanne. ‘Pierre still goes out/is once again going out with Jeanne.’

I would, however, prefer to modify Martin’s and Vet’s accounts, and argue instead that the basic constraint on phasal encore is that it can occur only with imperfective aspect, irrespective of the Aktionsart of the predicate,9 and that those authors’ grouping of examples like (33) and (36) with (34)-(35), rather than with (32), can be attributed to an unwarranted conflation of the interpretation of encore itself with the interpretation of the SoA denoted by the sentence. Thus, with respect to (33), it is true that, due to the telicity of the predicate SORTIR AVEC QUELQU’UN (‘to go out with someone’) the SoA in itself must be interpreted habitually (as opposed to iteratively), but, given that – as noted above – habituals can be analyzed as derived states, encore nevertheless retains a continuative reading, such that our global understanding of the sentence is one in which Pierre continued, during some past interval, to go out with Jeanne on an unspecified number of occasions. The same holds for one of the two possible interpretations of (36), except that TT is here located in the speaker’s present rather than in her past. Martin (1980: 177) goes on to say that a continuative interpretation of encore is possible with atelic verbs in the perfective, but only if the particle scopes a constituent below the sentence level, as in (37), where it takes the durational adverb deux heures in its scope. In ch. 6, sect. 6.1 infra, I will analyze encore in this use as a temporal focus particle: (37)

Les enfants dormirent[perf.past] encore deux heures. ‘The children slept for another two hours.’

As suggested by Michaelis (1992: 324), the compatibility of déjà / already etc. with both the perfect and the imperfective, as opposed to the perfective aspect, can be explained if the perfect is analyzed as an imperfective operator, which maps eventualities of any kind onto state predications (see also Hoepelman & Rohrer 1980: 130; Herweg 1992: 390; De Swart 1998: 353f), such that the subject of a verb in the perfect is in fact described as being in an unalterable state of having done something (or of having had something done to him / her / it). Thus, in (38), it is not as much the past action of invading France that is being predicated of the U.S. Army, as it is the present (and permanent) property of having invaded France: (38)

The U.S. Army has invaded France.

Let us refer to the SoA scoped by a phasal adverb (whatever its Aktionsart) by the variable e, and to the non-instantiation of that SoA as ~e. The above considerations allow us – largely following Doherty (1973: 175) – to say that in their basic phasal use, déjà and its equivalents assert that at least the inception of the SoA e expressed in their host sentence has taken place prior to topic time TT. Moreover, it must be the case that e still holds at TT, given that imperfective situations are held to subsume their topic time (cf. Partee 1984: 255, who prefers the term “reference point” where I speak of topic time). Encore and its equivalents, on the

9

This also appears to be the position of Hoepelman & Rohrer (1980).

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other hand, assert the continued existence of the SoA e at TT, such that e must have been the case for at least some time prior to TT. Due to their focus on the beginning of the SoA in question, déjà and corresponding particles in other languages have been classified as inchoative markers by several authors (e.g. Muller 1975; van der Auwera 1993, 1998; van Baar 1997), whereas particles like encore, which focus on some middle (i.e. non-initial and non-final) part of the SoA are classified as continuatives. As such, phasal adverbs qualify as “superlexical” morphemes in the terminology of Smith (1991: 75ff), that is, as morphemes that present SoAs from a narrowed point of view, focusing on a specific internal stage of the SoA rather than specifying its content.10 Although the above descriptions of the respective semantics of the two markers in their phasal uses suggest that they will be truth-conditionally equivalent in many (if not all) cases, the difference in aspectual focus explains why only déjà, and not encore, is compatible with the perfect aspect: by denoting a state resulting from a prior situation (cf. Comrie 1976: 52), the perfect at the very least strongly suggests a change of state, and thus naturally comes to attract attention to the beginning of the state it denotes. Such a focus is entirely in line with the semantic specification of déjà, but it conflicts with that of encore. In terms of their compatibility with verbal aspect, phasal enfin would appear to observe the same constraints as déjà, while phasal toujours patterns with encore.

2.4

Perspectivity

The notion of perspectivity was introduced by Vandeweghe (1992: 47ff; as well as earlier work, cited in Löbner 1989 and van Baar 1990) in connection with the phasal adverbs of Dutch (principally al [‘already’] and nog [‘still’]). In marking a potential or actual transition between a given SoA and its opposite in terms of polarity, individual phasal adverbs contrast along the dimension of perspectivity by being oriented either towards the past or the future. Now, the relational nature of phasal adverbs mentioned above is constituted precisely by this property of implicitly locating the SoA in their scope with respect to some other past or present SoA, and it is in virtue thereof that we may classify them as belonging to the category of phasal aspect (or orientation), as defined above. A possible objection to such a classification is the fact that, as pointed out by van Baar (1990: 25ff), the form of prospectivity found in encore / still etc., where the speaker is looking ahead to the moment at which the SoA will end, is not identical to the traditional notion of prospectivity found, for instance, in temporal periphrases like English be going to, where the speaker is rather looking ahead to the moment at which the SoA will become actual. However, while it is, of course, important to point this out in order to prevent misinterpretations, I do not think it vitiates the subsumption of phasal adverbs under the category of phasal aspect as such.

10 This accounts for Muller’s (1975: 32ff) intuition that déjà is related to the verb commencer à V [‘begin to V’], and encore to the verb continuer à V [‘continue to V’], since these verbs are also superlexical in nature according to Smith (1991: 75ff). However, Muller is clearly wrong to claim that the superlexical verbs can constitute straightforward paraphrases of the phasal adverbs.


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Van Baar (1990: 25ff) also claims (contra Vandeweghe 1992: 47) that whereas the traditional notion has to do with situation-external time, both retro- and prospectivity in Vandeweghe’s model rather concern situation-internal time. This interpretation is, I believe, strictly speaking incorrect, given that, as we have just seen, perspectivity in Vandeweghe’s sense has to do with the temporal location of one SoA with respect to a different one, and this is, in fact, a matter of situation-external time. At the same time, of course, the fact that phasal adverbs are also superlexical, and thus focus on different internal stages of SoAs, does make them partake of situation-internal time as well. As this difficulty of categorization is largely analogous to what we have seen to be the case with the present perfect (cf. sect. 2.1 supra), I choose to maintain the hypothesized overarching category of phasal aspect intact. I would like to point out, however, that, on a different dimension, phasal adverbs, like traditional viewpoint aspect, are essentially subjective in nature. Thus, just as, in French, one and the same past event may frequently be recounted in either the perfective or the imperfective past, according to the speaker’s subjective viewpoint and the current focus of the discourse, so speakers may often choose to perspectivize one and the same SoA in different ways, depending on contextually relevant assumptions and expectations, and on the argumentational aim of the utterance. That speakers are thus expressing a subjective stance when using a phasal adverb even in its basic sense is presumably a not unimportant factor in the development of the various context-level (i.e. modal and discourse-oriented) senses of these items. (These senses will be dealt with in depth in ch. 7 infra.) Returning to the perspectivity parameter, déjà / already / schon / al are then retrospective adverbs, because they mark that the transition between the SoAs ~e and e has taken place in the past, whereas encore / still / noch / nog are prospective, given that they mark the transition between e and ~e as being a potential future occurrence. Thus, from (39), we will normally infer that there was some point in time preceding TT at which Marie was not here, and similarly, from (40), we will tend to infer that there may come a point in time following TT at which Marie will no longer be here. Hence, as pointed out by Vandeweghe (1992: 1), phasal adverbs tend to add to their host clause a sense of dynamicity, in the form of a suggestion of actual or possible temporal evolution of the described situation (cf. the unmarked (41), which contains no such element of dynamicity): (39) (40) (41)

Marie est déjà là. ‘Marie is already here.’ Marie est encore là. ‘Marie is still here.’ Marie est là. ‘Marie is here.’

For Vandeweghe, perspectivity is closely tied up with two further parameters, namely polarity and direction of sequence (1992: 102). Thus, Dutch al is said to contrast with nog in terms of retrospectiveness vs prospectiveness. However, the above examples suggest that they might both function as markers of positive polarity, in as much as both sentences entail the existence of the positive SoA e at R. Dutch niet meer (‘no longer’) and nog niet (‘not yet’), on the other hand, would function as, respectively, retrospective and prospective markers of negative polarity.11 By analogy, we would expect the same to be true of their French equivalents ne…plus and ne…pas encore given that we may infer from (42) that there was some point in 11 As the title of his book indicates, van Baar (1997) makes the expression of polarity the main feature of the semantic contribution made by phasal adverbs to their host clause.

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time preceding TT at which the positive SoA [BE AROUND]MARIE was actual, but that it has become non-actual at TT; and similarly, from (43), that there may come a point in time following TT at which the positive SoA [ARRIVE]MARIE will become actual, but that it is nonactual at TT: (42) (43)

Marie n’est plus là. ‘Marie is no longer around.’ Marie n’est pas encore arrivée. ‘Marie has not yet arrived.’

The second parameter with which perspectivity is intimately connected in Vandeweghe’s model is direction of sequence, from positive to negative (i.e. e → ~e) or vice versa. This, of course, follows directly from the combination of perspectivity and polarity. Thus, al is said to mark the sequence neg → pos; nog to mark the sequence pos → neg; niet meer pos → neg; and nog niet neg → pos. Again, given examples such as (39)-(43), it is tempting to extend the model to the corresponding particles of other languages, including French, by analogy. While I am not competent to take a stand on the nature of the Dutch particles, I will, however, maintain that, as far as French is concerned, the analogy must be resisted. Thus, neither déjà nor encore is inherently a marker of positive polarity, as not only the existence of the collocation ne...pas encore, but also that of authentic examples like (44), in which déjà falls under the scope of negation, and (44)-(46), in both of which déjà / encore clearly takes the sentence negation in its scope, show:12 (44)

(45)

– Tu vois, Montale, ça m’étonne que tu ne l’aies pas déjà fait. A ta place, moi, j’aurais commencé par là. (Jean-Claude Izzo, Chourmo, 1996, p. 190 – from Frantext) ‘You see, Montale, I’m surprised that you haven’t already done so. If I were you, I’d have done that first.’ Je n’étais déjà pas d’accord avec les communistes avant l’affaire des camps, ce n’est pas maintenant que je vais me jeter dans leurs bras. (S. de Beauvoir, Les mandarins, 1954, from Frantext)13

12 It will be shown in ch. 6, sect. 4.2, that Old French encore could actually function on its own as a negative polarity item in questions and conditionals. Such a use is admittedly marginal in contemporary French, but not, it appears, entirely non-existent. 13 Co Vet (p.c.) has expressed doubts about the interpretation of déjà in this example as phasal, and feels that its function might rather be modal / argumentational in nature (cf. ch. 7, sect. 2 infra). However, I would argue that the fact that we have a clearly temporal adverbial avant l’affaire des camps in the same clause, and a contrasting, just as clearly temporal, adverbial maintenant in the following clause is a fairly strong indication that déjà here does, indeed, have its basic phasal sense. Thus, I take S. de Beauvoir to be asserting that her lack of agreement with prevailing Communist views had begun prior to a topic time fixed by avant l’affaire des camps, and that this lack of agreement continues at utterance time (marked by maintenant). Indeed, other examples of phasal déjà cooccurring with negation can be found in Frantext: (i) …l’eau avait coulé sur le bois ciré et la serviette brodée, et quand Henriette voulut enrayer le désastre, elle renversa le deuxième… ce fut Alexis qui essuya l’eau avec son grand mouchoir de linon, bien soigneusement, pendant qu’Henriette pleurait sur une chaise. ”Mais ce n’est rien, disait-il, il n’y paraît déjà pas, je t’assure qu’elle ne remarquera rien,… (Elsa Triolet, Le premier accroc coûte deux cents francs, 1945, from Frantext) ’…the water had been spilt on the polished wood and the embroidered napkin, and when Henriette tried to control the extent of the damage, she knocked over the other one… it was Alexis who very carefully wiped up the water with his large linen handkerchief while Henriette sat on a chair and cried. ”But it’s nothing, he said, already it doesn’t show, I assure you, she won’t notice a thing,…’


(46)

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‘I already did not agree with the communists before the matter of the camps, I won’t throw myself in their arms now.’ Une dizaine d’ouvriers firent irruption dans le café. Quelques-uns reconnurent Chauvin. Chauvin ne les vit encore pas. (Marguerite Duras, Moderato cantabile, 1958, from Frantext)14 ‘Some ten workmen burst into the café. Some of them recognized Chauvin. Chauvin still did not see them.’

Moreover, while examples like the latter two are comparatively infrequent, combinations of déjà and ne…plus are quite common: (47)

Marie n’est déjà plus là. ‘Marie is already not around anymore.’

This point will be taken up again below. If déjà and encore have no inherent polarity, nor can they, of course, inherently mark a specific direction of sequence. As for ne…plus and ne…pas encore, these expressions clearly are inherently negative, and as such, they do mark a specific direction of sequence. I will return to this asymmetry between the four particles below. As already suggested, there is little doubt that, statistically, combinations of déjà and widescope encore with positive polarity is the norm, but that fact can be explained by appealing to the pragmatic Principle of Contrast, which Clark (1993) claims to be operative in lexical semantics. According to that principle, language users proceed on the assumption that any linguistic form should contrast in meaning with every other form, i.e. complete synonymy should not exist (Clark 1993: 64). Now, truth-conditionally, ne...pas déjà will, in most cases, be equivalent to the more common ne...pas encore, while ne…déjà pas will be equivalent to the more common, and fully lexicalized, ne…plus (the difference between them will be discussed immediately below). Similarly, ne…encore pas is truth-conditionally equivalent to the more common ne…pas encore. In such cases, another pragmatic principle, the Principle of Conventionality (Clark 1993: 64) dictates that, when faced with a choice between the members of each pair of expressions, speakers should pick the more common alternative unless they specifically want to express something over and above the default meaning (cf. also Levinson 2000: 38). In other words, if the speaker wants to express simply that a given SoA e was not the case at t < TT, and, indeed, continues not to be the case at TT, but that it may conceivably become the case at t > TT, then she should use ne...pas encore in preference to ne...pas déjà. Similarly, if all the speaker wants to express is that e used to be the case prior to TT, but is not the case at TT, then ne...plus should preempt ne…déjà pas. And finally, in quite the same way, ne…pas encore should preempt ne…encore pas if all that needs to be expressed is that a negative SoA ~e persists at TT, but may conceivably end at some time t > TT. 14 As we have seen, French likewise uses encore in combination with negation in the fully lexicalized equivalent of the Dutch retrospective and, according to Vandeweghe, negative polar marker niet meer, namely ne…pas encore. The scope relations between the negation and encore in this expression are open to debate, being representable as either ∼ALREADY or STILL∼. I will, however, argue in ch. 6, sect. 4.2 infra that in contemporary French, at least, encore always takes wide scope with respect to the negation, irrespective of the surface word order.

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What reasons might there be then for choosing ne...pas déjà or ne…déjà pas instead? The use of the former collocation is justified if the speaker wishes to insist not just on the fact that the SoA has not been realized at TT, but also on the idea that some degree of precocity in the realization of that SoA might actually have been desirable, cf. the contrast between (44) and (48): (48)

− Tu vois, Montale, ça m’étonne que tu ne l’aies pas encore fait. ‘You see, Montale, I’m surprised that you haven’t done so yet.’

As for the choice of ne...déjà pas, two reasons can be imagined: One is that, while ne…plus presupposes that e was the case at some time t < TT, ne…déjà pas does not: it merely presupposes the possibility of e at t < TT (cf. sect. 4 infra), while stating that ~e has begun at TT, as shown by the contrast between (44) and the constructed (49): (49)

Je n’étais plus d’accord avec les communistes avant l’affaire des camps. ‘I no longer agreed with the communists before the matter of the camps.’

Of course, an utterance stating that a given SoA, be it negative or positive, has begun at some particular point in time, and presupposing the possibility that an SoA of the opposite polarity was the case prior to that point in time, will by default carry a Gricean quantity implicature (cf. Grice 1989a[1975]) to the effect that the opposite SoA was indeed the case earlier. As the most likely interpretation of (44) shows, it is, however, compatible with a situation where neither e nor ~e was the case before, because the matter was simply irrelevant: with respect to (44), it is entirely natural to suppose that there was a time when the speaker did not ask herself whether or not she agreed with the communists on anything at all, and that when she began to ask herself the question, she right away made up her mind to disagree with them. The other reason for choosing ne...déjà pas might be to focus on the conventional implicature of prematurity carried by déjà, as opposed to ne…plus (see sect. 4 infra). Thus, the speaker of (44) may have wanted to suggest that she began to disagree with the communists at a time when, for various reasons, she might have been expected to agree with them. Finally, in the case of ne…encore pas vs ne…pas encore, what could be the reason for placing the phasal adverb in front of the negation as in (46), rather than vice versa? It might plausibly be the desire to highlight the adverb, and thereby suggest that the negative SoA has lasted longer than might have been expected under the circumstances. In sum, then, as far as French is concerned, a strict application of Vandeweghe’s model would seem to put an unnecessary burden on the semantics of the phasal adverbs, a burden that we may instead profitably allow the pragmatics to carry, the more so as this can be done by an appeal to principles of general applicability well beyond the interpretation of phasal adverbs in particular, such as Grice’s (1989a[1975]) conversational maxims (or reformulations thereof, such as those found in Horn 1989 or Levinson 2000) or Clark’s (1993) principles of lexicalization. A final issue with regard to perspectivity is that several authors (König 1977: 182; Löbner 1989: 167; Vandeweghe 1992: 94) have suggested that speakers rely, in taking a perspective on a SoA, on a directional notion of time, where different points on the time line are ranked


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linearly as on a scale. Individual authors do not, however, seem to agree on precisely what this concept of scalarity entails for the semantic description of phasal adverbs. Thus, König (1977) uses it to propose a Gesamtbedeutung, from which both the basic aspectual and the various pragmatic readings of these adverbs may be derived. In other words, his is basically a monosemy approach. For Löbner (1989: 167), who classifies at least some of the different readings of schon as belonging to different paradigms while explicitly excluding the pragmatic uses of phasal adverbs from his account altogether, and who must hence be characterized as assuming polysemy, the notion of a scale is an evaluatively neutral one: any set with a linear ordering ipso facto constitutes a scale. What phasal adverbs do in their basic use is simply to “modify plain yes / no predications by focussing on the transition from a positive to a negative phase or vice versa on [the temporal] scale”. Because they pick a particular polarity value over a conceivable alternative, they are to be understood as a type of quantifier. For Vandeweghe (1992: 96ff) (who also assumes that a given particle may be a member of several different paradigms, and thus be polysemous), on the other hand, scalarity does have an evaluative aspect, and phasal adverbs are said to problematize the relationship between the point of reference (equivalent to TT) and the SoA e denoted by the host sentence, such that e is singled out as remarkable in light of the (more or less advanced) position of the reference point on the time line. This is also the stance taken in Löbner (1999). I will argue in subsequent chapters that the idea of a Gesamtbedeutung accounting for all uses of a given particle is difficult to uphold. I will likewise argue that evaluation of the relative earliness or lateness of the SoA denoted by the host clause is not part of the semantic content of all the French particles. For these reasons, the notion of scalarity that will be retained here in connection with the basic uses of déjà, encore, toujours and enfin is Löbner’s (1989) evaluatively neutral one, which provides a plausible spring board for, and constraint on, possible semantic extensions of those basic uses. As will become clear in sect. 3.1.1 infra, this does not mean, however, that I subscribe to Löbner’s model in its entirety.

2.5

Summary

In this section, it has been shown that, due to their semantics, phasal adverbs are generally constrained to appear with specific temporal / aspectual forms and / or predicates having specific types of Aktionsart. To explain these constraints, I have argued that phasal adverbs belong in a notional category of phasal aspect, which should be recognized alongside the more traditional categories of tense, (viewpoint) aspect and Aktionsart, and which is characterized by being relational, as opposed to deictic, in nature, and by expressing situation-external time. The items in question thus relate the SoA denoted by the host clause to a different SoA, which either precedes or follows it; hence, they can be classified as either retrospective or prospective. At the same time, however, phasal adverbs have an element of situation-internal meaning, in as much as they function as superlexical aspectual morphemes, which focus on specific internal stages of the SoA in their scope. Individual phasal adverbs can thus be classified as either inchoatives or continuatives.

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I have shown that the assumption voiced in some previous work that phasal adverbs are inherently markers of polarity is incorrect, at least as far as French is concerned. On the other hand, I have suggested that they are inherently subjective, and that this may go some way toward accounting for their frequent extension into modal, as opposed to purely temporal / aspectual, contexts. The next section will be concerned with a different, but equally central, issue in the semantic description of phasal adverbs, namely whether or not they can legitimately be said to constitute a lexical field or paradigm, and if so, in what sense.

3 THE PARADIGMATICITY OF PHASAL ADVERBS By choosing to refer to déjà, encore, toujours and enfin, as well as to ne…plus and ne…pas encore, as “phasal adverbs”, and treating them in a single monograph, I am, of course, suggesting that they have some salient semantic properties in common, and I have already sketched the nature of these properties. This naturally raises the question of whether these items can be conceived as constituting a semantic field or paradigm, and if so, what precisely is the status of such a field or paradigm. I have already discussed the notion of paradigmatic relations among lexical items in relatively general terms in ch. 2, sect. 5 supra. The conclusions that will be drawn in the present chapter with respect to the paradigmaticity of phasal adverbs will further support the view of the nature of word meanings that was argued for previously.

3.1

Two competing hypotheses about the interrelations of phasal adverbs

While a good many authors have implicitly assumed that phasal adverbs constitute a semantic field, it is probably fair to say that there are, currently, two major competing hypotheses about the most appropriate way to model the basic meaning of phasal adverbs as a group, namely, on the one hand, the so-called “duality hypothesis” associated with Löbner (1989; 1999; see also Vandeweghe 1992; van Baar 1990) and, on the other hand, the “three-scenarios hypothesis” associated with van der Auwera (1993; see also van Baar 1997). In the following subsections, I will take a critical look at both of these. 3.1.1 The duality hypothesis Löbner’s (1989; 1999) duality hypothesis, which is prefigured in Välikangas (1982), is without doubt the more esthetically attractive of the two competing hypotheses. It very simply states that German schon, noch, noch nicht and nicht mehr constitute a perfect structuralist paradigm, such that the meaning of each can be described in terms of a combination of inner and outer negation of each of the others. Thus, schon ≡ ~noch~ and noch ≡ ~schon~, while nicht mehr ≡ ~noch nicht~ and noch nicht ≡ ~nicht mehr~. The members of the two pairs of items are therefore logical duals of one another, given that an account of their meaning involves two negations, namely inner negation of the operand and outer negation of the operator. By the same token, noch nicht becomes the direct negation of schon, and nicht mehr that of noch. These logical relations can be illustrated by means of the “duality square” in Figure 4.1:


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[Figure 4.1: A duality square for phasal adverbs] OUTER NEGATION SCHON

NOCH NICHT

INNER NEGATION

DUAL

NICHT MEHR

INNER NEGATION

NOCH OUTER NEGATION

Vandeweghe (1992: 84f) observes that the same type of logical relations are found elsewhere, for instance between the universal and existential quantifiers, ∀ and ∃ (Figure 4.2), or between the modal necessity and possibility operators, and ◊ (Figure 4.3). He implicitly uses this observation to justify the duality hypothesis with respect to phasal adverbs, asserting that duality is a basic feature of the organization of the lexicon, especially in respect of quantifiers:15 [Figure 4.2: A duality square for quantifiers] OUTER NEGATION

∀X : P ≡ ~∃X : ~P

INNER NEGATION

~∀X : P ≡ ∃X : ~P

DUAL

∀X : ~P ≡ ~∃X : P

INNER NEGATION

~∀X : ~P ≡ ∃X : P OUTER NEGATION

15 This is, of course, already implicit (if perhaps less immediately apparent) in the traditional logical ”square of oppositions”, which goes back to Aristotle (cf. Tugendhat & Wolf 1983: 73).

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[Figure 4.3: A duality square for modal operators] OUTER NEGATION

P ≡ ~◊~P

INNER NEGATION

~P ≡ ◊~P

DUAL

~P ≡ ~◊P

INNER NEGATION

~~P ≡ ◊P OUTER NEGATION

However, as the above figures show, the analogy is far from perfect: thus, the entailment relation between the upper left hand corner and the lower right hand corner in Figures 4.2 and 4.3 has no equivalent in figure 4.1. In other words, All x are p logically entails Some x are p, just as It is necessary that p logically entails It is possible that p (but of course not vice versa), but, while it is true (as we will see below) that there are some contexts in which already and still can be both be used appropriately, It is already the case that p nevertheless does not entail It is still the case that p, cf. the oddness of (51) as compared to (50) (assuming, of course, that the phone calls are understood to be prompted by the announcement):16 (50) (51)

The moment it was announced that Margaret had been awarded the Nobel Prize, the papers were already calling to interview her. #The moment it was announced that Margaret had been awarded the Nobel Prize, the papers were still calling to interview her.

Furthermore, the generalized conversational implicature from the lower to the upper right hand corner in Figures 4.2 and 4.3 (cf. Horn 1989: 211; Levinson 2000: 68) is not found in Figure 4.1: thus, whereas Some x are p carries a quantity implicature to the effect that Not all x are p, and It is possible that p implicates It is not necessary that p, It is still the case that p is in direct contradiction with It is not yet the case that p. Hence, justifying the duality hypothesis by reference to the relations existing between the universal and existential quantifiers on the one hand, and between the modal operators on the other, does not seem to be an entirely successful line of argument. The above, ultimately somewhat pedantic, objections do not exhaust the problems with the duality hypothesis. While there is no doubt that the model tells us something very interesting about the meaning of phasal adverbs, it nevertheless seems to raise as many questions as it answers.

16

Of course, we might conceivably rotate the duality square in Figure 4.1 180 degrees, making noch appear in the upper left hand corner in the place of schon, in which case the logical entailment would hold. Such a move, however, would be incompatible with Löbner’s (1989: 167) claim that schon is the central item of the paradigm (cf. infra), because, if it is, it ought, by implication, to occupy the same place in its square as the universal quantifier or the necessity operator do in theirs.


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First, Löbner (1989: 167) claims that schon constitutes the central item in the alleged paradigm. He justifies this by arguing that noch has a basic meaning allowing for nonquantificational uses, making schon the only genuine phase quantifier of the group (1989: 168). This presumed centrality of schon is, however, directly at odds with the typological finding reported in van der Auwera (1998: 37) according to which, in a 50-language sample, if a language has one or more lexical gaps anywhere in the phasal “paradigm”, the ALREADY17 notion is invariably missing, which, if anything, would suggest that this notion occupies a marginal position as compared to STILL, NOT YET and NO LONGER. Secondly, van der Auwera (1993: 618) observes that given the bidirectional entailment between schon and ~noch~ in Löbner’s model, finally should logically entail already, given that, like the latter, it also entails ~still~. Since finally does not appear to entail already, − indeed, the two seem incompatible −, it cannot be the case that the meaning of already is simply that of being the dual of still. This point is taken up by both Vandeweghe (1992: 89ff) and Löbner (1999: 77), who argue that the Dutch and German equivalents of finally (eindelijk and endlich, respectively) do not have the same categorial status as al and schon, and in fact belong to an entirely different paradigm. Thus, in Dutch, eindelijk can occur as a pro-clause, whereas al cannot (Vandeweghe 1992: 89). This, however, seems to be an idiosyncratic feature of Dutch, as already and its equivalents in a number of languages (including French déjà) occur quite normally as pro-clauses, cf. (52): (52)

A. Peter’s here. − B. Already?

Moreover, both Vandeweghe and Löbner argue that two adverbs are, in fact, not incompatible, but may actually appear together in the same clause: (53)

(54)

Vorige week is er eindelijk al een eerste poging ondernomen. (from Vandeweghe 1992: 89) ’Last week, the first already of a series of attempts has finally been undertaken.’ Schon am Dienstag können wir uns endlich sehen. (from Löbner 1999: 86) ’Already on Tuesday can we finally see each other’

However, this argument strikes me as spurious, in as much as al / schon and eindelijk / endlich do not have the same scope in these examples: in both, eindelijk / endlich scope the whole clause, whereas al / schon scope only the ordinal eerste (‘first’) and temporal adverbial am Dienstag (‘on Tuesday’), respectively, and they therefore function as focus particles in both clauses. It is commonly the case that items which are incompatible when scoping the same material may well occur in tandem provided they have different scope, cf. the contrast between (55) and (56): (55) (56)

*Only Peter also came. I prefer cigarettes. Only on New Year’s Eve do I also smoke cigars.

It is argued, moreover, that the use of finally allows for textual inferences not licensed by already (Vandeweghe 1992: 90f; Löbner 1999: 79). Thus, when in an utterance like (57) 17 Small capitals are used here to denote the notional content that is assumed to be constant to phasal adverbs across languages.

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containing finally, we would not infer that the professor was satisfied because it had taken a long time to solve the problem, whereas the same utterance with already would, in fact, tend to implicate that he was satisfied because the problem had taken a comparatively short time to solve: (57)

When he was told that the problem had (already / finally) been solved, the professor was deeply satisfied.

The importance of this difference in interpretation is not entirely obvious to me: it seems to me that, in both cases, the professor’s satisfaction is due, in the first instance, to the fact that the problem has been solved. With already, the implied brevity of the process may be seen as increasing his satisfaction because it might conceivably have taken longer than it did, and thus have left him with less time for other problems. With finally, the length of the process implies rather that the problem has been a very complicated one, so the professor’s ultimate satisfaction may well be at least indirectly related to the tardiness of the solution, given that finding a solution to a difficult problem tends to be more intellectually satisfying than finding the solution to an easy one. Further, finally is argued to possess a modal component not found in already, namely that the SoA in question was hoped for by the speaker. Although judgments are not firm, this does appear to be true for at least some speakers of the contemporary vernaculars, as (58)-(59) (which have the same meaning) show: (58) (59)

Je déteste Duschnok. ?Ça m’embête vraiment qu’il ait enfin obtenu la chaire qu’il voulait. I despise Jones. ?I’m really annoyed that he finally got the chair he wanted.

However, a diachronic study of French enfin (Hansen 2005b) revealed that this modal component was not originally part of the meaning of the particle in that language, and that one can find examples in Classical French of enfin with SoAs that are explicitly non-preferred by the speaker, cf. (60). (That the SoA in that example was wished for by a third person does not appear to be relevant, as the content of the relative clauses in (58)-(59) is intended to demonstrate): (60)

ALEXANDRE. C’est un rang où Porus n’a plus le droit de prétendre: / Il a trop recherché la haine d’Alexandre. / Il sait bien qu’à regret je m’y suis résolu ; / Mais enfin je le hais autant qu’il l’a voulu. (Jean Racine, Alexandre le Grand, V.i, p. 55, 1697 – from Frantext) ‘Alexander. That is a rank to which Porus can no longer lay claim : / He has sought Alexander’s hatred to too great an extent. / He knows well that it is to my regret that I have made up my mind; / But finally I hate him as much as he has wished for.’

Lastly, Löbner (1999: 70) maintains that schon and endlich actually do entail one another, contra van der Auwera (1993: 618), because the earliness or tardiness of the SoA is a matter of pragmatics, and not of semantics, which alone is concerned by logical relations. However, by making this claim, Löbner would seem to be undermining his own (1989) account, in which he argues that earliness is not a secondary meaning component of schon, but one which falls out naturally from the basic meaning captured in the duality hypothesis, as a consequence of the contrast between schon and noch nicht. But of course, it cannot fall out naturally from that


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contrast if endlich is also accepted as a possible dual of noch nicht, through its logical equivalence with schon. Now, in fact, Löbner seems to want to have his cake and eat it, too, in so far as he does not ultimately accept endlich as a dual of noch nicht, but includes it in an entirely different duality paradigm, along with noch immer, noch immer nicht, and endlich nicht mehr, which have in common, he says, that they all contain an extrapropositional component conveying a subjective, negative, evaluation of a perceived delay in the transition between polarity values of the SoA, cf. Figure 4.4: [Figure 4.4: A duality square for German endlich] OUTER NEGATION ENDLICH

INNER NEGATION

NOCH IMMER NICHT

DUAL

INNER NEGATION

NOCH IMMER

ENDLICH NICHT MEHR OUTER NEGATION

The problem with that proposal is that duality is fundamentally about logical relations, and not about contextuality. Logically, endlich is as much a dual of noch as schon is, and conversely, schon is as much a dual of noch immer as endlich is. (Note, incidentally, that, in contemporary English, both noch and noch immer are translated by the same item, still.) Moreover, unless we assume that noch immer (nicht) and endlich nicht mehr are entirely non-compositional, and hence that their formal resemblance with noch (nicht) and nicht mehr is essentially arbitrary, it strikes me as counter-intuitive to place the two sets of items in different paradigms. Finally, − and this specifically concerns the applicability of Löbner’s proposal to French, which, after all, is the language with which the present work is centrally concerned −, the closest translation equivalents of the four German expressions in Figure 4.4 would be enfin, toujours, ne…toujours pas, and ne…enfin plus. However, it will be shown in ch. 6, sect. 4 infra that, of these four, only (ne)…enfin (plus) actually contain the meaning component “delay”: with toujours (pas), such a reading is at best a conversational implicature. To this we may add that the fact that the existence of a fairly frequent and relatively fixed18 collocation encore et toujours in modern French (cf. (61)) suggests that the two adverbs are perceived by speakers as belonging to one and the same semantic field. (61)

18

Je suis encore et toujours / après tant et tant d’années / cet enfant qui tire sur une ficelle / à la poursuite du vent / (Philippe Soupault, « Cerf-volant », in Poèmes retrouvés, 1918-1981, from Frantext)

”Relatively” fixed, because the order of the conjoined adverbs may be reversed.

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Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface ‘I am still and ever / after so many many years / that same child pulling a string / in pursuit of the wind /’

In this connection, it is worth pointing out that Löbner (1989; 1999) also classifies the two senses of schon illustrated in (62)-(63), respectively, as belonging to different paradigms, such that the sense exemplified in (63) patterns with erst (approx. ‘still only’) noch nicht, and nicht erst (approx. ‘not only’), cf. Figure 4.5 infra: (62) (63)

Das Licht ist schon an. ‘The light is already on.’ Peter hat schon fünf Bücher. ‘Peter already has five books.’

[Figure 4.5: A duality square for “scalar” German schon] OUTER NEGATION SCHON

INNER NEGATION

NOCH NICHT

DUAL

NICHT ERST

INNER NEGATION

ERST OUTER NEGATION

There are, according to Löbner (1989; 1999) two main differences between the uses of schon instantiated in (62) and (63): one is a difference in scope, the other a difference in the number of alternative SoAs envisaged. Thus, while the adverb has sentential scope in (62), it is claimed to take scope only over the numeral fünf in (63); in other words, it functions as a focus particle rather than as an ordinary sentence adverbial. And while only one other alternative – namely a SoA of the opposite polarity – is being envisaged in the former sentence, at least two must be envisaged when schon is used as in (63). (In the present case, Peter’s possession of any number of books smaller than five constitutes the conceivable alternatives.) Thus, this use of schon would be appropriate only when the expression in its scope is of a scalar nature. Now, first of all, it is unclear that the “scalar” use of schon seen in (63) actually is distinct from the basic aspectual one we have been considering so far: as Löbner himself notes, the notion of a temporal development is involved in both cases, and there is no either semantic or syntactic reason to assume that schon in (63) might not scope the clause as a whole, rather than just the numeral. The only real difference between the two uses seems to inhere in the binary vs scalar nature of the predicates. Note moreover, that “scalar” schon continues to have noch nicht as its external negation, and, as Löbner (1989: 190f) himself notes, and as (64)-(65) show, schon can in fact contrast with noch in this use, too, the difference being that erst in (64) implies that, if anything, the amount of books is expected to increase, whereas noch in (65) implies that it is expected to decrease:


(64) (65)

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Peter hat erst fünf Bücher. ‘Peter still has only five books.’ Peter hat noch fünf Bücher. ‘Peter still has five books left.’

We do not need to postulate two different paradigms to explain the behavior of schon, erst and noch with scalar predicates. As amply demonstrated in work on neo-Gricean pragmatics (e.g. Horn 1989; Levinson 2000), and as already discussed in ch. 2, sect. 2.2,19 expressions that are logically scalar (such as the cardinal numerals) entail all and any items lower down on the same scale, while being compatible with all and any items higher up on the scale, but at the same time the use of a given scalar expression will, mutatis mutandis, carry a generalized conversational implicature (or GCI) to the effect that expressions higher up on the scale could not truthfully be applied. Thus, (66) logically entails the truth of all the propositions in (67)(70): (66) (67) (68) (69) (70)

Peter hat fünf Bücher. Peter hat vier Bücher. Peter hat drei Bücher. Peter hat zwei Bücher. Peter hat ein Buch. ‘Peter has five/four/three/two/one book(s).’

At the same time, (66) is logically compatible with a SoA in which Peter in fact possesses any number of books higher than five, but pragmatically, it will implicate (via the the second submaxim of the maxim of quantity [cf. Grice 1989a(1975)], which is equivalent to Levinson’s [2000] Q-principle) that those higher values do not, in fact, hold. Conversely, in all but metalinguistic contexts, the negation of (66) in (71) will logically entail that higher numerical values do not apply, but will imply nothing whatsoever about the truth or falsity of (67)-(70): (71)

Peter hat nicht fünf Bücher. ‘Peter does not have five books.’

Now, as discussed in sect. 2.4 supra, schon is a retrospective particle, which at least strongly implicates that the SoA e denoted by the clause was not actual at some point prior to topic time TT. (63) will thus strongly implicate the truth of ~HAVE(FIVE BOOKS, PETER) at a time t < TT, along with any entailments thereof. This means that any change of state must have involved an increase in the number of books possessed by Peter. Noch, on the other hand, is a prospective particle, which implies at least the possibility that the SoA denoted may no longer be actual at some time t > TT. Since the negation of (66) entails the negation of any values higher than five, (65) can only suggest that any future change of state will be towards a decrease in the number of books possessed by Peter. Finally, what erst does is to lexicalize the GCI carried by the bare scalar expression, i.e. the negation of any values higher than the one indicated by the scalar expression used.

19 The concept of scalarity as such (in a logical, but also, prominently, a pragmatic understanding), and its importance for linguistic coding, was – to my knowledge – first elaborated on by French linguists, prominently Oswald Ducrot (e.g. 1973) and Gilles Fauconnier (e.g. 1975).

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Consequently, given that erst is a prospective particle like noch, any future change of state must therefore be precisely towards such higher values.20 The duality hypothesis, of course, with its postulation of distinct paradigms, wholly obscures these relations between the three lexemes, and leaves the “scalar” use of noch entirely unaccounted for. This in itself is an argument in favor of the present account, which is further supported by the way the notional content coded by erst is realized lexically in English or French, namely as still only and ne…encore que, respectively, i.e. as fully compositional combinations of prospective still / encore with a restrictive scalar adverb, which excludes values higher on the scale than the one denoted by the predicate: (72) (73)

Peter still only has five books. Pierre n’a encore que cinq livres.

In these languages, the existence of a distinct “scalar” duality group is even more questionable, in as much as the content coded by German nicht erst is simply not lexicalized as such: thus, the translations of (74) into English (as in (76)) or French (as in (77)) do not do the German original justice, as neither can distinguish it from (75). Incidentally, the native German speakers I have asked in fact concur that (74) has a distinct metalinguistic ring to it, such that they find it difficult to contextualize such an utterance other than as a direct denial of something said by a previous speaker: (74) (75) (76) (77)

Peter hat nicht erst fünf Bücher. Peter hat nicht nur fünf Bücher. Peter does not have only five books. Pierre n’a pas que cinq livres.

When taken seriously, the duality hypothesis can only lead to an unfruitful proliferation of paradigms, as seen in Löbner (1999), where “scalar” noch is also claimed to form its own duality group, distinct from the three we have already seen, along with nur noch, nicht mehr and nicht nur noch / noch mehr als. I find such an approach unfruitful because it appears to multiply distinct senses of several of the expressions involved far beyond what is intuitively plausible, and is inherently incapable of saying anything interesting about the possible connections between these allegedly distinct senses. The essential problem is that, in a structuralist framework such as the duality hypothesis, the meaning of any individual item is negatively defined: schon gets its value from not being noch, noch nicht or nicht mehr (or, alternatively, from not being erst, nicht erst or noch nicht) – it has no inherent meaning of its own. Hence, it becomes meaningless to study lexical relations across paradigms, because where do you stop? How do we know that more is to be gained from relating and contrasting “binary” schon to “scalar” schon, than from relating and contrasting it to any arbitrarily chosen lexeme from the language? And if it is in principle relevant to relate and contrast any pair of lexemes, then the relevant paradigm must consist in the language as a whole. This, if we continue to hold that meanings are negatively defined within a paradigm, would seem to entail the unlearnability of any language in a stepwise fashion, and yet we know for a fact that this is how both first and second language acquisition actually take place. 20 If this is the correct analysis, it means that erst constitutes a counterexample to Horn’s (1989: 256) generalization that generalized scalar implicatures will not usually be lexicalized.


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Elegant though it is at first sight, we must conclude, I think, that the duality hypothesis is untenable as an account of the semantics of phasal adverbs. 3.1.2 The three-scenarios hypothesis Van der Auwera (1993; 1998) also assumes that the group of phasal adverbs together constitute a lexical field, but where Löbner’s (1989; 1999) approach is – as we saw – a structuralist one, van der Auwera’s is of a functional-typological nature. He partitions the relevant linguistic items into continuatives, on the one hand, and inchoatives, on the other, such that the former group includes still, no longer and not yet and their equivalents (no longer being termed a “discontinuative” and not yet a “continuative negative”, cf. van der Auwera 1998: 35), while the latter group includes already and finally and their equivalents. Contra Löbner (who, as we saw, considers schon to be the central lexeme), the lexical field as a whole is seen in van der Auwera’s model as basically continuative, the inchoatives occupying a marked position, as evidenced by the fact that languages more frequently have lexical gaps here than among the continuatives (van der Auwera 1993: 615). However, in a given language, the system of phasal adverbs may be either symmetrical, with the positive continuative and the inchoative being of equal importance, or it may be asymmetrical, with the positive continuative as the central element (van der Auwera 1998: 38). The basic aspectual meaning of the adverbs is described with the aid of three different scenarios, all involving actual or possible changes in the polarity of a SoA along a time axis. The first scenario is referred to by van Baar (1997: 27ff) as the “neutral” one, the second as the “simultaneously counterfactual” one, and the third as the “non-simultaneously identical” one. To see what is meant by this, imagine that two protagonists, John and Peter, have an appointment at some airport (for instance, Heathrow) at a particular time (say, 3pm) and that Peter is supposed to fly to a different city (for instance, Madrid) an hour later (i.e. at 4pm). Now, in the neutral scenario, John’s watch breaks down, and he doesn’t reach the airport until 4:10pm. He may then utter (78), meaning that Peter’s departure is early with respect to his own (John’s) sense of time, while being objectively on schedule. In other words, Peter’s departure is not “objectively” early (i.e. early in respect of the agreed-to schedule), but only subjectively so. (78)

Peter is already on his way to Madrid.

The simultaneously counterfactual scenario has John arriving on schedule at 3pm, while Peter spontaneously decides to take an earlier flight to Madrid resulting once again in their not meeting at Heathrow as planned. Again, John may felicitously utter (78), this time contrasting the actual SoA with a simultaneous, but counterfactual, one in which Peter would have waited for the 4pm flight to Madrid. In this case, Peter’s departure is “objectively” early. These two scenarios constitute, it is claimed (van der Auwera 1993: 621f), the semantics of already, i.e. they are present together in all uses of the adverbs. However, the context may render one of them more prominent, to the de facto exclusion of the other. Finally, the non-simultaneously identical scenario is one in which Peter arrives too late at the airport, misses his 4pm flight and has to take a later one, such that at – say – 6pm, John may utter (79). Here, the actual SoA is contrasted with an earlier, but counterfactual, one in which Peter would have taken off at 4pm as scheduled, and Peter’s departure is presented as “objectively” late.

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(79)

Peter is finally on his way to Madrid.

Van der Auwera (1993: 624f) constructs similar neutral and simultaneously counterfactual scenarios for not yet: one in which (80) is uttered at for instance 3:45pm, and one in which it is uttered at 4:15, but Peter is not on the flight. The expression still not is said to be specialized for the latter, counterfactual, scenario, and to emphasize the extendedness of the negative SoA, cf. (81): (80) (81)

Peter is not yet on his way to Madrid. Peter is still not on his way to Madrid.

The scenarios needed for the still and no longer are left implicit, although diagrams showing the position of the positive and negative phases of the SoA are provided (van der Auwera 1993: passim). Van der Auwera (1993: 627) further states that there is a division of labor between already and still, whereby the former can apply to a topic time that is immediately contiguous to the change of polarity in the SoA, whereas the latter cannot. He illustrates this with the aid of the diagram in Figure 4.6, representing three successive phases of time, such that the first and third represent negative phases of the SoA, and the middle one a positive phase, and where the black area of the time continuum represents the area to which already can apply, while the grey area is that to which still can apply. Not yet would then apply to the first of the two negative phases, and no longer to the second negative phase: [Figure 4.6: van der Auwera’s three-phase diagram] −

… 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 … +

−

To the extent that phasal adverbs are seen as forming a semantic field in van der Auwera’s analysis, it is in a much looser sense than what we found in Löbner’s tight paradigmatic description: here, the adverbs are rather held together semantically by a cluster of conceptually based properties of which any two adverbs may share some but not others. Moreover, the meaning of each adverb is defined in positive, as opposed to negative, terms. The scenario hypothesis is thus, at least at first blush, more compatible with the approach to meaning adopted here. Indeed, it is very easy to see the scenarios as abstract frames of the type evoked by extra-thematic elements (cf. ch. 2, sect. 1). The different phasal adverbs would then be related to each other either as different instantiations of the same superordinate frame, or as elements occupying similar positions in closely related frames. However, van der Auwera’s account, too, has been subject to criticism, principally from Michaelis (1996) and Löbner (1999). The former is mainly interested in the nature of the presuppositions carried by already – if any. This issue will be dealt with in the next section, so I will concentrate on Löbner’s objections here.


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Löbner (1999: 68) argues, firstly, that the idea of a contrast with a counterfactual SoA is unnecessary, whether this SoA is located at a different point in time, as in the neutral scenario, or it is simultaneous with the actual SoA, as in the simultaneously counterfactual scenario. According to him, schon may be used in an utterance even if the context rules out that the change may be perceived as either subjectively or “objectively” early. Thus, for instance, even if everyone present has all along been expecting Peter’s flight to arrive on schedule in Madrid at 4:15, (82) may nevertheless be uttered at 4:20. The meaning of already and schon is simply that the truth of the host clause “represents a relatively advanced state of affairs compared with the state of affairs given if the sentence were false” (1999: 68f). (82)

Es ist jetzt zwanzig nach vier. Peter ist schon angekommen. ‘It is now twenty past four. Peter has already arrived.’

My intuitions about German are not strong enough to allow me judge the original example with certainty, but it does indeed seem perfectly felicitous to utter the English (or the French) analogs of (82) in a situation where, for instance, the speaker and / or hearer have been rushing to the airport to pick Peter up, not knowing if they would be on time. However, given a situation where everyone present knows exactly what time it is, and no-one has been scrambling to get anywhere at an earlier time, the example seems natural to me only if already / déjà is left out. To accommodate examples such as (82), a slight modification of van der Auwera’s neutral scenario will suffice. It need not express actual counterexpectation, but merely a temporal comparison between two possible SoAs, e and ~e, the latter of which is conventionally implicated to have been expected or simply preferred by a contextually relevant individual. Löbner (1999: 74f) is moreover critical of van der Auwera’s claimed division of labor between already and still. For one thing, he feels it suggests that the two adverbs should be mutually exclusive, whereas in fact many SoAs may be described using either, e.g. (83), as said by someone who is waiting at a traffic light: (83)

Die Ampel ist schon / noch rot. ‘The light is already / still red.’

While Figure 4.6 is, indeed, misleading due to the precise numbering of stages of seemingly equal length within the positive middle phase, I do not believe this example necessarily undermines the division-of-labor hypothesis. Clearly, both adverbs are equally possible if the light has been red for a relatively short time prior to the utterance. Which one is chosen will be a matter of the length of the time intervals the speaker is operating with, and of how much time she expects to have to wait before the light turns green, that is, it will depend on the particular perspective taken on the SoA. To me, (83) could only constitute a decisive counterexample to the division-of-labor claim either if noch could be used at the very moment the speaker observed light turning red – which, I am fairly confident, is impossible (cf. (51) supra) –, or if schon could be felicitously used by someone who knew for a fact (for instance, if she had programmed the computer controling the traffic light) that the red light had been on for several minutes and that it would turn green the second after she produced her utterance. The latter use seems – if not actually untruthful – at the very least highly uncooperative. Secondly, Löbner says (1999: 74), certain cases are not covered by van der Auwera’s threephase model, namely those where the SoA e denotes an irreversible state, and which seem to

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exclude still, even at an advanced stage of the SoA (cf. (84)), and those where e denotes an unrepeatable state, and which apparently exclude already, even at the very beginning of the SoA(cf.(85)): (84) (85)

I am (*?still) old. I am (*?already) young.

In such cases, Löbner argues, there can be no question of a division of labor between the two particles, because one of them simply cannot apply anywhere along the continuum. The conclusion is, of course, that accounting for the uses of both particles with the aid of a single model like Figure 6 is inadequate, and that the meanings of, respectively, already and still must be represented separately. However, quite apart from the fact that – given the discussion under 3.1.1 – it is not clear in what sense Löbner’s own model fares any better than van der Auwera’s in respect of that particular criterion, one wonders about the status of examples like (84)-(85): are the asterisks really justified? True, such utterances will be odd in a “normal” context, but it seems to me (and König 1977: 176 also suggests as much) that we are dealing with a pragmatic, as opposed to a semantic, oddity, which can be attributed to the interaction between standardly assumed encyclopedic knowledge and the second submaxim of Grice’s (1989a[1975]) maxim of quantity (i.e. “Say no more than is required”). In other words, under normal circumstances, both speaker and hearer will be aware that, for human beings, youth is necessarily preceded, and old age necessarily followed, by non-existence, hence the communicative point of uttering (84)-(85) with the phasal adverbs in place is likely to be entirely opaque in most cases (for further discussion, see sect. 4 infra). In sum, van der Auwera’s account does not seem to be substantially undermined by the criticisms that have been leveled against it by Löbner. Moreover, of the two competing models we have reviewed, van der Auwera’s is clearly more compatible with the frame semantic approach argued for in ch. 2, sect. 1.

3.2

Summary

In this section, I have argued that, although phasal adverbs can profitably be described as semantically related, this should not be taken to mean that their meanings essentially emerge from their interrelations. I reviewed two prominent unifying approaches to the meaning of phasal adverbs, namely Löbner’s (1989, 1999) and Vandeweghe’s (1992) structuralist model, vs van der Auwera’s (1993, 1998) functional-typological model. I hope to have made clear that, on theoretical grounds, the former model is fundamentally incompatible with the view of word semantics adopted in the present study. Furthermore, I brought up a number of empirical objections that may be raised against it, which together allowed me to conclude that the model could not be upheld. From a theoretical point of view, van der Auwera’s model is more congenial to my purposes, and the criticisms that have been raised against it on empirical grounds were shown to be less than damaging. However, I will argue in the next section that the simultaneously counterfactual scenario is actually redundant, and, in chapter 6, sect. 4, that the three-phase


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diagram represented in Figure 4.6 cannot accurately describe the use of French toujours, which − unlike encore − does not in itself invoke the idea of a possible ulterior negative phase of the SoA. Moreover, the model does not account (indeed, does not pretend to account) for extended, non-phasal uses of the relevant adverbs. Hence, while the scenario model may form a promising basis for further investigation of phasal adverbs, it will need to be modified and supplemented with additional notions of a non-temporal nature in order to be fully adequate to my purposes in this work. As already suggested, van der Auwera’s model has come under attack for its analysis of the presuppositions carried by already. Indeed, the issue of the presuppositions that may or may not be conveyed by all the phasal adverbs has loomed large in the literature. That question will form the topic of the next section.

4 THE PRESUPPOSITIONALITY OF PHASAL ADVERBS A number of scholars have assumed that an essential part of a semantic description of phasal adverbs would consist in an account of their presuppositions. There can be little doubt that the meaning contribution made by these items to their host sentences is essentially of a contextualizing, as opposed to a strictly referential, nature: Thus, as (86)-(92) show, sentences containing them invariably entail the “bare” sentences without the marker (although sentences containing the negative adverbs of course entail the negated “bare” sentence). On the other hand, it simply does not seem meaningful to talk about either entailments or the lack of them in the opposite direction, so the reasons for using the particles must lie in what they implicitly convey. (86) (87) (88) (89) (90) (91) (92)

4.1

Jean est déjà là. → Jean est là. ‘Jean is already here. → Jean is here.’ Jean est encore là. → Jean est là. ‘Jean is still here. → Jean is here.’ Jean est toujours là. → Jean est là. ‘Jean is still here. → Jean is here.’ Jean est enfin là. → Jean est là. ‘Jean is finally here. → Jean is here.’ Jean n’est pas encore là. → Jean n’est pas là. ‘Jean is not yet here. → Jean is not here.’ Jean n’est toujours pas là. → Jean n’est pas là. ‘Jean is still not here. → Jean is not here.’ Jean n’est plus là. → Jean n’est pas là. ‘Jean is no longer here. → Jean is not here.’

Presuppositions concerning preceding phases of the SoA

It is common, following Doherty (1973: 154) to assume that déjà and its equivalents presuppose a preceding negative phase of the SoA e denoted by the host clause, while asserting (as the entailment relation in (86) suggests) that e is in a positive phase at the topic time TT. Conversely, encore and its equivalents are often taken to presuppose a preceding positive phase, while likewise asserting a positive succeeding phase that includes TT.

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The negative adverbs, of course, assert a negative phase of e at TT, but to the extent that ne…pas encore are taken to negate déjà, and ne…plus to negate encore, they must be assumed to share the presuppositions of those items. Whereas the existence of such a presupposition with respect to a time interval t < TT has never, to my knowledge, been questioned in the case of encore / still / noch etc., it is far more controversial in the case of déjà / already / schon etc. Thus, Martin (1980: 169) weakens it to a presupposition of possible, as opposed to actual, negative polarity of e at t < TT, but does not argue for this, while Michaelis (1992: 325; 1996: 484) and Mittwoch (1993: 73) simply deny the necessity of any kind of presupposition regarding a change of state. The latter authors adduce examples like the following to support their claim: (93) (94)

Why would you need a permanent? You already have curly hair. (from Michaelis 1992: 326 – her [4c]) He’s already American. (as said of a newborn baby by his not-yet-naturalized parents) (from Mittwoch 1993: 74 – her [14])

Martin’s (1980: 169) weaker presupposition of possibility could handle (93), since it is of course conceivable that the addressee might at some time in the past have had straight hair, but it cannot account for (94), given that nationality simply cannot be meaningfully predicated of someone who has not yet been born. Yet, (94) could be argued to be a simple case of presupposition failure due to conflicting encyclopedic knowledge (cf. Levinson 1983: 186ff). In terms of the frame-semantic view of presuppositions argued for in ch. 2, sect. 3.3 supra, already could then be said to comment on the applicability of the “being-American” frame as such in the case of the newborn baby. If so, (94) is no more problematical than an example adduced by Levinson and reproduced here as (95). Despite the normally presupposition-triggering temporal before-clause, this sentence, of course, fails to presuppose that Sue finished her thesis, as it is common knowledge that people do not usually finish theses after their death, hence, that particular frame is not relevant in Sue’s case: (95)

Sue died before she finished her thesis.

Mittwoch (1993: 78) further argues that already fails standard presupposition tests such as 1) survival in conditional protases, 2) suspension in main clauses if entailed by a conditional protasis, and 3) suspension in a disjunct if denied by the other disjunct (cf. Levinson 1983: 192ff), and she adduces the examples in (96)-(98) (her [27], [30a], and [30b]) to demonstrate this: (96) (97) (98)

If he’s already American, he doesn’t have to be naturalized. (as said of a newborn) #If the milk train didn’t stop here before, then I’m sure it already does. #Either the milk train stopped here in the past or it already does.

However, the failure of the negative presupposition in (96) can of course be explained in exactly the same way as that in (94). Exx. (97)-(98) are admittedly quite odd, but that is


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probably due to other factors, given that the logically equivalent (99)-(100) seem to constitute unproblematic cases of presupposition suspension: (99) (100)

Harry’s already arrived, if indeed he wasn’t here all along. Harry’s already arrived, or perhaps he was here all along.

Furthermore, we observed in sect. 2.3 supra, that (as was remarked as early as Traugott & Waterhouse 1969: 296) already is not felicitously used in gnomic statements (cf. (101)), which argues for its status as being, indeed, a presupposition trigger. Now, according to Mittwoch (1993: 75) gnomic statements containing already may, in fact, be felicitous, and she cites (102) (her [18]) as an example. But notice that, in (102), the added context, represented by the time adverbial before the Big Bang, and the change from present to past tense in the verb, is one which actually suspends the gnomicity of the statement by conversationally implicating – via the maxim of relation (cf. Grice 1989a[1975]) – that someone (possibly, although not necessarily, the addressee) might have thought that 2 plus 2 did not always equal 4. In fact, such suspension of gnomicity is characteristic of all the examples I have come across of already occurring in sentences expressing what we otherwise believe to be eternal truths. (101) (102)

#Two plus two already make four. Two plus two already made four before the Big Bang.

For these reasons, I will assume that déjà, which appears to pattern exactly like already in these respects, does trigger a presupposition to the effect that ~e was possible at some time t < TT, as claimed by Martin (1980: 169). At the same time, examples like (102) demonstrate that a strictly logical-referential approach to these adverbs is inadequate, as we clearly need to relativize our understanding of what is possibly or actually true and false at specific times to the belief worlds of contextually relevant, possibly virtual, individuals. As noted above, already and not yet and their equivalents are usually taken to be negations of one another and, hence, to share the same presupposition. Mittwoch (1993: 75f), for her part, argues that neither adverb carries a presupposition about any time prior to TT, and that there is, in fact, no lexical, but at best a pragmatic, relationship between them, such a pragmatic relationship being one of comparison between earlier vs later stages of a process. However, she does accept the common wisdom that still presupposes the truth of the SoA e at an interval t < TT. In support of her distinction between not yet and still, she adduces the following examples (her [20a] and [21a]), in which, she says, there is a difference in acceptability between the two adverbs, presumably due to a presupposition failure in (103), which is not paralleled in (104): (103) (104)

#Peter’s eyes were still blue when he was born. (NB ! the # represents Mittwoch’s evaluation) Peter’s eyes were not yet brown when he was born.

Personally, I find the examples equally felicitous, and I do not think (103) involves presupposition failure, in as much as fetuses have colored eyes even before they are born. Indeed, Mittwoch (1993: 76n) undermines her own account by noting the manifest possibility of sentences like (105) (her [i]). She explains (105) by saying that still’s pragmatic meaning of comparison with a later stage can sometimes override the presupposition, but in that case, it is difficult to see why the same explanation would not suffice to make (103) acceptable (as, indeed, I believe it is):

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(105)

When pocket calculators first came on the market, they were still pretty expensive.

Mittwoch (1993: 79) applies the same presupposition tests to not yet as to already (cf. (96)(98) supra and (106)-(107) below – her [31a / b]). Once more, I am forced to disagree with her judgments: I do not find either (106) or (107) unacceptable, it is merely difficult to think of a context in which they might be natural. On the other hand, the structurally similar (108)-(109) would be perfectly felicitous in the following type of context: The speaker knows that Maxine is seven months pregnant, but has no idea whether she has any children other than the one she is expecting, and the hearer has just asked the speaker whether she thinks Maxine has become a mother: (106) (107) (108) (109)

#If the milk train didn’t stop here before, then I’m sure it does not yet. #Either the milk train stopped here in the past or it does not yet. (NB! the # are Mittwoch’s in both cases) If Maxine wasn’t a mother all along, then I’m sure she isn’t one yet. Either Maxine was a mother all along or she isn’t one yet.

In the light of the preceding discussion, it seems possible to conclude that all the phasal adverbs do indeed trigger a presupposition about the polarity of the SoA prior to reference time. I have come across no data suggesting that French phasal adverbs behave any differently from their English counterparts in this respect, so I will assume, from now on, that they trigger the presuppositions spelled out in (110)-(113): (110) (111) (112) (113)

déjà: [◊~e at interval t < TT] encore and toujours: [e at interval t < TT] enfin and ne…pas encore: [~e at interval t < TT] ne…plus: [e at interval t < TT].

It will be noticed that I have accepted the weakening possibility operator only in the case of déjà, but not in that of enfin and ne…plus, as it does not seem possible to construct examples containing the latter two adverbs that are parallel to (93)-(94). The consequence of this is that, although it is, of course, logically compatible with the internal negation of déjà, ne…plus cannot simply be equated with such a formula, a fact which constitutes a further counterexample to the duality hypothesis discussed in sect. 3.1.1 supra (see also the discussion of exx. (44) and (49) in sect. 2.4). It should be noted that in all cases, we are dealing with what Nølke (1983: 33) calls “weak”, as opposed to “strong”, presuppositions. Hence, it is not necessary, for a phasal adverb to be used appropriately, that its presupposition should already be part of the hearer’s world view; the speaker should merely have reason to suppose that the presupposition can be accommodated without problems (cf. Lewis 1979), that is, she should suppose that the hearer has no reason not to believe in the truth of the presupposition.

4.2

“Presuppositions” concerning subsequent phases of the SoA

Our discussion of the presuppositions of phasal adverbs does not end here, however, as yet other proposals have been made in the literature. Thus, Muller (1975: 24) suggests that déjà in


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its basic phasal sense presupposes that the SoA e denoted by the host clause would have become actual at some point in time, and that all that is asserted is the relative earliness of its realization. It appears, however, that that cannot be right, as (114), a translation of an English example adduced by Michaelis (1996: 483 – her [10]), is – as Michaelis points out – felicitous even if no-one had assumed that the job would necessarily be given to someone else: (114)

Ce n’est pas la peine d’envoyer ta lettre. Ils ont déjà donné le poste à quelqu’un d’autre. ‘There’s no point in sending your letter. They’ve already given the job to someone else.’

It should be noted that Michaelis, in fact, uses this example to argue against the idea of relative precocity of the SoA. I will return to that issue below, as it is − as far as I can tell − logically independent of the issue of whether or not the SoA as such is presupposed or not. Further, it has been claimed that encore and its equivalents presuppose ~e at some time t > TT (e.g. Doherty 1973: 155; Michaelis 1993: 207), due to their perceived incompatibility with irreversible states (cf. (115)). (115)

?*Pierre est encore mort. (NB! the acceptability judgment is due to the authors cited) ‘Pierre is still dead.’

Like a number of other authors (e.g. Muller 1975: 26; König 1977: 176; Martin 1980: 169), however, I prefer to weaken the presupposition to one of a simply possible subsequent negative phase, in view of the perfectly natural character of (116) (adapted from König 1977: 176 – his [11]): (116)

Le roi Constantin est encore en exil, et il le restera sans doute. ‘King Constantine is still in exile, and will probably remain so.’

Note that, in order to account for this element of meaning, we need an approach to semantics which is capable of taking into account the possibly divergent views of reality that participants in one and the same speech-event may hold, or assume one another to hold. A strictly logicalreferential model will not suffice. For one thing, (115) could, as a matter of fact, be appropriately uttered in the right context, viz. the following authentic example from Danish: (117)

[A and B are watching the evening news on TV. The anchorperson has just introduced a news item concerning the discovery of a murder victim only a couple of hours earlier. He next addresses a field reporter with the question, So, is there any news about the investigation? A comments:] Manden er formentlig stadig død… ‘The man is presumably still dead…’

More significantly perhaps, (115) could, I take it, also be uttered non-ironically by or to someone whose system of beliefs included the existence of not-quite-living-but-not-quite-dead creatures like zombies, vampires or the like. In other words, the notion of irreversible state must be relativized to the context of utterance and to the belief systems of contextually relevant individuals. Secondly, our semantics needs to take into account more “ordinary”, but nevertheless culture-specific, expectations of the kind that often forms part of semantic frames

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(cf. Fillmore 1982; 1985), in order to account for the infelicity of uttering (118), despite the fact that the idea of the Pope getting married involves no logical or physical impossibility: (118)

#Le Pape est encore célibataire. ‘The Pope is still unmarried.’

Likewise, we will need to refer to conventional, more or less culture-specific, patterns of thinking to account for the apparently irreversible directional element of meaning inherent in phasal déjà and encore, first noted by Muller (1975: 31) and evidenced in the acceptability judgments in (119)-(120). For, objectively speaking, “early” and “late” follow upon one another in a cyclical fashion, such that 3am may for instance be considered “late” with respect to certain activities, while 4am may be considered “early” with respect to others, allowing a speaker who went to sleep at 3am and awoke again at 4am to utter (121). The frames evoked by the use of déjà and encore and their equivalents, however, appear to involve a linear conception of time, whereby “early” invariably precedes “late”, witness the unacceptability of (122):21 (119) (120) (121) (122)

Il est encore / *?déjà tôt. ‘It is still / already early.’ Il est déjà / *?encore tard. ‘It is already / still late.’ Je me suis couché tard, et je me suis levé tôt. ‘I went to bed late, and got up early.’ *?Je me suis couché quand il était encore tard, et je me suis levé quand il était déjà tôt. ‘I went to bed when it was still late, and got up when it was already early.’

Returning to the idea that the use of encore conveys that a subsequent negative phase of the SoA is at least conceivable, it seems to me that the exact status of that element of meaning is perhaps not as straightforward as it might seem. Thus, the fact that it does not seem to be suspendable indicates that it is not actually a presupposition, cf. the oddity of (123)-(124), as opposed to (125)-(126), in which the presupposition of a previous positive phase of the SoA (whose existence we established above) is tested: (123)

(124)

(125)

(126)

#Le Pape est encore célibataire, en supposant qu’il ne lui soit pas carrément défendu de se marier. ‘The Pope is still unmarried, assuming he’s not forbidden from ever marrying at all.’ #Ou bien il est carrément défendu au Pape de se marier, ou bien il est encore célibataire. ‘Either the Pope is forbidden from ever getting married at all, or he’s still unmarried.’ Si Jean était célibataire la semaine dernière, alors je suis sûr qu’il l’est encore. ‘If John was unmarried last week, then I’m sure he still is.’ Ou bien Jean s’est marié la semaine dernière, ou bien il est encore célibataire.

21 This is, of course, also implicitly or explicitly recognized both in van der Auwera’s and Löbner’s models: implicitly, in the former, by the nature of the diagram reproduced as Figure 6 supra; and explicitly in the latter, by the description of phasal adverbs as scalar in the evaluatively neutral, temporal sense (cf. sect. 2.4 supra).


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‘Either John got married last week, or he’s still unmarried.’ Together with the fact that the addition of encore does not actually make the host sentence untrue (or truth-valueless), even if no-one believes a future change of state is possible, this suggests that the idea of such a possible change of state should be categorized as a conventional implicature in the sense of Grice (1989a[1975]), rather than as a presupposition.

4.3

“Presuppositions” concerning earliness or lateness of the change of state

Lastly, we come to what is perhaps the most controversial alleged presuppositions of all, namely the idea that déjà and its equivalents might presuppose that the realization of the SoA e has come about comparatively early, while encore and its equivalents might presuppose that the SoA has lasted a comparatively long time. To the best of my knowledge, only Vet (1980: 151) actually refers to these as presuppositions, other authors preferring to speak of conventional implicatures involving comparison (Mittwoch 1993: 73, 75), or of “evaluative” (Doherty 1973: 157; König 1977: 190; Hoepelman & Rohrer 1980: 126), “counterfactual” (van der Auwera 1993: 620) or “illocutionary” (Martin 1980: 170f) elements of meaning, which may or may not rely on specific features of the co- or context in order to go through. Yet other scholars deny that they are part of semantics of déjà and / or encore at all (Välikangas 1982: 374f; Löbner 1989: 183; Vandeweghe 1992: 104; Michaelis 1992: 326, 1996: 479), thus maintaining − or at least implying − that they are, at best, conversational implicatures. Many authors appear to agree, however, that no matter how these interpretive components are ultimately classified, they must involve some form of expectation contravention: thus, for instance, Hoepelman & Rohrer (1980: 126) introduce the notion of an alternative world of expectations in their account of the meaning of déjà and encore. Yet, as (127) (adapted from Löbner 1989: 176 – his [19]) shows, it is not necessarily the speaker’s own expectations that are at odds with the facts. It is presumably the possibility of such examples that leads Martin (1980: 171) to relativize the counterfactual expectation to a “virtual”, rather than an actual, speaker. (127)

Comme je m’y attendais, la lumière est déjà / encore allumée. ‘As I expected, the light is already/still on.’

Even so, − and as already discussed in connection with example (82) −, it is not clear that expectation contravention plays a role in all cases. Indeed, Mittwoch’s (1993: 75) notion of comparison seems to be closer to the mark when one considers examples like (128) (adapted from Mittwoch 1993: 75 – her [19])22 and (129): (128) (129)

22

Les Dupont ont eu une petite fille. Ils avaient déjà deux garçons. ‘The Duponts have had a little girl. They already had two boys.’ Ma fille aînée Juliette a passé son bac cette année. Sa sœur Louise est encore en première. ‘My eldest daughter Juliette graduated from high school this year. Her sister Louise is still a junior.’

Note that that example is used for a different purpose in Mittwoch’s argument.

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It does not seem meaningful to maintain that someone might relevantly have expected the Duponts to have had their sons only at a later date, or a younger sister to have progressed academically as far as, or even further than, her older sister. Rather, in both examples, the SoA denoted by the first clause provides a frame of reference to which the SoA denoted by the déjà / encore-marked clause is compared. Thus, in (128), the state-of-affairs constituted by the Duponts’ having two male children is described, in an evaluatively neutral fashion, as having completed at least its initial phase at the time of their having a female child, while in (129), Louise’s being a high school junior is described as falling at an interval on the time line where her sister is in a state of having completed her degree. In both cases, the SoA marked by the phasal adverb is early or late only by comparison to the SoA described in the preceding clause. It seems to me that the idea of temporal comparison can subsume cases of genuine expectation contravention (of both the subjective and the objective kind) as well: in such cases, a comparison is drawn between the actual combination of SoA and reference time, and a counterfactual, expected combination. As van der Auwera (1993: 621) points out, when we are dealing with “objective” counter-expectation, as in his simultaneously counterfactual scenario, it is the nature of the SoA itself that is unexpected, whereas the reference time is the expected one. In cases of subjective counter-expectation, it is the reference time that is further advanced than expected, whereas the SoA is correct with respect to the actual reference time, but wrong with respect to the expected one. Simple temporal comparison can also accommodate examples where the SoA is compared to some implicit norm, as might be the case in (127), where one possible reason for using déjà, even if the switching on of the lights had occurred at the time expected for that particular day, would be if the lights in question were typically switched on at a later time. This will also account for the oddity, at least in a standard Western context, of examples like (130), where the suggestion that the SoA is somehow premature cannot easily be cancelled, and therefore renders the utterance pragmatically strange, even if it is certainly objectively possible for a man to contract a first marriage at age 65. (130)

#Jacques s’est déjà marié pour la première fois à 65 ans. ‘Jacques already got married for the first time at 65 years of age.’

The fact that the suggestion of temporal comparison with some other earlier or later SoA (be it a co-textually evoked one, an implicit normative one, or a potentially or actually contextually expected one) is apparently not cancelable when déjà and encore are used, must lead us to reject its classification as a mere conversational implicature. Intuitively, it is also difficult to understand Martin’s (1980: 170f) categorization of it as an illocutionary feature. This leaves us with two alternatives from among the standardly recognized types of implicit meaning, namely either Vet’s (1980: 151) presuppositions or Mittwoch’s (1993: 73) conventional implicatures. As (131)-(134) show, the standard tests for presupposition suspension used above do not seem to result in meaningful discourses, so I will conclude that, once again, we are dealing with conventional implicatures. (131)

(132)

#Si Jacques s’est marié tôt selon un critère quelconque, alors il s’est déjà marié à l’âge de 16 ans. ‘If Jack married early by some standard, then he already got married at age 16.’ #Ou bien Jacques ne s’est pas marié tôt selon quelque critère que ce soit, ou bien il s’est déjà marié à l’âge de 16 ans.


(133)

(134)

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‘Either Jack didn’t marry early by any standard, or he already got married at age 16.’ #Si l’exil du roi Constantin a duré longtemps selon un critère quelconque, alors il vit encore en exil. ‘If King Constantine’s exile has lasted a long time by some standard, then he’s still living in exile.’ #Ou bien l’exil du roi Constantin n’a pas duré longtemps selon quelque critère que ce soit, ou bien il vit encore en exil. ‘Either King Constantine’s exile hasn’t lasted a long time by any standard, or he’s still living in exile.’

To the extent that the notions of simple temporal comparison / subjective counter-expectation vs “objective” expectation contravention are parallel to the distinction between a modified neutral scenario and the simultaneously counterfactual scenario, the above considerations seem to lead to the conclusion that there is no need for déjà and its equivalents to actually contain both scenarios in its semantic description: the notion of temporal comparison being broad enough to subsume both types of counterexpectation, the latter may be seen as contextual modulations (cf. Cruse 1986: 52) on the former. The same holds for that reading of encore where the adverb appears to suggest that the SoA continues beyond an expected point of completion. The consequence is then a reduction of van der Auwera’s model in as much as the simultaneously counterfactual scenario becomes redundant. Such an analysis is supported by the fact that the distinction between the two scenarios does not appear to have any grammatical reflexes.

4.4

Summary

In this section, I have discussed the status of various non-truth-conditional elements of the interpretation of phasal adverbs, which have been the object of controversy in the existing literature. I concluded that the use of déjà (and its equivalents) triggers a weak presupposition that the opposite SoA was possible prior to reference time, while encore (and its equivalents) trigger a weak presupposition, shared by ne...plus, to the effect that the SoA was also the case for some time preceding reference time. Lastly, enfin and ne…pas encore share a weak presupposition of a negative phase of the SoA prior to reference time. On the other hand, I rejected the hypothesis that déjà might presuppose the eventual realization of the SoA. However, phasal adverbs do not only carry presuppositions, but also conventional implicatures. Thus, encore seems to conventionally implicate both the possibility of a subsequent negative phase of the SoA, and the relatively protracted duration of the SoA, while déjà conventionally implicates the relative precocity of the SoA. It must be emphasized, though, that in neither case does the evaluation necessarily imply any kind of actual counterexpectation, as the relative protractedness vs precocity may simply be invoked in comparison with another SoA that has been mentioned in the previous discourse, or with what someone might have wished. Two theoretical points were made in this section: first, that the notion of presupposition needs to be understood within a cognitive-pragmatic approach such as frame semantics, as opposed to a strictly logical-referential one; and secondly, that a reduction of van der Auwera’s (1993) scenario model was in order, in so far as the simultaneously counterfactual scenario could be eliminated from the semantic representation of phasal adverbs.

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5 GENERAL SUMMARY In this chapter, I have critically reviewed three aspects of the meaning of phasal adverbs, namely aspectuality, paradigmaticity, and presuppositionality, which have traditionally been considered to be of particular importance to the linguistic description of these items both within and across individual languages. I have attempted to point out both the strengths and the weaknesses of previous analyses, and to integrate the former into a coherent description conducted within an overarching frame-semantic approach. I will now proceed to an in-depth study of the French phasal adverbs in particular. The following chapter briefly describes the data and methodology used, whereupon ch. 6 will provide analyses of the content-level uses of the four adverbs, and ch. 7, an analysis of their context-level uses.

5 DATA AND METHODOLOGY

1 EMPIRICAL BASIS OF THE INVESTIGATION The semantic-pragmatic description of the four French phasal adverbs that follows in chs. 6-7 infra is based on different types of data. The synchronic analysis is largely based on constructed examples intended to represent the currently possible range of uses of the four adverbs. The range of uses was initially determined partly by intuition combined with informal observation of actually occurring utterances, partly by consultation of the Trésor de la langue française dictionary and of the existing literature on phasal adverbs in French, and partly by searching a selection of corpora representing contemporary spoken French. Subsequently, as the analysis progressed, this initial classification of uses was refined through the use of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic tests carried out on constructed representative examples. This part of the investigation aimed at determining, as precisely as possible, the conditions and limits of use of each individual sense identified. Further, in each case, it aimed at drawing a boundary between those elements of the interpretation of utterances containing a phasal adverb which could be assumed to be actually coded by the adverb in question, and those elements which could be inferred pragmatically from the use of that particular adverb in that particular type of utterance, in a given type of context. The use of negative evidence – that is, of presumably unacceptable or only marginally acceptable examples – therefore figures prominently in the exposition. Judgments that some uses of a given linguistic item are marginally acceptable, or even unacceptable, should, of course, be treated with great caution. It is a sociolinguistic saw that native speakers will frequently declare a structure unacceptable if they cannot think of a

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meaningful use of it off the top of their heads, or if the structure in question conflicts with the tenets of prescriptive grammar (e.g. Labov 1975: 105; Milroy 1987: 149f). This holds not only for “naïve” (i.e. linguistically untrained) language users, but also for professional linguists. The latter may, in addition, be prone to the opposite “sin”, namely that of declaring acceptable even highly unnatural uses of a given item provided these uses fit their preferred hypothesis (cf. Greenbaum 1976: 5; Schütze 1996: 5). Clearly, these problems are exacerbated if one is studying a language that is not one’s native tongue, and I could not possibly hope to be taken seriously if I were to claim that the present study was completely free of such errors. Nevertheless, if one aims at fine-grained descriptions of the coded semantics of lexical items, establishing the limits of use of those items is an essential part of the task. Now, it is, of course, well-known that non-attestation of a given type of use in a corpus of arbitrary size does not warrant the conclusion that the use in question does not exist (cf. Chomsky 1957: 15ff). As Widdowson (2000: 7) puts it, “the linguistics of the attested is just as partial as the linguistics of the possible”. Consequently, one must to some extent rely on constructed examples in determining not only the full range of possibilities of use of a given lexeme, but also what that same lexeme might conceivably, but in fact cannot (in all probability), be used to mean. In the case of items such as the phasal adverbs, which contrast at least partially in at least some of their uses, it may moreover be highly useful to test their acceptability in one and the same sentential frame, something which will almost invariably involve the use of constructed examples, and hence, of intuitive judgments. It almost goes without saying that, whenever subtle, non-straightforward judgments have been involved, I have sought confirmation of my own intuitions from several different native speakers of (hexagonal) French. The judgments in question are, of course, only as reliable as the individuals emitting them.1 However, the relevant instances were few enough in number, and agreement between the native speakers asked was high enough, that I did not deem it necessary to proceed to carefully controlled experiments of the type recommended by Schütze (1996: ch. 6). For the diachronic analyses contained in this study, on the other hand, a large corpus of actually attested utterances containing tokens of the four adverbs was used. These examples stem exclusively from written sources, the large majority of them available on the internet. The sources in question will be described in the next section. The diachronic part of the investigation aimed principally at determining how the contemporary range of senses of each individual adverb came into being, that is, at discovering the paths of extension, and inferring the most likely mechanisms of change involved. In a very few cases, the historical data brought to light one or more uses of a particular adverb that have subsequently become obsolete, and which therefore did not form part of the synchronically determined range. Such uses are discussed in chs. 6-7, but they do not form part of the superordinate classification of senses. In as much as sense extensions, as opposed to actual sense changes, appear to be the norm where the phasal adverbs are concerned (that is to say that, rather than being ousted by them, older senses continue to exist alongside more recently developed ones, a phenomenon that Hopper 1991 refers to, in the context of grammaticalization, as “layering”), I have not attempted to chart the spread of the new meanings quantitatively, or with respect to their possible affinity for a particular genre or genres, over time. 1

This in itself assumes that it was in all cases clear to the informants exactly what kind of judgment they were being asked to make, cf. Schütze (1996: 132).

Data and Methodology

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This is not to suggest that either the gradual spread of new meanings across different constructions and / or genres, or the relative text frequencies and / or genre-relatedness of different senses of a lexeme or construction are, as such, uninteresting phenomena. Thus, for instance, recent research by Eckardt (2003: ch. 6) and Pons Bordería (2006) suggests that extralinguistic cultural factors such as textual traditions may play an important role in the rise of new context-level meanings of existing lexemes and collocations. From the point of view of the lexical semanticist, however, (if not from that of the sociolinguist), a less frequently, or even relatively rarely, occurring sense of a given lexeme is as interesting, descriptively and theoretically, as highly frequent ones. In the cases studied here, the development of new uses does not – except in a very few instances – result in the elimination of older ones, as demonstrated by the fact that almost every single use of the French phasal adverbs found in the historical data remains possible in contemporary French. For each individual sense extension, I have therefore sought only to document the innovation stage, and the possible bridging contexts leading up to it, while leaving detailed study of the propagation stage, and of genre-related issues, to future research. That having been said, it should be noted that I have, in one or two cases, found what seems like a fairly clear instance of a new use of one of the adverbs, a use which, furthermore, exists in contemporary French, after which there is a temporal gap of considerable length before that use appears again in my data. In those cases, it is, of course, unclear whether the early, single, attestation simply represents an essentially idiosyncratic nonce use by one single author, such that the use in question did not really become part of the language until the later period at which it is more amply attested, or whether the gap is rather an artifact of the corpus, possibly due to an initially slow spread of the new use. Where relevant, such matters are discussed in the course of the exposition. For the same reason, i.e. the preponderance of semantic extension over semantic shift in the case of the phasal adverbs, I have not paid systematic attention to dialectal differences between Old French texts, except in so far as such differences may be reflected in different orthographical forms of one and the same adverb, such different forms needing, of course, to be searched for individually in the data base. Given that, as observed above, the uses analyzed are practically all still current in contemporary French, it did not seem to me to be of great importance whether they were first attested in one or the other Old French dialect, since they clearly did not stay confined to that dialect.

2 CORPORA USED The corpora principally used for this investigation are two important electronic resources, the Base de français médiéval and Frantext. For Old French (9th-13th cent.) and Middle French (14th-16th century), I have consulted the Base de français médiéval. This is an evolving data base created and managed by the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, and it consists – at the time of writing – of 74 texts (approx. 3,000,000 words), which have been digitalized in their entirety. A few more are included in the CD-ROM concordances from 2000, of which I have also made some use. As far as I have been able to determine, the data are in all cases based on critical editions of the texts. The oldest text, Les Serments de Strasbourg, is from 842, and the most recent, François Rabelais’

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Le Tiers livre, from 1546. The texts fall principally within the literary, narrative genre, but other text types, such as histories, hagiographies, scientific treatises etc. are also represented. Up until the 13th century, the vast majority of the texts in the data base are in verse. From the 13th century onwards, prose and verse are about evenly represented (cf. Prévost et al. 2000, and ). For Classical French (16th-18th cent.) and Modern French (19th cent. to the present day), I have relied on Frantext, another evolving data base, created and managed by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). This data base contains approx. 3,500 texts, totaling more than 1,000,000,000 characters. 80 per cent of the texts are of a literary nature, while 20 per cent are of a technical, scientific nature. In neither case is it possible to view any single text in its entirety. Both bases allow one to search only for specific lexemes and constructions, which are then provided with a certain amount of context. In the Base de français medieval, it is possible to specify the amount of both left and right context that one prefers, while Frantext provides a set, but variable, amount of context for each individual example. In addition to these two data bases, I have made use, sporadically and to a not very significant degree, of attested examples gleaned from dictionaries, from a few printed texts, from a handful of contemporary corpora of spontaneous spoken French (tapes and transcriptions) that were already in my possession, and from the internet. It should be noted that the latter is, of course, slightly problematic as a source of linguistic evidence, as one typically cannot be certain that the examples culled were actually produced by native speakers of the language in question. In the present study, however, this problem will be ignored, as the number of examples taken from the internet (in all cases, from various chat rooms) is negligible, and as most of the uses they illustrate are conventionalized enough to have made their way into standard dictionaries. All authentic examples used in this study bear an indication of their source, the data sources cited being listed at the end of the References section. Constructed examples borrowed from previous scholarly work are, of course, marked as such. Examples bearing no source indication have been constructed by myself.

2.1

Problems with the data

Diachronic research in general, and research on pragmaticalization, in particular, is beset with a number of problems that stem from the nature of the available corpus data. First and foremost, diachronic research suffers even more acutely than synchronic research from the fundamental inadequacy of corpora: while we may be able to conclude from the fact that a particular use of a linguistic item or construction is attested in a given corpus that such a use is, or was, at least possible (barring certain very obvious examples of performance errors), we cannot similarly conclude from the absence of corpus attestation that any given use is, or was, not possible. In synchronic research, we have the option of relying on native speaker intuitions to help settle such questions (with all the caveats that this implies, see sect. 1 supra). A case in point is the “categorizing” use of French déjà and Italian già exemplified in (1)-(2) (cf. ch. 7, sect. 2.2


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infra). While this use is attested in French since at least the 19th century, Hansen & Strudsholm (2008) were unable to find actual corpus attestation of the Italian equivalent. Nevertheless, a number of native speakers of Italian whom we asked unhesitatingly concurred that (2) was acceptable, although some felt that it was more natural if the elements in parentheses were included. This seemed to us to warrant the conclusion that the use in question does exist in Italian, while suggesting that it may perhaps have a more marginal status in that language than it does in French. (1) (2)

Un pinguin, c’est déjà un oiseau. Un pinguino è già un (tipo di) uccello. ‘A penguin, now, there we’re dealing with a (type of) bird.’ [As opposed to some other category of being.]

The important diachronic corollary of this is that, in cases where one knows for a fact that a given use is possible, because it is attested, one cannot be certain that the earliest attestation in one’s data base does, indeed, mark the period during which the use in question first arose, because its non-attestation prior to that time may simply be an accidental feature of the corpora used. This is clearly a problem for studies that involve pragmaticalizing items, because context-level uses of lexemes and constructions typically originate in spontaneous spoken interaction, rather than in writing. Given that writing tends, for a number of reasons, to be more conservative than speech (cf. Hansen 1998a: 100), this means that extensions, particularly pragmaticalized extensions, of any given basic meaning may have been around in the spoken vernacular for a very long time before they were first attested in writing. Obviously, however, for time-depths of more than fifty years or so (that is, before tape recordings of spontaneous speech became an easily manageable undertaking), written texts basically furnish all the available data. To some extent, the problem can be dealt with by concentrating one’s attention on genres that are more “oral” in nature, as measured by a set of operational parameters like those defined in Koch & Oesterreicher (1990: ch. 2; see also discussion in Hansen 1998a: 92ff).2 Thus, for instance, given a choice between looking at a corpus of scientific treatises and one consisting of theatrical comedies, the scholar who is seeking to discover when the “interrogative” use of déjà exemplified in (3) first developed, will be well-advised to choose the latter option: (3)

Quel était votre nom, déjà ? ‘What was your name, now?’

In general, scholars agree that the genres that may be thought to resemble actual speech to the greatest extent are drama, personal correspondence or diaries, fictional dialog, courtroom transcripts, and the like (e.g. Jacobs & Jucker 1995: 8; Traugott & Dasher 2002: 47; Jucker & Taavitsainen 2003: 8; Hansen & Rossari 2005: 181). In keeping with this, I have, from that point in the history of French where the total number of attested examples of a given form in my data became unmanageably high, limited myself to searching mainly these types of texts for attestations of new uses. This has, in all cases, been necessary from approx. the 16th century onwards. As we go back in time, the number of phasal adverb tokens found in the texts becomes smaller (although it may still amount to several hundred for each item), and it is therefore feasible to 2

Biber (1988) presents a different, but highly reminiscent, set of criteria.

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take all the tokens into account. Unfortunately, since the reduced number of examples is largely due to a reduced number of extant texts, this goes hand in hand with a narrowing of the range of genres represented in the data base. The problem is clearly insoluble, and the only possible response to it is to emphasize that whenever I say in chs. 6-7 below that such-and-such a use of one of the adverbs under review arose at such-and-such a time, it should be understood to mean simply that I have not found this use in my data prior to the time indicated. That is, it does not exclude the possibility that the use in question may actually have existed in the language for a long time, perhaps even for centuries, before it surfaces in my data. A further potential source of error is the fact that, as noted above, the texts in the Base de français médiéval all stem from critical editions, the notes to which have not been included. This means that whatever variation exists between different manuscripts of one and the same text is glossed over in the data base. Consequently, I have made a point of checking all the examples from the Base de français médiéval cited in this study against the printed editions, looking for variants. (Consultation of the original medieval manuscripts was, I am afraid, simply out of the question, for reasons of time and practicality). To the extent that they were within reasonably easy access to me (that is to say, with three or four exceptions), I have made use of the specific editions reproduced in the BFM. The editions in question are all listed under “Data sources” at the end of the References section of this monograph. In actual fact, however, the problem of variants does not appear to loom very large with respect to the phasal adverbs at least: not only have I found no relevant variants in any but a single one of the examples cited (viz. the – fortunately non-central – ex. (18) adduced in ch. 6 infra), but at any given period of time where a new use of any one of the phasal adverbs under consideration appears in the data base, I have, in the majority of cases, found the number of tokens of that new use to be high enough to support the conclusion that it did, indeed, arise during the period in question. In the few cases where that is not so, it is noted in the text. As far as the examples gleaned from the Frantext data base are concerned, which all originate in texts composed subsequent to the invention of the printing press, I have elected not to check them against printed editions of those same texts.

3 TESTS As already discussed in various places in earlier chapters (cf. chs. 2 and 4), a number of tests designed to elicit various types of (un)acceptability judgments have been employed in this study, with a view both to refining my descriptions of the meanings and functions of phasal adverbs, and to establishing the syntactic and semantic status of their various uses. In general, the tests in question are described at those points in the exposition where they are put to use. Here, I will only briefly discuss the tests used to classify a given use of a phasal adverb as belonging on either the content-level or the context-level, since this forms the basis for the description in the following two chapters. (For a definition of the terms “content-level” and “context-level” as used here, see ch. 2, sect. 2.1 supra.)

Data and Methodology 3.1

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Tests for content-level vs context-level function

The tests used in this study in distinguishing the content-level uses of the phasal adverbs from their context-level uses are those advocated by Dik et al. (1990), which, in turn, are largely based on Quirk et al. (1972: §8.4; 1985: §8.25) and ultimately, on Greenbaum (1969: ch. 2). What I call “content-level uses” thus correspond to Quirk et al.’s (1985) “adjuncts” and “subjuncts”, and to Dik et al.’s (1990) “representational-level satellites”, while my “contextlevel uses” correspond to the former’s “disjuncts” and “conjuncts”, and to the latter’s “interpersonal-level satellites”. The choice of terminology is theory-dependent and not essential here, but I refer the reader to the discussion in ch. 2, sect. 2.1 supra. The basic assumption underlying the tests in question is that adverb(ial)s functioning at the context-level express some form of comment on the informational content of the utterance, whereas adverb(ial)s functioning at the content-level themselves form part of that informational content. This gives rise to two predictions: The first prediction is that context-level adverb(ial)s will fall outside the focus structure of the host clause. If so, they should be able to occur neither as answers to wh-questions, as in (4), in non-metalinguistic contrastive contexts like (5), nor in clefts like (6): (4) (5) (6)

A. In what way did Felix arrive at midnight? B. *Probably. *Felix didn’t probably, but rather certainly, arrive at midnight. *It was probably that Felix arrived at midnight.

The second prediction is that content-level adverb(ial)s will form an information unit with their host clause. Thus, the adverb(ial) and host should fall under one and the same unified intonation contour (cf. the unmarked contour on (7)), the adverb(ial) should be within the scope of pro-forms (cf. (8)), and it should be possible to question the contents of the entire host, including the adverb(ial), by a yes / no question, (cf. (9)): (7) (8) (9)

Felix arrived at midnight. Felix arrived at midnight, and so did Victoria. Did Felix arrive at midnight?

It is important to note that these criteria are not bi-implications: while it does seem to be the case that context-level items fall outside the focus structure of the clause, it does not follow that any item falling outside the focus structure functions, eo ipso, at the context-level. Similarly, if an item functions at the content-level, it would seem that it will pass the tests in (7)-(9), but it does not follow that context-level items will invariably fail those same tests. Thus, although classified here as content-level uses, the basic, phasal, uses of déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin pattern with the context-level uses of the particles in terms of the tests in (4)-(6) (cf. equivalents in (10)-(12), but they pattern with content-level items in terms of the tests in (7)-(9) (cf. equivalents in (13)-(15): (10) (11) 3

A. Quand Gabriel est-il arrivé? B. *Déjà. ‘A. When did Gabriel arrive? B. Already.’ *Gabriel n’est pas déjà, mais plutôt enfin, arrivé.3

This example is, of course, acceptable on a metalinguistic (echoic) reading of the particles. Such uses are, however, excluded from the purview of the tests.

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(12) (13) (14) (15)

‘Gabriel didn’t already, but rather finally, arrive.’ *C’est déjà que Gabriel est arrivé. ‘It’s already that Gabriel arrived.’ Gabriel est déjà arrivé. ‘Gabriel has already arrived.’ Gabriel est déjà arrivé, et Delphine de même. ‘Gabriel has already arrived, and so has Delphine.’ Gabriel est-il déjà arrivé? ‘Has Gabriel already arrived?’

Indeed, as noted above, Quirk et al. (1985: §8.24) recognize two sub-categories of adverbials corresponding to my content-level items, namely “adjuncts” and “subjuncts”, where only the former are focalizable (1985: §8.88). The English phasal adverbs are classified precisely as subjuncts.4 This category of adverbials is not very clearly defined, however, and the authors do not offer any explanation of the syntactic differences between adjuncts and subjuncts. For this reason, I will make no further use of this distinction. I will, however, venture the suggestion that, in the case of phasal adverbs at least, their lack of focalizability is no doubt attributable to the fact that, while they express a relation between the time of the SoA denoted by the clause and some other, contextually specified, time – this being a content-level function –, they also, as noted in earlier chapters, convey a subjective, evaluative nuance, which make them a type of speaker comment on the SoA. Similarly to the way the two sets of tests mentioned above were seen to give conflicting results in the case of the phasal uses of déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin, the second set (i.e. those in (7)-(9)) seem to give internally conflicting results with respect to certain context-level uses of the particles. Thus, the uses of déjà, encore, and toujours that will be referred to as the “scalar” use and the “categorizing” use in ch. 7 infra, and which are clearly context-level uses according to the test pattern in (9), ought, according to the test pattern in (7), rather to function at the content-level (cf. the contrast between (16)-(17)). As for the test pattern in (8), the result is odd, and – to the extent that (18) is a possible utterance – it is not clear that déjà is most naturally interpreted as being included in the scope of de même: (16) (17) (18)

3.2

Un pingouin, c’est déjà un oiseau. ‘A penguin, now, that’s some kind of a bird.’ #Un pingouin, est-ce déjà un oiseau? ‘A penguin, now, is that some kind of a bird?’ ??Un pingouin, c’est déjà un oiseau, et une autruche, de même. ‘A penguin, now, that’s some kind of a bird, and so is an ostrich.’

Problems with the use of tests in semantic / pragmatic description

The upshot of the preceding discussion is that not only these tests, but all the tests used in this study, are taken to have heuristic value only. As discussed in ch. 2, sect. 4 supra, in connection with the standard tests for ambiguity vs vagueness, different test frames may purport to identify one and the same property, and yet give conflicting results in some cases (cf. Nølke 1990: 15f). Indeed, as illustrated by exx. (98)-(99) adduced in ch. 2, sect. 4, one and 4

Inexplicably, phasal finally appears to be classified as an adjunct (Quirk et al. 1985: §8.53), despite the fact that it fails the focalizability tests.


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the same test frame may give different results for one and the same linguistic item if contextualized in different ways. It has, of course, long been clear that contextual assumptions matter when language users are asked to judge the acceptability of utterances, in terms not only of their degree of grammaticality, but also of their degree of meaningfulness and / or pragmatic felicity (cf. Schütze 1996: 101, 130, 151). A variant of the context problem is the fact that, as was also pointed out in ch. 2, sect. 4, the nature of the lexical material contained in the test examples may affect acceptability judgments at all levels, by making it more or less difficult for scholars themselves and / or for their informants to imagine a context where the tested utterance might be used (cf. Levelt et al. 1977, Nølke 1990: 15). Thirdly, as argued by Hopper & Thompson (1984), there is reason to think that parts-of-speech are not Aristotelian categories, but that they rather have a prototype structure, whereby some instances of a given part-of-speech will be more central, and hence yield clearer and less ambiguous test results, while other instances will be more marginal in status (for arguments supporting the prototype structure of the class of adverbs in particular, see Ramat & Ricca 1994). To the extent that functional categories cut across part-of-speech divisions, this is – if anything – likely to be even more true of function classes than of word classes. Indeed, Hansen (1998a: ch. 3) argued that, although one could roughly distinguish several classes of particles in terms of their meanings and uses, not only did the functional classes so identified overlap in various ways, but individual lexemes might frequently occur as members of different classes and / or migrate from one class to another in the course of time (cf. also Pons Bordería 1998: ch. III). For these reasons, we should not be surprised to find that the results of any single test are frequently not absolutely decisive in determining the status of a given example, but that conflicting results from several tests may have to be weighed against one another. Ultimately, it is the semantic / pragmatic analysis that must determine the status of a given use of one of the adverbs as pertaining to either the content-level or the context-level of utterances. Given that this is so, readers may wonder about the point of using tests at all in linguistic research. The point, as I see it, is to attempt, in so far as possible, to make explicit one’s criteria for classifying any given item or structure in a particular way, and to ensure replicability. The fact that tests may sometimes fail does not undermine their utility, as it will ideally prompt scholars to consider possible reasons for the failure, and to look for possible ways to circumvent the problem. As pointed out by Nølke (1990: 18f), it is important to try to identify the properties singled out by any given test, that is, to think about why a given test is (or is not) relevant to a particular classificatory enterprise, as this in itself provides insight into the properties of the classes of items the test is supposed to distinguish.

4 SUMMARY In this chapter I have discussed, in general terms, the data and methodology used in this study. As described, I combine the methods of corpus linguistics with those of what Labov (1975:

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127) calls “introspective” linguistics.5 Like Labov (1975: 128; see also Widdowson 2000), I believe that a triangulation of intuitive judgments, corpus data, and the abstract linguistic system to be described ultimately represents the best of both worlds, and that it will allow us to approximate the true nature of language more closely than either of the two methods used in isolation. We are now in a position to proceed to an analysis of the meanings and uses of the French phasal adverbs, both synchronically, and in terms of the presumed diachronic development of their current range. It appears that the basic, i.e. the oldest attested, meaning of these adverbs is in all four cases to be situated at the content-level, which is, indeed, what we would expect given current theories on semantic / pragmatic change (cf. ch. 3 supra). I will therefore discuss their content-level uses in ch. 6, postponing discussion of their context-level uses until ch. 7.

5 Although see Schütze (1996: 48ff) for an argument that linguistic intuitions are not to be equated with introspection, in as much as the former represent symptomatic evidence of underlying representations, whereas the latter represents subjects’ conscious reflexion on their own mental processes.

6 CONTENT-LEVEL USES OF THE FRENCH PHASAL ADVERBS

1 INTRODUCTION In this chapter, I will be concerned with the content-level uses of the four French phasal adverbs, that is, those uses in which their meanings bear saliently (if not exclusively) on SoA in some real or imagined world that’s being described by the host utterance. The term “context-level uses” is meant to distinguish the uses in question from those uses in which the particles primarily express the speaker’s attitude to, and / or comments on, the described situation, the discourse itself, or the wider speech situation (cf. ch. 2, sect. 2.1). In the context of the present study, the latter are called “context-level uses”, and they will be described in the next chapter. My use of this terminology is not meant to imply that there is always a clear cut distinction between the two basic types of uses: most of the uses to be discussed in this chapter have evaluative, i.e. subjective, nuances of meaning, in addition to the more “objective” information they convey about the SoA in question. In all cases, however, their use has truthconditional consequences, in terms of what is asserted and / or presupposed by a clause containing them. To a large extent, the uses to be discussed here are the basic (in the sense of diachronically older) temporal and aspectual meanings of the four adverbs, but a number of other contentlevel uses will enter into the picture as well. The actual diachronic development of, and relations between, the various uses in question will be a central issue in both this and the following descriptive chapter. When analyzing the various uses of the individual markers, I will, in each section, and for reasons of systematicity, discuss the four markers in the order déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin.

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I start with déjà and encore because they have the largest number of similar uses, and end with enfin, because of the four adverbs, this lexeme is, as we will see, in many ways the “odd man out”. However, it will also become clear that even déjà and encore differ significantly in their various uses, and have developed at a very different pace. This fact provides additional support for the conclusion argued for in ch. 4, sect. 3 supra, that the idea that some or all of the phasal adverbs might constitute a lexical paradigm in the structuralist sense is not truly enlightening. Instead of being an essential linguistic property that wholly or partially defines the meaning of these four particles, the similarities that we perceive among them in some of their uses are likely to form part of our metalinguistic knowledge. In other words, these four particles have inherent meanings that not only suffice to ensure their appropriate usage and interpretation independently of one another, but which also allow them to evolve independently in more or less different directions. At the same time, it will be argued, such inherent meanings appear to constrain the directions that semantic / functional extensions can take, and how far extensions can go. As discussed in ch. 3, sect. 5 supra, it is well-known in the grammaticalization literature that grammaticalized items usually retain some aspects of the meaning of their diachronic source items, a phenomenon known as “persistence”. Indeed, this appears to be true of items that undergo semantic / functional change more generally, including (but of course not limited to) pragmaticalization. However, in the bulk of the literature, persistence is considered in a “backwards” perspective, that is, it is observed mainly as a fact about the target item. It will be argued here that persistence is also relevant in a “forwards” perspective: contextual inference, and in particular frame-based metonymies, being a prime motor in semantic / functional change, meaning extensions are typically motivated by the existence of so-called “bridging” contexts, i.e. contexts that are compatible with the inherent source meanings of the items undergoing extension, but which at the same time point to the target meanings. This requirement of compatibility with the source meaning in at least the initial stages of metonymic change means that a given existing form cannot be recruited to express just any arbitrarily chosen new meaning. As already discussed in ch. 3, sect. 5, this means that even if two source items may seem largely synonymous in a number of contexts, a difference of meaning in one salient dimension may predispose only one of them to develop a specific new use. For a cogent illustration of this, cf. Visconti (2005, 2006). As we shall see, the differential range of contemporary uses of the four French phasal adverbs is to a significant extent attributable to the details of their individual source meanings, something which throws further doubt on the tenability of a structuralist account of the lexicon.

2 ETYMOLOGY OF THE FRENCH PHASAL ADVERBS The synchronically opaque adverb déjà (“already”) does not appear until the latter half of the 13th century (cf. Välikangas 1985, Buchi fc). This does not mean that older stages of the French language had no marker corresponding to English already. In fact, Old and Middle French possessed a cognate particle, ja, a direct descendant of Latin IAM (“already, now”). Its modern equivalent déjà originates in a particular use of ja, namely as the complement of the prepositional phrase dès ja, i.e. “as of now / that time” (where dès represents a combination of the Latin prepositions DE [‘from’] + EX [‘out of’], cf. Buchi fc; Paillard n.d.). Both Latin IAM and OF/MF ja were highly polyfunctional, and the range of uses of each of these two particles

Content-Level Uses of the French Phasal Adverbs

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overlapped, but was not identical to that of contemporary French déjà (on IAM, cf. Kroon & Risselada 2002). Interestingly, however, déjà, once coined, appears to commence its semantic / pragmatic evolution “from scratch”, as it were, having for a long time no attested uses of a non-temporal / aspectual nature. Although no analysis of OF / MF ja will be offered here, we may conjecture that dès ja > déjà was coined precisely in order to insist on a “literal” interpretation of the particle ja, which therefore did not carry its existing polysemy over to the new expression.1 Encore, toujours, and enfin, on the other hand, are all attested in some of the earliest extant French texts (11th century), although not necessarily with a phasal meaning. The etymology of the latter two is quite transparent, even today. Both originate in lexicalized phrases whose constituents underwent a process of coalescence / univerbation, and subsequent decategorialization: in the case of enfin, the prepositional phrase en fin, from Latin IN FINE, meaning “in the end”; and in the case of toujours, the universally quantified NP tous jours (in Old French, the orthography varies, the most frequently found form being toz jorz), meaning “all days”. Encore, however, presumably derives from a reconstructed Latin adverbial *HINC HA(C) HORA (literally, “from then at this hour”, cf. Tobler & Lommatzsch 1954: 243), or alternatively, *HINC AD HORAM (“from then until the hour”, cf. TLF, vol. 7: 1048), both glossable as “thus far” in English. Like enfin, the form encore would be the result of a process of coalescence and decategorialization, but one which is presumably entirely opaque to contemporary speakers. In other words, the etymology of all four markers is clearly temporal, involving either points in time or temporal duration. Déjà and encore, however, saliently involve phasal-aspectual meaning from the very start, whereas toujours and enfin develop such uses only much later (cf. Hansen 2005a-c).

3 TEMPORAL AND CLOSELY RELATED USES OF DÉJÀ, TOUJOURS, AND ENFIN Déjà, toujours and enfin possess time-related uses that are (or, in the case of déjà, have at least been analyzed as) purely temporal, i.e. non-aspectual. In the case of all three items, the (putative) temporal use appears to constitute the diachronic source from which all the extended uses have evolved.

3.1

Déjà

As already observed above, déjà (OF desja or dezja) goes back to the latter half of the 13th century (cf. (1)). (1)

- ge -, ai vendu et livré e doné – E desja m’en sui desvestuz et dessasiz,… (1260, from Välikangas 1985: 78)

1 That the two forms were not felt to be synonymous is indicated by the possibility of their co-occurence in the same clause, cf. (i): (i) Desja ma lire, un honneur tu reçois, // Et ja desja la race des François // Me veut nombrer entre ceus qu’elle loue, // Et pour son chantre heureusement m’avoue. (Pierre de Ronsard, Le premier livre des Odes, 1550, from Frantext) ’Already my lyre, you receive an honor, // And now already the French race // Wants to count me among those that she praises, // And happily admits me as her bard.’

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Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface ‘- I – have sold and delivered and given (it) – And [as of now / already] I have renounced on it and parted with (it),…’

For Välikangas (1985), ex. (1) represents a purely temporal use, i.e. it does not yet mean “already”, but rather “as of now / this moment”. However, it is not clear from his examples that this is the correct analysis. In fact, all the occurrences reproduced in his paper seem to be just as appropriately translatable by “already”, as indeed the author himself notes (1985: 83) with respect to the example in (1). I would argue that the use of the present perfect (as opposed to a simple present tense) in (1) is precisely indicative that the particle has inchoative (i.e. phasal), rather than punctual (i.e. purely temporal) meaning. I will therefore postpone further discussion of déjà until sect. 4 infra.

3.2

Toujours

In its original, temporal, use, toujours is truth-conditional, just as is enfin in its temporal use. Essentially, temporal toujours quantifies over a contextually relevant plurality of times, asserting that the host proposition is true of the (quasi) totality of these times, cf. (2). The qualifiers “quasi-totality” and “contextually relevant” reflect the fact that an utterance containing temporal toujours may be true even if one or more isolated points or intervals of time can be observed for which the proposition does not hold true (cf. Krifka et al. 1995: 4). Thus, an assertion of (3) may very well be considered true, even if (4) is not verified at the moment of utterance: for one thing, the time of the utterance may not be included in the set of contextually relevant times (for instance, if Max is asleep in his bed when (3) is uttered); secondly, even if contextually relevant in principle, the moment of utterance may constitute a rare exception to the rule (for instance, if Max has just removed his cap): (2) (3) (4)

Au Groënland, il y a toujours de la neige. ‘In Greenland, there is always snow.’ Max porte toujours une casquette. ‘Max always wears a cap.’ Max porte une casquette en ce moment. ‘Max is wearing a cap right now.’

In other words, sentences containing toujours are so-called “characterizing” sentences, which abstract from particular states or events to express a generalization about the subject referent (cf. Krifka et al. 1995: 3). That is, toujours signifies that the proposition expresses a regularity, or a disposition of some entity, and we may therefore say that the adverb indicates the “global validity” of the SoA in question. Like characterizing sentences in general, those marked by temporal toujours are thus aspectually stative (cf. Krifka et al. 1995: 16), a fact which will be seen to be of importance to the meaning extensions that toujours can undergo. The internal negation of temporal toujours is expressed by ne…jamais (“never”), and its external negation by ne…pas toujours (“not always”), cf. (5)-(6): (5) (6)

Au Groënland, il n’y a jamais de neige. ‘In Greenland, there is never any snow.’ Au Groënland, il n’y a pas toujours de la neige. ‘In Greenland, there is not always snow.’


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In some cases, as in (2), the relevant set of times is unlimited with respect to both past and future times, in which case there is no salient interval for which the SoA denoted by the host clause is not assumed to be true. In other words, the SoA is posited as eternal. However, in other – probably more frequent – cases, the set of relevant times may be co- or contextually bounded on either, or even on both, side(s), cf. (7)-(9). Nevertheless, given that toujours expresses a general rule or disposition, it is applicable only to SoAs of a certain duration, as shown by the unacceptability of (10)2: (7)

(8) (9) (10)

Sébastien a toujours préféré les blondes, mais maintenant qu’il a rencontré Delphine, qui est brune, cela changera peut-être. ‘Sébastien has always preferred blondes, but now that he has met Delphine, who has dark hair, that may change.’ Si on se marie, je te serai toujours fidèle. ‘If we get married, I will always be faithful to you.’ A l’époque où Hugo était en thèse, il était toujours déprimé. ‘Back when Hugo was doing his Ph.D., he was always depressed.’ *?Demain, je serai toujours chez moi. ‘Tomorrow, I’ll always be at home.’

Examples similar to the above can be found from the 11th century onwards, cf. (11): (11)

Dist l’arcevesque: “Asez le faites ben! // Itel valor deit aveir chevaler // Ki armes portet e en bon cheval set: // En bataille deit estre forz et fiers, // U altrement ne valt .IIII. deners, // Einz deit monie estre en un de cez mustiers, // Si prierat tuz jurz por noz peccez.” (La chanson de Roland, vv. 1876-1882, 1080 – from BFM) ‘The archbishop said, “You are doing very well. Such valor must a knight have who bears arms and sits on a good horse: In battle he must be strong and wild, or else he is not worth four pieces of silver, but should be a friar in one of these convents, then he will always pray for our sins.”

The first clear extensions towards an independent aspectual meaning, namely the phasal, continuative meaning, are found in the 13th century, and will be discussed in sect. 4.3 infra. At roughly the same time, toujours also acquires a different, more obviously aspectual, use that may be called “habitual” (cf. Kleiber 1987), but which, in fact, seems better analyzed as a pragmatic variant of the basic temporal sense. Due to a certain resemblance with what I will call the “iterative” uses of déjà and encore, discussion of this use of toujours will, however, be postponed until sect. 5.3 infra. 3.2.1 Distributive use A particular variant of the temporal use of toujours, having the same internal and external negations (cf. (13)), as well as the same translational equivalents in a number of languages (e.g. English always, German immer, Italian sempre, and Danish altid), is the distributive, generic reading exemplified in (12). The peculiarity of this use is that it is the subject, rather than the predicate, which must be seen as falling within the scope of the adverb, such that the generality of the rule or disposition expressed by toujours is not understood to concern time, but rather space. Thus, as observed by de Swart (1991: 122), (12) is most naturally paraphrased by (14), in which the subject NP is universally quantified. A significant difference between the use of 2

Note that (10) is, of course, perfectly acceptable on a phasal reading of toujours, cf. sect. 4.3 infra.

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toujours in (12) and that of the indefinite pronoun tous (“all”) in (14) consists, however, in the fact that the former requires a generic interpretation of the subject NP. Hence the unacceptability of toujours, but not of tous in (15).3 (12) (13) (14) (15)

Les Hollandais sont toujours très grands. ‘The Dutch are always very tall.’ Les Hollandais ne sont jamais / pas toujours très grands. ‘The Dutch are never / not always very tall.’ Tous les Hollandais sont très grands. ‘All Dutch people are very tall.’ Les Hollandais qui sont ici en ce moment sont tous / *toujours très grands. ‘The Dutch people who are here at present are all / always very tall.’

De Swart (1991: 122) explains that, in sentences like (12), the predicate (“to be very tall”) is gnomic or individual, that is, it does not (at least in the normal case) apply differentially to any given adult individual at different times, as shown by the oddity of (16). Consequently, in order to quantify over a plurality of occasions, toujours must, in such sentences, take a plural subject NP, rather than the predicate, in its scope, which, in the case of (12), results in the following – distributive – interpretation: “In the quasi-totality of arbitrarily chosen encounters with one or more arbitrarily chosen Dutch people, one observes that the latter are very tall.” If, on the other hand, the reference of this NP is restricted to a set defined by a unique occasion, as in (15), toujours, of course, cannot apply, and ungrammaticality results. (16)

?*Chaque fois que je le vois, Félicien est très grand. ‘Every time I see him, Félicien is very tall.’

My first clear example of distributive toujours is as recent as the early 17th century, cf. (17). I have, however, found an example of a use that appears intermediate between the temporal and the distributive use, and which probably represents the type of context that helped pave the way for the distributive use to arise, namely (18), from the early 13th century. While the subject NP is not in the plural here, there is no doubt that it must be interpreted generically, not as referring to a specific emerald. The meaning of toz jorz is, however, quite clearly temporal, stressing the eternal quality of the color, and the adverbial takes the predicate est vert in its scope: (17)

3

Toutes ces choses longuement debattues et bien considerées, nous avons cogneu que, tout ainsi que les choses que nature produict, sont toujours plus parfaictes que celles qui precedent de l’art, de mesme l’amour qui vient par inclination, est plus grande et plus estimable que celle qui procede du dessein ou de l’obligation. (Honoré d’Urfé, L’Astrée, vol. 2, pt. 2, p. 72, 1610, from Frantext) ‘All these things having been debated at length and considered carefully, we recognized that, just as things produced by nature are always more perfect than those that are man-made, so the love that grows from inclination is greater and more worthy than that which has its origin in design or obligation.’

Another difference is that, while, on a strict reading, the universally quantified (14) would seem to be falsified by the discovery of a single Dutch person who is short, it is not clear that (12) would be similarly falsified thereby. Judgements are not firm, but if correct, this would be entirely in line with the “general-rule” meaning of temporal toujours.

Content-Level Uses of the French Phasal Adverbs (18)

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Après ces ii vertuz que je t’ai devisees avoies tu en toi souffrance. Souffrance si est semblable a esmeraude qui toz jorz4 est vert. Car soffrance n’avra ja si fort temptacion que ele puisse estre vaincue, ainz est toz dis verdoianz et en une meïsme force. (La Queste del Saint Graal – ms K, ca. 1220, from BFM) ‘After these two virtues that I have attributed to you, you had patience in you. Patience is indeed similar to an emerald, which is always green. For patience will never suffer such strong temptation that it can be vanquished, but is always verdant and of the same strength.’

The five hundred years between the first attestation of the temporal use and that of the distributive use, coupled with the difference in the scope of toujours in the two uses, may be evidence that an actual meaning extension took place around the beginning of the 17th century. On the other hand, the two uses are so close (as corroborated by the fact that one and the same form is used for both in a number of languages besides French) that one may legitimately question whether contemporary speakers represent them as different meanings. An answer to that question can probably only be obtained via psycholinguistic experimentation, something which is beyond the scope of the present study. However, it seems not impossible that the rise of distributive toujours may represent, not an actual meaning extension, but rather the simple actualization of a meaning potential that was, from its very birth, inherent in temporal toujours. According to Timberlake (1977) and Harris & Campbell (1995: 81f), it often takes quite some time for language users to realize the full range of applicability that is consistent with a given meaning, such that the item carrying that meaning may only gradually spread to more and more contexts of use. If this is the case with distributive toujours, the very long temporal gap separating its appearance from that of the temporal use may simply be an artefact of the extant corpora.

3.3

Enfin

As observed above, enfin was originally a prepositional phrase, and was only subsequently reanalyzed as an adverb. The status of the expression as a PP is not only clear from its etymology, but also from the fact that, in Old and Middle French texts, it frequently appears with a definite determiner on the complement, as en la fin, with no apparent difference in meaning. The propagation of the reanalyzed form may well have been very gradual, given that many medieval scribes were in the habit of writing the preposition en and its complement together as one word (P. Skårup, p.c.), which would yield enfin even when the underlying analysis may have been equivalent to en fin, e.g. (19)5. Indeed, unambiguous examples of the prepositional phrase (unambiguous due to the presence of a determiner) can still be found in the 16th century (cf. (20), which is especially noteworthy because we find tokens of the expression both with and without a determiner, in exactly similar contexts, and within a few lines of one another): 4

This example represents the one case mentioned in ch. 5, sect. 2.1 supra, where there appears to be relevant variation in the manuscripts: thus, Pauphilet’s (1967) edition of La Queste del Saint Graal gives toz dis (”all days”) instead of (the entirely synonymous, if not homographic / -phonic) toz jorz. The edition from which (18) is taken, which has been established by Christiane Marchello-Nizia, is a quasi-diplomatic edition of a manuscript known as Manuscript K, which is in the Municipal Library at Lyon. Example (18) is found on Folio 189 verso, as readers may verify for themselves by looking at (Christiane Marchello-Nizia, p.c.). 5 Assuming that the printed edition cited accurately reflects the original orthography, which is not necessarily the case…

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(19)

(20)

car li mauvais, il s’en confont, // car li plons art et l’argent font,/ et si s’afine par le plom, // qui s’art por lui; li mauvais hom // art enfin por le proude gent // si con li plons fait por l’argent. (Gautier d’Arras, Eracle, 1176-1184, vv. 1839-1844 – from BFM) ‘for the bad one, he destroys himself thereby, for lead burns and silver melts, and thus it is refined by the lead, which burns for it; the bad man burns in the end for the good people in the same way lead does for silver.’ …l’ange bening et consolateur apparoissant à l’homme, l’espovante au commencement, le console en la fin, le rend content et satisfaict; l’ange maling et seducteur au commencement resjouist l’homme, en fin le laisse perturbé, fasché et perplex. (Rabelais, Le Tiers livre, 1546, ch. XIV, p. 463 – from BFM) ‘…the good consoling angel, when it appears to man, frightens him initially, consoles him in the end, renders him content and satisfied; the evil seducing angel initially makes man happy, in the end leaves him troubled, angry, and confused.’

The “literal”, temporal sense “in the end” is quite clearly the original sense of the expression, in as much as it is a possible interpretation of all the 102 examples that I have found in both Old French (ca. 9th-mid-14th century) and Middle French (ca. mid-14th-16th century). Indeed, in all but a couple of examples, it is not just a possible interpretation, but the only possible interpretation of en (la) fin. This use (which, as (21) shows, is still found in contemporary French) is the only truth-conditional use of the expression, in which it marks an event as being the last in a real-world chronological sequence. As such, its felicitous use presupposes the existence of at least two, and possibly more, events in the talked-about world (be it real or fictitious), which are sufficiently related to the enfin-marked event that they may together be regarded as forming a coherent sequence from some contextually relevant point of view. Moreover, it presupposes that these other events temporally precede the enfin-marked one. Interestingly, however, except if used metalinguistically, temporal enfin cannot occur as the focus either of negation (cf. (22)), or a cleft sentence (cf. (23)), and it must therefore be assumed to take wide scope with respect to its host proposition (cf. Martin 1974: 67f.; also Greenbaum 1969: 20f; Nølke 1990: 13).6 Nevertheless, temporal enfin is truth-conditional, in as much as an utterance of (21) could be responded to by Ce n’est pas vrai: en fait, il s’est couché avant d’éteindre la télé! (“It’s not true: in fact, he went to bed before turning off the TV!”). (21)

(22) (23)

Pierre a éteint la télé, il s’est brossé les dents, il s’est déshabille. et enfin il s’est couché. ‘Pierre turned off the TV, brushed his teeth, undressed, and finally, he went to bed.’ *Pierre ne s’est pas enfin couché. ‘Pierre did not at last go to bed.’ *C’est enfin que Pierre s’est couché. ‘It was at last that Pierre went to bed.’

6 Of course, this cannot be concluded with certainty as far as Old and Middle French are concerned, as there are no native speakers of those languages to whom test sentences might be submitted for evaluation. However, I have found no examples of negated or focalized enfin among my diachronic data.


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Actual extensions of this strictly temporal sense are not found in my data until the late Middle French period. As argued in Hansen (2005a), it may be relevant that, from the 14th century onwards, en (la) fin is in competition with an apparently new item, finalement (or finalment / finablement, as it is frequently spelled in the older texts)(“finally”).7 The two expressions have a partially common etymology, in as much as finalement is derived from the noun fin (“end”), via the adjective final (“final”), by regular morphological processes, and indeed, in their temporal senses, the two expressions are largely interchangeable, cf. (24): (24)

…et les troubles lointains du ciel se dissolvaient, se résolvaient dans l’accord thématique du monde, dans cette douceur qui l’emporte enfin [/ finalement] sur la violence, car on n’a jamais vu d’orage qui ne se soit apaisé, d’hiver qui n’ait finalement [/ enfin] cédé au printemps, au calme apaisant de la vie. (Louis Aragon, Les Voyageurs de l’impériale, p. 470, 1947 – from Frantext. The contents of the sharp parentheses have been added by me.) ‘…and the distant turmoil of the sky dissolved, resolved itself into the thematic harmony of the world, into the gentleness that in the end [/ finally] defeats violence, for a storm that did not subside, a winter that did not finally [/ in the end] yield to the spring, to the soothing calm of life, has never been seen.’

In contemporary French, however, the “literal”, temporal sense is most frequently expressed by finalement, whereas enfin, in the large majority of its uses, particularly in spontaneous speech, tends to fulfil one of its many more context-oriented functions (cf. Hansen 2005a, Beeching 2002: 130). As argued in chapter 2, sect. 5 supra, the pragmatic Principle of Contrast will normally ensure that superficially synonymous items acquire distinct uses at the level of parole at least, if not actually different senses. In the case of enfin and finalement, such a functional diversification is supported by the fact that, although finalement is polyfunctional in contemporary French, it is so to a much smaller degree than enfin, and its one major nontemporal use, viz. the “conclusive” use in (25), is one that was never entrenched for enfin, despite the fact that the basic temporal use of enfin would seem to make that marker as good a candidate for a conclusive use as finalement, as is attested by a very few sporadic early uses that did not catch on (cf. (26), which, if “translated” into contemporary French, would be most likely to feature finalement in the place of enfin): (25)

(26)

J’ai été à la montagne avec Pierrot. Dimanche il a neigé toute la journée. Finalement, j’aurais mieux fait de rester à la maison. (from Schelling 1982: 76) ‘I went to the mountains with Pierrot. On Sunday, it snowed all day long. I should have stayed at home, after all.’ Hélas, ilz pensent avoir tout; / Mais ce tout là, qu’ilz disent leur, / Ce n’est enfin que tout Malheur: / Nostre Tout n’est pas de la sorte. (Marguerite de Navarre, Trop, prou, peu, moins, Sc. III, p. 165, 1544 – from Frantext) ‘Alas, they believe they have it all; / But this all, which they say is theirs, / Is ultimately no more than all unhappiness: / Our All is not of that kind.’

7 In fact, fina(b)l(e)ment can be found as early as the 12th century. However, prior to the 14th century, I have only three tokens of it in my data bases, all from the same text, Li quatre livre des Reis, a work of prose written ca. 1190, in Anglo-Norman, a dialect which differs substantially from other Old French dialects in a number of ways. I therefore take the liberty of ignoring those three tokens in the main text.

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3.4

Summary

As the above analyses will have shown, both toujours and enfin have source meanings of a purely temporal nature not obviously shared by déjà, and apparently not at all by encore. Moreover, the temporal meanings of the two items have very little in common, apart from being temporal. Nevertheless, their phasal meanings, in which not only toujours and enfin, but all four adverbs under consideration here, have the largest number of sense elements in common, will be shown in the next section to have grown directly out of their temporal source meanings, a fact which suggests that the phasal “paradigm” is not a result of intra-linguistic pressures, but an epiphenomenon of largely independent changes in individual lexemes.

4 PHASAL USES OF THE FOUR ADVERBS In the case of déjà and encore, the phasal use is, as already mentioned, the original one in French, whereas the phasal senses of enfin and toujours are derived from older meanings.

4.1

Déjà

As already observed in sect. 3.1, phasal déjà (OF desja or dezja) goes back to the latter half of the 13th century (cf. (1) supra). Synchronically at least, in this use, the adverb is – as discussed in ch. 4, sect. 2.3 supra – compatible primarily with imperfective predicates (states and activities), and will therefore not normally co-occur with the perfective past tense. It may, however, co-occur with compound perfects, in as much as the perfect can be regarded as an imperfectivizing operator (cf. Herweg 1992: 390). Largely following Doherty (1973: 175), I will say that phasal déjà asserts that the SoA e in its scope has begun prior to topic time TT.8 In other words, the initial phase of e has occurred at TT. Given that déjà is compatible primarily with imperfective predicates, we can moreover infer that e still holds at TT, in as much as imperfective situations are held to subsume their reference time (i.e. TT, in the terminology used here)(cf. Partee 1984: 256). Nothing is said about the medial and final phases of e, and the continued existence of e at any time following TT is thus left to contextual inference. As pointed out by Michaelis (1992: 324n), the clause predicate must, however, be such as to at least allow for the possibility of further accretion of values along the time scale, as seen by the oddness of (27), as opposed to (28), infra. The predicate COURIR DEPUIS MIDI (“to have been running since noon”) does not represent an expandable situation, that is to say that no matter how long Benjamin continues to run, COURIR DEPUIS MIDI will continue to be an appropriate description of his activity. COURIR DEPUIS X TEMPS (“to have been running for X amount of time”), on the other hand, is inherently expandable: thus, une heure et demie may turn into deux heures (“two hours”) and so on, depending on how long the running activity goes on: (27)

*?A 14 heures, Benjamin courait déjà depuis midi.

8 It will be recalled that, following Klein (1992), I defined TT, in ch. 4, sect. 2.1 supra, as the temporal interval with respect which the main claim of the utterance is made.


(28)

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‘At 2pm, Benjamin had already been running since noon.’ A 14 heures, Benjamin courait déjà depuis une heure et demie. ‘At 2pm, Benjamin had already been running for an hour and a half.’

As discussed in ch. 4 sect. 3.4, probably due to its insisting specifically on the instantiation of the initial phase of e, déjà carries a weak presupposition to the effect that a change of state may have taken place, in other words, ~e may have been instantiated at some point TT-n preceding TT (cf. Martin 1980). By thus presupposing the possibility of a prior change of state, déjà implicitly contrasts the SoA in its scope with one of the opposite polarity. Besides asserting the instantiation of the initial phase of e prior to TT and presupposing ◊(~e) at TT-n, the adverb also appears to have an evaluative element of meaning. For, as argued in ch. 4, sect. 4.3, it moreover conventionally implicates that things might have been otherwise, i.e. that ~e might (still) have been actual at TT. In conjunction with the aforementioned presupposition, this yields the interpretation that e has been actualized relatively early as compared to what might have been expected. Thus, these two implicatures together give the phasal use of déjà a modalizing tinge, which predisposes it to develop the modal use that will be discussed in ch. 7, sect. 2 infra. Based on the above, we may describe phasal déjà as inchoative and retrospective (cf. ch. 4, sect. 2.4), and a rough graphical representation of its coded meaning might look as in Figure 6.1:9 [Figure 6.1: The meaning of phasal déjà] implicated transition point

presupposition:

◊(~e)

expected transition point

TT

e asserted

As we saw in ch. 4, sect. 3.1.1, phasal déjà is externally negated by ne…pas encore, its unmarked internal negation being ne…plus, cf. (29)-(31): (29) (30) (31)

Max est déjà là. ‘Max is already here.’ Max n’est pas encore là. ‘Max is not yet here.’ Max n’est plus là. ‘Max is no longer here.’

9 Not too much should be read into this representation. Thus, for instance, the lengths of time between the implicated transition point and TT, on the one hand, and between TT and the expected transition point, on the other, may, in principle, be of any duration, long or short.

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4.2

Encore

Phasal encore (variably written as uncor, ancor, and encor(e)) is attested in the BFM data base as early as the mid-11th century (cf. (32)), although, until the mid-12th century (cf. (33)), only in the context of negation (with the meaning “not yet”). Moreover, OF encore could be used without a negative marker in interrogatives and conditionals, cf. (34): (32)

(33)

(34)

“Mercit, mercit, mercit, saintismes hom! // Net coneümes n’uncor net conuissum.” (La vie de Saint Alexis, v. 360, mid-11th cent. – from BFM) ‘”Mercy, mercy, mercy, most holy man! We neither knew you, nor yet know you.”’ Ele est par linage roïne, // si est encore assez meschine; … (Le Roman de Thèbes, vv. 8805-06, ca. 1150 – from BFM) ‘Her lineage is that of a queen, yet she is still young;…’ “Est, va, encore toz mes charroiz entrez ? (Le Charroi de Nîmes, v. 1177, mid-12th cent. – from Tobler & Lommatsch 1954: 247) ‘“Say, have all my carts entered yet?.’

This might suggest that encore was originally an inchoative marker taking narrow scope with respect to the negation. If this is correct, the appropriate formalization of the meaning of ne…pas encore would then be ∼(ALREADY p), as opposed to STILL(∼p), the latter representing a continuative-negative meaning. OF encore would then have been a negative-polarity item forming a suppletive set with the positive polarity marker ja (“already”). Given, however, that its use in interrogatives and conditionals is obsolete (or, at best, very marginal) in Modern French, there is good reason to analyze encore synchronically as taking wide scope over the negative marker in ne…pas encore. We must then assume that the scope relations between the two markers were at some point reanalyzed, yielding a continuative-negative interpretation, as opposed to the original negative-inchoative meaning. Such a reanalysis is certainly not unlikely, given that a negative inchoative is logically equivalent to a continuative negative, and it would then subsequently have made the use of encore in positive continuative contexts possible. 10 On the other hand, the attribution of inchoative meaning to OF encore would sit uneasily with the etymology of the marker, which as we saw in sect. 2 seems best described as continuative in meaning. In fact, the etymological “thus far” interpretation is entirely compatible with the use of encore in interrogatives and conditionals (cf. van der Auwera 1993: 633f). Alternatively, therefore, it may be that the comparative lateness of the positive form can simply be attributed to the scarcity of pre-12th-century texts in the data base (the BFM contains only three such texts, two of which are quite short). In its synchronic phasal use, encore asserts the continued existence at topic time TT of a SoA e. As argued in chapter 4, sect. 4.1, the truth of this SoA at some interval TT-i prior to TT is weakly presupposed in the sense of Nølke (1983: 33), that is, the speaker is not necessarily assuming that the hearer already believes the presupposition (as would be the case if we were dealing with a strong presupposition), but merely that the hearer will not believe the presupposition to be false. Thus, encore is a continuative marker, which indicates that e has reached a relatively advanced phase of development at TT. 10

Interestingly, König & Traugott (1982) analyze English yet as having completed this trajectory in reverse: they argue that yet originally took wide scope with respect to negation, but was subsequently reanalyzed as having narrow scope.


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As we saw in ch. 4, sect. 3.1.1, phasal encore is externally negated by ne…plus (accordingly, (36) carries the same weak presupposition as (35)), and internally negated by ne…pas encore: (35) (36) (37)

Gérard est encore là. ‘Gérard is still here.’ Gérard n’est plus là. ‘Gérard is no longer here.’ Gérard n’est pas encore là. ‘Gérard is not yet here.’

Although the actuality of e prior to TT is presupposed, encore says nothing whatsoever about the moment TT-j at which e came into existence. Indeed, there may be no such moment, and hence, no preceding ~e phase. On the other hand, if the adverb is to be felicitously used, the speaker must consider it at least possible in the current universe of discourse that a transition into a negative ~e phase might occur at some ulterior point in time TT+i. Thus, (38) is quite unexceptional, whereas (39) is distinctly odd: (38) (39)

De nos jours, un homme de quarante-cinq ans est encore un homme jeune. ‘Nowadays, a 45-year-old man is still young.’ ??Le Pape est encore célibataire. ‘The Pope is still unmarried.’

If someone is “still young”, there is obviously no prior time at which he was not young (barring the establishment of a very special universe of discourse in the preceding text). It must, however, be possible to conceive of a time when he will no longer be young. This is what makes (39) infelicitous, for (again assuming an “unmarked” universe of discourse) the Pope cannot marry and remain Pope. It is due to this element of meaning (which I argued, in ch. 4, sect. 4.2 above, is a conventional implicature attached to encore) that an utterance like (40) is, as observed by Muller (1999: 230), a good deal less flattering than (41), which implicates nothing whatsoever about an eventual transition into ~e (cf. the discussion in sect. 4.3 infra): (40) (41)

Vous êtes encore aussi jolie! ‘You are as yet as lovely as ever!’ (→ But you may not remain so…) Vous êtes toujours aussi jolie! ‘You are still as lovely as ever!’

Although the possible cessation of e must be conceivable, there is no need for the speaker to think that it is inevitable, or even probable, for encore to be felicitously used (cf. König 1977: 176). Hence, (42) is a perfectly acceptable utterance: (42)

Nicolas est encore célibataire, et il le restera sans doute jusqu’à la fin de ses jours. ‘Nicolas is still unmarried, and he’ll no doubt remain so for the rest of his life.’

However, as already noted in connection with ex. (116) in ch. 4, sect. 4.2, an adequate description of the coded meaning of these adverbs requires that the (presumed) knowledge states of other individuals besides the speaker be taken into account. Thus, in (43), where the

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epistemically weakening adverbial sans doute has been removed from the second conjunct of (42), so that, from the speaker’s point of view, the possibility of a future transition to ~e is now excluded, encore takes on a distinct metalinguistic flavor, embedding the voice of an ALTER, most probably (but not necessarily) the hearer: (43)

Nicolas est encore célibataire, et il le restera jusqu’à la fin de ses jours. ‘Nicolas is still unmarried, and he’ll remain so for the rest of his life.’

Although the use of encore in (42) is not metalinguistic, it does appear to signal that the speaker is alive to the possibility that some relevant other might, in fact, be expecting the future transition into ~e which the speaker herself is rejecting in the second conjunct. I assume that the elements of meaning described above constitute the coded meaning of phasal encore, a graphical representation of which might therefore look as in Figure 6.2:11 [Figure 6.2: The meaning of phasal encore] potential transition point

e presupposed

TT

~e conceivable

e asserted

These elements of meaning allow not only for standard uses of phasal encore, but also for an initially puzzling use, which is attested since the mid-12th century in my data base12, namely that illustrated in examples like (44)-(45), where encore co-occurs with a telic predication in the future tense, indicating the continued possibility of an event which at present may appear unlikely: (44) (45)

On gagnera encore!13 ‘We’ll win yet!’ La vielle dist: “Or entendez // et que ce est si devinnez; // encor vous fera touz iriez! (Le roman de Thèbes, vv. 2921-2923, ca. 1150, from BFM) ‘The old woman says, “Now listen // and then guess what it is // it’ll drive you all mad yet!’

This use is puzzling because the host clause clearly expresses the coming-into-being of a SoA at some future point in time (in the case of (44), for instance, the predicate GAGNER denotes a punctual event, or “achievement” in the terminology of Vendler 1968), hence, it obviously 11

As with Figure 6.1 supra, not too much should be read into this representation, which is merely a rough attempt at illustrating the claims made in the text. As a matter of fact, the use in question may be even older. Thus, in the late 11th century, we find (i): (i) Enz en voz bainz que Deus pur vos i fist, // La vuldrat il chrestïens devenir.” // Charles respunt: “Uncore purratfut.ind. guarir.” (La chanson de Roland, vv. 154-56, ca. 1080 – from BFM) ‘There, in the baths that God made for you, // He will become a Christian.” // Charles replies, “He may yet / still be saved.”’ The example is ambiguous, however, due to the atelic character of the modal pouvoir (”can/may”) 13 Depending on the context, a token of this sentence may, of course, also also be interpreted to mean ”We’ll win again!”, in which case we are dealing with the iterative sense of encore, which will be discussed in sect. 5.2 infra. 12


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does not allow for the presupposition that the SoA itself was already actual prior to that point in time. The use can, however, be explained if we assume that encore takes wide scope with respect to the future tense operator in such utterances. The TT of the adverb is thus not the unspecified future time indicated by the tense form, but rather the time of utterance. It is then not the as-yet-unrealized SoA itself that remains in force during an extended interval, but the prediction of its eventual realization. This also provides an explanation of why such utterances have a concessive nuance, in as much as it will not normally be relevant to assert the continued relevance of a prediction except in the presence of factors seen to militate against it. Should the SoA indeed become realized, the prediction will no longer be relevant as a prediction, and the moment of realization can thus be mapped onto the potential transition point posited in the preceding discussion. Besides the elements of meaning posited in Figure 2, phasal encore will moreover typically convey the idea that someone (not necessarily the speaker) might have expected the transition into ~e to have occurred prior to TT. As already discussed in ch. 4, sect. 4.3 supra, this element of meaning is, however, cancelable, as (46) shows. The difference between (46) and the previous examples seems to be that, in (46), the SoA marked by encore is explicitly compared to a different, but related SoA, namely the one expressed in the first sentence of the example. In the examples given above, on the other hand, the encore-marked SoA is in some sense implicitly compared to itself at some earlier point in time. As argued in ch. 4, sect. 4.3, the notion of temporal comparison is a conventional implicature attached to the meaning of phasal encore. The nuance of unexpected duration that is conveyed by examples like (38), however, appears to have the status of a generalized conversational implicature arising from the speaker’s presumed observance of the maxim of quantity: that is, if she chooses to indicate that a given SoA has been the case for some time, and might conceivably come to an end at some point, but that this has not happened at TT, the hearer will by default infer that the SoA in question has lasted longer than might have been expected. (46)

Ma fille Juliette a passé son bac cette année. Sa sœur Louise est encore en seconde. ‘My daughter Juliette graduated from high school this year. Her sister Louise is still a sophomore.’

Like the semantics of phasal déjà, that of phasal encore appears, then, to contain at least the seeds of a modal use: for one thing, the adverb explicitly enjoins the hearer to imagine an ulterior alternative to the SoA denoted by the sentence; and secondly, its use will often implicate that such an alternative has, in fact, been envisaged even for the situation at TT. As observed in ch. 4, sect. 2.3 supra, phasal encore is compatible with atelic processes, but not with telic ones, except where these are coerced into being atelic by explicit imperfective aspect marking on the verb, as in (47). This use of the adverb is likewise incompatible with compound tenses, in construction with which encore will instead be interpreted iteratively (cf. (48), and the discussion below). No doubt this can be explained as a consequence of the conventional implicature that ~e at TT+i is at least conceivable, such an implicature being inconsistent with the essentially stative nature of the compound tenses, which, as argued in chapter 2, sect. 2.1, denote the aftermath of a temporally prior event. Thus, strictly speaking,

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the present perfect in (48) denotes that, at TT, Caroline is in an unalterable state of having phoned.14 (47) (48)

L’année dernière, Luc allait[imp.past] encore à l’école à pied. ‘Last year, Luc still used to walk to school.’ Caroline a encore téléphoné. ‘Caroline has phoned again.’

At the risk of belaboring the point, this inherent prospectivity of phasal encore (cf. chapter 4, sect. 2.4) implies that TT is more advanced in time than the anterior moment TT-i, where the SoA e was equally valid, but less advanced than some moment TT+i, where e may no longer be valid. The idea of cumulativity that Nølke (1983: 141) posits as a central element of the meaning of encore can, in my view, be attributed to this implicit comparison between times TT, TT-i, and TT+i (which Löbner 1989 defines as the scalar element of the meaning of the adverb). As will be shown below, the cumulative aspect of encore is made more concrete in several of its extended senses.

4.3

Toujours

In its phasal use, toujours is very close in meaning to encore. Indeed, both will normally be translated into English by the adverb still (cf. (35) supra and (49)), and both have the same external negation in French, namely ne…plus (cf. (36) supra). Their internal negations, however, are different, that of toujours being ne…toujours pas, cf. (50). As the reader will have noticed, both forms of negation differ from those that were appropriate for the temporal use of toujours and its generic (as well as habitual, cf. sect. 5.3 infra) variants. This is thus a first indication that the phasal use of toujours constitutes a lexicalized polysemy. (49) (50)

Gérard est toujours là. ‘Gérard is still here.’ Gérard n’est toujours pas là. ‘Gérard is still not here.’

Like encore in (35), toujours as used in (49) asserts the actuality of e at TT, and weakly presupposes its actuality during an interval preceding and leading up to TT, and is therefore a continuative marker. However, unlike encore, toujours does not explicitly evoke the possibility of a future transition from e to ~e (cf. Fuchs 1988: 138; Franckel 1989: 291). In other words, whereas encore invariably evokes the idea of progression towards a point of potential transition between e and ~e, phasal toujours – although it does not preclude a future transition – allows for the indefinite duration of e. Hence, it is not a prospective marker, and it does not contain the element of dynamism inherent in encore, déjà, and enfin, but is essentially a marker of stasis. 14 The negative continuative ne…pas encore is, however, compatible with compound tenses, as in (i): (i) Caroline n’a pas encore téléphoné. ’Caroline hasn’t phoned yet.’ This dissymmetry between the positive and the negative variant of encore is explained by the already noted fact that, despite the relative surface positions of the negation and the adverb, ne…pas encore represents the internal, and not the external, negation of encore. In other words, encore takes wide scope (i.e., ”still(not)”) in this expression. With respect to (i), this means that, at TT, Caroline is still in a phase where the phoning event is future with respect to TT (assuming it is to take place at all); hence no unalterable aftermath of that event exists at TT.


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That this should be so should not surprise us, in light of the discussions of the phenomenon of “persistence” at the very beginning of the present chapter, as well as in ch. 3 sect. 5, given that phasal toujours develops out of temporal toujours, appearing for the first time in my data in the early 13th century (cf. (51)), temporal toujours being, of course, a marker of stasis par excellence. The development from temporal to phasal toujours is no doubt motivated by the fact that the temporal sense of the adverb (“always”) will of course entail the phasal one (“still”) in a great many, if not most, contexts (although not vice versa). (51)

Si le troevent de tele force et de tele vistece que il ne cuident mie que il soit hons terriens: car il n’a home ou monde qui la moitié poïst soffrir que il a soffert. Si s’esmaient mout, car il voient que il nel pueent remuer de place, ainz le troevent tor jorz d’autel force come au comencement. (La Queste del Saint Graal, p. 48, ca. 1220 - from BFM) ‘Thus, they find him to have such strength and such speed that they do not believe that he is an earthly man: for there is no man in the world who could endure half of what he has endured. So they become very fearful, for they see that they cannot remove him from his place, but find that he still has as much strength as in the beginning.’

We can graphically represent the meaning of phasal toujours as in Figure 6.3: [Figure 6.3: The meaning of phasal toujours] [transition e → ~e?]

e presupposed

TT: e asserted

This analysis of the meaning difference between encore and toujours is not accepted by all. Thus, for van der Auwera (1993: 625), toujours is simply a more emphatic variant of encore, which serves to underscore the unexpectedly long duration of e.15 While toujours does frequently seem to carry the implicature that e has lasted a good deal longer than expected, this is unlikely to be part of its coded meaning, as exx. (52)-(53), due to Franckel (1989: 291), show. These examples are taken from a French version of the fairy tale Snowhite (BlancheNeige in French), and are uttered by the evil stepmother’s magic mirror. At the beginning of the tale, whenever the Queen asks her mirror who the “fairest of them all” is, she receives the answer in (52). Later, however, when Snowhite has begun to grow up, and is turning into a rival, the mirror answers as in (53). On van der Auwera’s analysis, this distribution should be odd, given that the state-of-affairs in which the Queen is the most beautiful woman in the land has actually lasted longer at the time of the encore-answer than at the time of the toujoursanswer. (52) (53) 15

Reine, tu es toujours la plus belle. ‘My Queen, you are still the fairest of them all.’ Reine, tu es encore la plus belle.

Löbner (1999: 82) gives a very similar analysis of the German equivalent of toujours, namely immer noch.

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Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface ‘My Queen, you are as yet the fairest of them all.’

Moreover, we find minimal pairs like that already adduced in (40)-(41), where, if toujours did indeed focus on the unexpectedly extended duration of the SoA, it ought, strictly speaking, to be perceived as less, not more, polite than encore. Finally, the incriminated analysis would wrongly predict that toujours would be licensed, and perhaps even preferred, in the construction seen in (54)-(55), in which the adverb longtemps (“a long time”) explicitly refers to the long duration of the process. However, while (54) represents an interactionally unmarked question, (55), which implies that the hearer is getting absolutely nowhere with what he is doing, could hardly be used other than sarcastically: (54) (55)

4.4

Vous en avez encore pour longtemps? ‘Do you have much left to do?’ *?Vous en avez toujours pour longtemps? ≈ ‘Do you have as much left to do?’

Enfin

If phasal toujours is close in meaning to encore, phasal enfin (cf. (56)) is close in meaning to déjà. Like the latter, enfin indicates that, at TT, the SoA e has completed at least its initial phase, and that e is thus actual at TT. The SoA may or may not remain actual following TT. Unlike déjà, however, enfin presupposes not only the possibility, but the actuality of ~e at some time TT-n prior to TT. Like déjà, phasal enfin is thus an inchoative and retrospective marker, and it shares the external and internal negations of déjà, cf. (57)-(58): (56) (57) (58)

On l’attendait depuis quatre heures, mais maintenant Lucie est enfin là. ‘We waited for her for four hours, but now Lucie is finally here.’ On l’attend depuis quatre heures, mais Lucie n’est pas encore là. ‘We have been waiting for four hours, but Lucie is not yet here.’ Lucie était enfin arrivée avec quatre heures de retard, et figure-toi que cinq minutes après, elle n’était plus là. ‘Lucie had finally arrived four hours late, and guess what, five minutes later, she was no longer there.’

A salient difference between the two lies in the fact that while déjà conventionally implicates that the instantiation of e has taken place early, enfin instead conveys that the transition from ~e > e has taken place at an unexpectedly late point in time (cf. the oddness of (59)). (As with déjà, the implicated expectation need not be attributed to the speaker herself, but may be assumed to have been held by the hearer, or some third party, including a virtual individual.) (59)

??Lucie est enfin arrivée une demi-heure avant notre rendez-vous. ‘Lucie finally arrived half an hour before our appointment.’

This difference between the two markers is hardly surprising given that enfin in its source meaning indicates that the SoA in its scope is the last in a chronological series of events. Such an event may well have been expected prior to its realization, and, indeed, the idea of expectation, even desire, is prominent in a large number of examples of the temporal sense (cf.


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(60)), prior to the emergence of the first unambiguous uses of phasal enfin in the 17th century (cf. (61)).16 (60)

(61)

Quand le beau Narcissus jà lassé de sa chasse, // vaincu du chauld, et travaillé de courir, cherchoit où il se peult // reposer, et tant chercha il qu’enfin il veit une fontaine en la vallée // obscure… (Jeanne Flore, Contes amoureux, p. 177, 1537 – from Frantext) ‘When the beautiful Narcissus, already tired from the chase, // defeated by the heat, and worn out from the running, searched for a place // to rest, and he searched so long that at last he saw a fountain in the dark // valley…’ Tirinte. Que les Dieux soient loüez! // Enfin elle s’en va, (Honoré d’Urfé, La Sylvanire ou la Morte-vive: fable bocagère, IV.ix, p. 311, 1627 – from Frantext) ‘Tirinte. The Gods be praised! // Finally she’s leaving,’

In analogy with the other three adverbs, we can therefore represent the phasal meaning of enfin as in Figure 6.4: [Figure 6.4: The meaning of phasal enfin] (transition ~e > e expected)

~e presupposed

4.5

TT

e asserted

Summary

In their phasal uses, we find quite close parallels among the four particles. Thus, we have two markers, déjà and enfin, which are both inchoative and retrospective, but which differ in the precise nature of their presuppositions with respect to the time prior to TT (possibility vs actuality of ~e), and in the implicated evaluation of the SoA as early vs late. On the other hand, we have two continuative markers, encore and toujours, differing principally in their prospective vs stative nature. 16

In contemporary French, phasal enfin appears to convey an additional element of relief that the expected SoA is finally actual at TT. Thus, native speakers tend to feel that the use of enfin is odd with negatively evaluated SoAs, cf. (i). In comparison with the other three adverbs under consideration, contemporary phasal enfin thus incorporates a very strong contextualizing element (in terms of the broad distinction between “content” and “context” made in sect. 1 supra): (i) ??Je regrette que Pierre soit enfin parti. ‘I’m sorry that Pierre has finally left.’ As I pointed out in ch. 4, sect. 3.1.1, however, this nuance of meaning must be a later development, as early examples can be found in which no sense of relief is expressed (cf. (ii), repeated here for convenience): (ii) Alexandre. C’est un rang où Porus n’a plus droit de prétendre: // Il a trop recherché la haine d’Alexandre. // Il sait bien qu’à regret je m’y suis résolu; // Mais enfin je le hais autant qu’il l’a voulu. (Jean Racine, Alexandre le Grand, V.i, p. 55, 1697 – from Frantext) ‘Alexander. That is a rank to which Porus can no longer lay claim: // He has sought Alexander’s hatred to too great an extent. // He knows well that it is to my regret that I have made up my mind; // But finally I hate him as much as he has wished for.’

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Notice, however, that there are four centuries between the respective first appearances of the two inchoatives, almost two centuries between the two continuatives, and two centuries between the first continuative, encore, and the first inchoative, déjà. Clearly, therefore, the four of them did not develop as a paradigm. Moreover, the phasal uses of the two adverbs whose diachronic source meanings are not phasal, namely toujours and enfin, are clearly linked to the earlier meanings, in ways that motivate the particular nature of those phasal uses. Why then, do these adverbs strike one as forming a lexical paradigm, and why are accounts such as that of Löbner (1989; 1999) and Vandeweghe (1992), discussed in ch. 4, sect. 3.1.1, so initially plausible and attractive? I believe the explanation can be located in the conjunction of two factors: One, borrowed from the social sciences, is the notion of “spontaneous order” in collective phenomena as an unintentional by-product of numerous individual actions directed towards a goal that in and of itself is unconnected to the order that results. This was discussed in ch. 3, sect. 4.3, in connection with Keller’s (1994) theory of the invisible hand in language change. The second factor is the idea that, as Bybee (1988: 253) puts it, [a] new locution develops because people want to say something over and above what the default case signals […] not because they want to express a new [paradigmatic, M.B.M.H.] contrast.” With respect to the four phasal adverbs, this allows for the following hypothesis: If the default case is a clause containing no phasal adverb, then we may assume that phasal encore developed to allow people to say something over and above what such a clause could signal. Subsequently, the other three adverbs developed for similar reasons. In as much as the “something more” signaled by déjà, toujours, or enfin in at least some respects contrasted with what was signaled by encore, such that the four of them could plausibly be seen as different perspectivizations of one and the same frame, the particles were spontaneously perceived as ordered into a set of (partial) oppositions, thus constituting what we think of as a type of lexical paradigm, but, crucially, only when considered from a specific point of view, within a specific type of cognitive / experiential frame, and the relevant contrast relations are thus unlikely to be perfect, as, indeed, they were shown not to be in ch. 4, sect. 3.1.1. We will see in the following, and in ch. 7, that similar spontaneous (partial) orderings appear to be at work in certain contextualizing uses (and to a lesser extent certain content-level uses) of a subset of the four adverbs studied here, but that the “paradigmaticization” of those uses has not (yet) proceeded as far as that of the phasal uses, and, indeed, may never do so.

5 ITERATIVE AND RELATED USES OF DÉJÀ AND ENCORE Both déjà and encore (but not toujours and enfin) have a second type of aspectual use, which I will refer to as “iterative”.

5.1

Déjà

Iterative déjà is found only with compound perfects (past, present, or future), as in (62). As pointed out by Muller (1975: 14), déjà in this use takes scope over an implicit quantifier over the number of past occasions (≥ 1) on which the SoA is assumed to have held.


(62)

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Tu as déjà mangé des calamars? ‘Have you ever eaten squid? / Have you eaten squid before?’

That this sense of the adverb is not identical to the phasal one – which, as we saw, is also found with compound verb forms – is supported not only by their different translations into English, among other languages, but also by the fact that, whereas phasal déjà is negated by ne…pas encore (cf. (30) above), iterative déjà is negated by ne…jamais (“never”), cf. (63), and by the zeugmatic feel that B’s answer in (64) has in a context where it is common knowledge that Pierre is not currently present, but may well have eaten squid on some previous occasion. Moreover, the earliest unambiguous instance of the iterative use in my data base appears to be as recent as the late 17th century (cf. (65)):17 (63)

(64)

(65)

A. Est-ce qu’Anne a déjà mange des calamars? B. Non, elle n’en a jamais mangé. ‘A. Has Anne ever eaten squid? B. No, she’s never eaten that.’ A. Tu aimes les calamars, non? Vas-y, sers-toi! B. #J’en ai déjà mangé, et Pierre aussi, d’ailleurs. ‘A. You like squid, don’t you? Go ahead, have some! B. I’ve already had some, and Pierre (has had it before), too, by the way.’ Ils ne purent parler de cela si secrettement qu’ils ne fussent entendus par le petit poucet, qui fit son compte de sortir d’affaire comme il l’avait déjà fait; (Charles Perrault, Les contes de fees, « Le petit Poucet. Conte », p. 219, 1697 – from Frantext) ‘They could not talk about that so secretly that they were not heard by Tom Thumb, who counted on managing as he had done before;’

One might question the appropriateness of the term “iterative” with respect to this particular use of déjà, for although sentences like (62) will frequently be uttered in contexts where the hearer is eating, or is about to eat, squid again, this is not necessarily the case. My reason for calling this use iterative is twofold: for one thing, the implied event may have been completed more than once at TT; secondly, the adverb cannot be used in this way unless the SoA in question may at least conceivably occur again in the future, hence the oddness (first observed by Muller 1975: 14) of an utterance like (66). This may be seen as the “iterative” counterpart of the constraint that we observed (in sect. 4.1) to be in force with respect to phasal déjà, according to which the SoA in the scope of the adverb must allow for further accretion of values along the time scale: (66)

[Speaking at a funeral] #Il a déjà fait du bien dans sa vie. ‘He has done some good in his life before.’

17 Buchi (fc) adduces the example in (i) as support for the claim that iterative déjà is attested as early as the 14th century. Judging by the co-text, however, it is not at all obvious to me that des ja in this example would be appropriately translated into English as before. To my mind, (i) instantiates the temporal focus particle sense of the adverb, which will be discussed in sect. 6.1 below: (i) Comme nostre amé frere Jehan de Saint Laurens, religieux, ceinnier de nostre dite eglise, nous eust des ja piessa supplié que nous voulssissions lui ottroier une place […], avons ottroié et ottroions par ces presentes au dit suppliant sa requeste. (1330, from Buchi fc, her (9)) ’As our beloved brother Jehan de Saint Laurens, friar, ”cennier” [a type of convent official, M.-B.M.H.] of our afore-mentioned church, had already a long time ago begged that we would grant him a place […], we have granted and grant by the present to the afore-mentioned supplicant his request.’

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Iterative déjà differs from its phasal source in as much as the former never carries a conventional implicature to the effect that the (first) completion of the implied event has occurred earlier than might have been expected. Rather, it is completely neutral on this point. (As such, it is, of course, compatible with a conversational implicature to the same effect.) It is probable that this use of déjà is a crystallization of what may originally have been a contextual side effect of the phasal adverb when used with the perfect tense: thus, a speaker who utters (67) is saying that at TT, Georges is in an unalterable state of having had his car stolen. The implied prior action of someone actually stealing the car need not be contiguous to TT, but may have taken place at any moment TT-n, or even several times, at several distinct moments. This is especially true of French, where the present perfect is commonly used as a less formal alternative to the perfective past tense. (67)

Georges s’est fait voler sa voiture. ‘Georges’ car has been/was stolen.’ (Lit.: Georges has had his car stolen.)

Now, when déjà is added to the sentence, the focus is on the inception of the state in question, i.e. the phase just following the completion of the implied event. Both the event itself and its subsequent result will be implied by such a sentence, but depending on the context, one or the other may be more salient, giving us the two different interpretations, cf. (68)-(69): (68)

(69)

Georges s’est déjà fait voler sa voiture, et cela ne fait que trois semaines qu’il l’avait achetée. ‘Georges’ car has already been stolen, and he bought it only three weeks ago.’ Georges s’est déjà fait voler sa voiture. C’était en 1976. ‘Georges’ car was stolen once. That was in 1976.’

The rise of the iterative use was probably favored by the possibility of using phasal déjà in comparative constructions like the ones discussed in ch. 4, sect. 4.3, and illustrated in (70), where there is nothing inherently premature about the idea of the couple having two sons at TT, but where the preceding clause provides a frame of reference to which the SoA denoted by the déjà-marked clause is compared, such that a hearer unfamiliar with the Duponts is given to understand that the little girl is not the couple’s first child.18 (70)

Les Dupont ont eu une petite fille. Ils avaient déjà deux garçons. ‘The Duponts have had a little girl. They already had two boys.’

We may, moreover, speculate that the iterative use of déjà is further favored by the fact that it appears to contribute to the disambiguation of the compound perfect as such. As discussed in ch. 4, sect. 2.3, note 7, there are three potential interpretations of the present perfect in French, 18 Co Vet (p.c.) suggests that déjà in (70) further contributes the meaning that the Duponts still had their boys at TT, and that, without déjà, the utterance would be compatible with a situation where the boys had died prior to the birth of their sister. The presence of déjà in the utterance would thus convey that the birth of the girl adds to the number of children in the Dupont household. I am not certain that I share this intuition, since, in the absence of an adverbial of temporal location, the TT of the imperfect past of the second sentence must be fixed by the previous sentence, as identical to the time of birth of the Duponts’ daughter, and, as we saw in sect. 4.1 supra, this TT is presumably subsumed by the imperfective event. If Vet’s intuition is correct, however, such an additive nuance of meaning could be the source of the requirement on the felicitous use of iterative déjà, discussed in connection with ex. (66), that it be conceivable that subsequent events of a similar type may add themselves to the ones mentioned in the déjà-marked clause.


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viz., as a resultative perfect (i.e. denoting a past event with present results), as an experiential perfect (i.e. denoting an event which has occurred one or more times in the past), and as a variant of the perfective past tense in informal registers. Now, an utterance of (67), which contains no temporal or aspectual adverbs, will intuitively tend to be interpreted as either a resultative perfect or as a perfective past, but not as an experiential perfect. The very same utterance containing déjà, on the other hand, will tend to favor the experiential reading of the perfect unless the context makes it clear that the phasal sense of déjà is intended (as it does in (68)).

5.2

Encore

Unlike iterative déjà, iterative encore is iterative in the strict sense of marking a repetition of a SoA that has been instantiated at least once prior to TT. Contrary to phasal encore, it is compatible with any type of process, telic (cf. (71)) or atelic (cf. (72)), and with both simple and compound tenses.19 Nonetheless, iterative encore constitutes a quite straightforward extension of the basic phasal use, which accounts for its being attested as early as the mid-12th century (cf. (73)). (71) (72) (73)

Philippe a encore divorcé. C’était pourtant sa quatrième femme… ‘Philippe has had a divorce again. And yet, it was his fourth wife…’ Tiens, Anne a encore les cheveux roux. Hier, elle était blonde. ‘Oh, Anne is a redhead again. Yesterday, she was blonde.’ Li reis Galafres encore l’en araisne: // “Parlez a mei, …” ‘King Galafres addresses him again, “Speak to me, …”’ (Li coronemenz Loois, v. 474, mid-12th cent. – from BFM)

The extension can plausibly be motivated by the idea of cumulativity, which, as argued in sect. 4.2 supra, is inherent in the phasal use of encore. In both uses, temporal intervals are being accumulated. What distinguishes the iterative use from the phasal one is simply that the intervals, which on a phasal reading of encore are conceived of as continuous, are instead understood as discontinuous on the iterative reading. The discontinuity – hence, the discreteness – of the intervals in the iterative use results in the disappearance of the conventionally implicated conceivable transition into ~e, which is now no more than a trivial logical implication. The validity of e prior to TT remains presupposed, however, although with one important modification: at least one transition into ~e must have occurred prior to TT, at which time e is again assertable. This presupposition renders the use of iterative encore infelicitous in an utterance like (74) (barring the establishment of a universe of discourse that differs markedly from the universe with which we are familiar from experience): (74)

Au moment où le bébé est sorti du ventre de sa mere, il a (*encore) hurlé. ‘Just when the baby came out of it’s mother’s belly, it screamed (again).’

Iterative encore may or may not conversationally implicate that someone might conceivably have thought that e would not become actual anew, i.e. that the most recent prior transition into ~e would have been the definitive one. Intuitively, however, such an implicature is probably a good deal less frequent than the corresponding implicature that, as observed above, frequently attaches to the use of phasal encore. 19 When encore takes scope over an atelic process in a simple tense, as in (72), the phasal reading will, however, tend to be preferred, unless the iterative reading is coerced by the co(n)text, as is the case here.

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Despite these differences, it is not clear that the iterative reading of encore constitutes an independent sense of the adverb.20 While some languages (e.g. English still vs again), possess different translation equivalents for the phasal and the iterative use of encore, others (e.g. German noch) use the same lexeme for both. Also, in French, the two uses are externally negated by the same expression, namely ne…plus (cf. (75)-(76)) (75) (76)

Nicolas n’est plus célibataire. ‘Nicolas is no longer unmarried.’ A partir de sa cinquième femme, Philippe n’a plus divorcé. ‘Starting with his fifth wife, Philippe didn’t get divorced anymore.’

On the other hand, Lakoff’s (1970) identity test (cf. ch. 2, sect. 4.2) for ambiguity vs vagueness indicates that the two readings are distinct (cf. (77)), as does the fact that they are mutually exclusive in contexts where either is possible (cf. (78)): (77)

(78)

[In a context where Anne has changed her haircolor recently, whereas Simone has always been a redhead] ??Anne a encore les cheveux roux, et Simone aussi. ‘Anne is (still) a redhead (again), and so is Simone.’ Ecoute! Il y a l’alarme qui sonne encore. ‘Listen! The alarm is still going off / has gone off again.’

Finally, although it is attested at an early stage, clear instances of the iterative reading of encore are not frequent in my Old French data, several potential instantiations being in fact equally compatible with a phasal interpretation (e.g. (79)). Clearly, such “intermediate” examples constitute the most likely bridging contexts for the rise of iterative encore. (79)

Dius m’a bien aidié dusc’a ore, // Si me puet bien aidier encore. (Eracle, v. 1217-18, ca. 1176-1184 – from BFM) ‘God has helped me so far, so he may well help me still / again.’

5.2.1 Additive encore Encore has a use, exemplified in (81), which is very close to the iterative one, but which is strictly speaking not aspectual in nature, but rather additive in a more general sense. In its iterative use proper, e.g. (80), encore scopes the predicate of the clause in its entirety (that is, the entire “verb constellation”, as defined in ch. 4, sect. 2.1 supra). Thus, in a context like (80), encore will normally be interpreted as presupposing that Aline has been involved in at least one “t-shirt-buying event” prior to the one described. (80)

Aline a encore acheté un t-shirt. Elle doit en avoir une cinquantaine maintenant. ‘Aline has bought a t-shirt again. She must have about fifty by now.’

However, certain types of contexts may give rise to a much looser interpretation, involving additivity, rather than strict iteration. In (81), for instance, the preceding sentence does not describe Aline as being the agent of any “t-shirt-buying events” at all prior to the encoremarked event; rather, it describes her as having completed a number of more general “clothes20 Indeed, it has been argued by Victorri & Fuchs (1992: 147) that the two are mere modulations of one and the same core sense.


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buying events”. Similarly, in (82), encore clearly does not signify that Burke repeatedly makes the same statement, but that he makes two different statements (in quotation marks in the text), both of which are relevant to the issue under discussion: (81)

(82)

Aline a acheté deux pulls, une mini-jupe et un caleçon. – Et puis, elle a encore acheté un t-shirt. ‘Aline bought two sweaters, a mini-skirt, and a pair of leggings. – And then, she also bought a t-shirt.’ A l’Anglais Thomas Paine, admirateur de la table rase révolutionnaire de 1789-1793, Finkielkraut oppose l’Anglais Edmund Burke, pour qui “l’Etat doit se concevoir comme une association non seulement entre les vivants, mais entre les vivants et les morts et tous ceux qui vont naître”. Si les hommes refusent de s’intégrer à la chaîne des generations, ils “ne vaudraient guère mieux que les mouches d’un été”, dit encore Burke. (Nouvel Observateur, no. 1795: 5) ‘In opposition to the Englishman Thomas Paine, an admirer of the revolutionary blank slate of 1789-1793, Finkielkraut mentions the Englishman Edmund Burke, for whom “the State must be conceived of as an association not only of the living, but of the living and the dead and all those yet to be born”. If men refuse to be part of the chain of generations, they “are hardly worth more than summer flies”, Burke also says.’

Thus, the additive use of encore presents the SoA it marks as part of a particular, contextually invoked frame, e.g. a “clothes-buying” frame in the case of (81), or an “observations-aboutthe-nature-of-the-state-made-by-E.-Burke” frame, and it presupposes that the relevant frame accommodates other similar SoA, at least some of which have been actualized in addition to the encore-marked one.21 Due to this looser meaning, additive encore is not appropriately negated by ne…plus (“not anymore”), but only by the general negation ne…pas (“not”). Another salient difference between the iterative and the additive use of encore is the fact that additive encore straddles the level of content and the level of context. While it does say something about the SoA described in the clause and its relation to other SoAs of the described world, the notion that the SoA in question is being added to other SoAs belonging to the same 21

This additive sense of encore is also found in a couple of more or less frozen collocations: the bi-partite additive-concessive connective non seulement…mais (encore) seen in (i), and the disjunctive connective ou encore, which marks the last of a series of (mutually compatible) alternatives, seen in (ii): (i) Non seulement la typologie constitue un prolongement de l’entreprise même de l’Analyse de Discours – puisqu’elle consiste à expliquer à partir de catégories linguistiques un phénomène, le Discours – mais encore elle permet de doter l’Analyse de Discours d’une nouvelle ambition et d’un nouveau projet. (Reboul & Moeschler 1998: 100) ’Not only does typology constitute an extension of the project of Discourse Analysis as such – since it consists in using linguistic categories to explain a phenomenon, namely discourse – but it also provides Discourse Analysis with a new ambition and a new project.’ (ii) Mais qui célèbre-t-on au juste? L’Hemingway légendaire, cabotin, le chasseur de fauves en Afrique, l’amateur de corridas, le boxeur approximatif, le bagarreur de night-clubs, le pêcheur d’espadons au large de Key West, l’homme qui prétendait jouer les espions et traquer les sousmarins nazis depuis sa demeure de La Havane, ou encore le correspondant de guerre qui libéra Paris et l’hôtel Ritz en août 1944, […]? (Nouvel Observateur, no. 1796: 58) ’But who exactly is being celebrated? The legendary, hamming Hemingway, the big-game hunter in Africa, the lover of bull fights, the so-so boxer, the night-club fighter, the sword fish angler off Key West, the man who claimed to be a spy and to be tracking down submarines from his residence in Havana, or else the war correspondent who liberated Paris and the hotel Ritz in August 1944, […]?’

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frame is relevant at the level of discourse presentation only. Thus, there is no sense, in either (81) or (82), that the encore-marked SoA is real-world-chronologically later than the ones described in the preceding sentence. Aline may well have bought her t-shirt before she bought her mini-skirt, and Burke may well have written the passage about men and flies before he wrote the one about the living and the dead. It is only in the context of the discourse as such that the events related in the encore-marked clauses constitute additional facts of relevance to the topic of discussion. My earliest example of additive encore is from the late 11th century (cf. (83)), and, the similarities between the two uses notwithstanding, it therefore probably does not represent a loosening of the iterative use, which, as we saw, appears over half a century later. Instead, it is likely to be motivated directly by the cumulative element of meaning that inheres in phasal encore, such that – in spite of the telicity of the verb ocire – (83) may be loosely understood as meaning that the Saracen who is the subject of the uncore-clause remains in a “killing-mode”: (83)

5.3

Aprof li ad sa bronie desclose, // El cors li met tute l’enseigne bloie, // Que mort l’abat en une halte roche. // Sun cumpaignun Gerers ocit uncore, // E Berenger e guiun de Seint Antonie; (La chanson de Roland, vv.1620-24, ca. 1080 – from BFM) ‘Afterwards, he tears open his coat of mail, He drives the entire blue ensign into his body, Killing him on a tall rock. He also kills his companion Gérier, And Berenger and Gui de Saint-Antoine;’

Habitual toujours

While toujours has no iterative use parallel to that of encore, it can, as noted above, be used with a related aspectual meaning that may be called “habitual” (cf. Kleiber 1987), as in (84). As the example shows, there is clear continuity between the temporal and the habitual use of toujours, in as much as the set of times quantified over are restricted to a particular co- or contextually determined frame of reference which re-occurs at more or less regular intervals, and with unspecified frequency, such that the “global validity” of the SoA is restricted to specific occasions within the contextually relevant interval: (84)

Quand je suis à Venise, je vais toujours à La Fenice. ‘When(ever) I am in Venice, I always go to La Fenice.’

In (84), the habitual interpretation comes about because a temporal clause introduced by quand, and whose verb is in the present indicative, can only be understood as referring to a SoA that is distributed in time. Had the verb been in the future tense, the sentence would be understood as referring to a single occasion, and insertion of toujours would be blocked, cf. (85). To get the habitual meaning, a different conjunction with a clearly distributive meaning, such as chaque fois que (“every time that”) is needed; here, however, the insertion of toujours is very odd (cf. (86)). The oddity presumably results from the fact that Chaque fois que p takes toujours in its scope here, while the interval denoted by the subordinate clause (any single, arbitrarily chosen trip to Venice) will, under normal circumstances, be seen as too short to accommodate a general rule, just as in (85), or in (10), adduced in sect. 3.2 supra. (85)

Quand je serai à Venise, j’irai (*?toujours) à La Fenice. ‘When I’m Venise, I’ll (always) go to La Fenice’

Content-Level Uses of the French Phasal Adverbs (86)

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Chaque fois que je serai à Venise, j’irai (*?toujours) à La Fenice. ‘Every time I’m in Venice, I’ll (always) go to La Fenice.’

The temporal and habitual uses are negated in the same way, both internally and externally, cf. (87), and are translated into at least the languages mentioned in sect. 3.2.1 supra, in connection with the generic use, by the same lexical items: (87)

Quand je suis à Venise, je ne vais jamais / pas toujours à La Fenice. ‘When(ever) I am in Venice, I never / do not always go to La Fenice.’

In my data base, the first unambiguous example of the habitual use of toujours is from the early 13th century (cf. (88)). This rather long temporal lapse between attestations of the basic and the habitual use, respectively, might argue for the latter’s being an actual meaning extension. However, there is clear continuity between the two uses in as much as the “generalrule” character of the quantification expressed by temporal toujours may be said to rely on an implicit restriction of the frequency with which the SoA occurs on the order of “whenever it was/is/will be possible and relevant,…” If this is correct, then the only real difference between the two uses is that habitual toujours requires an explicit restriction of that frequency, and a specification of the relevant frame. Hence, it is perhaps preferable to explain its existence the same way as I explained that of the distributive use of toujours, namely as a case of delayed actualization of the full usage potential of the temporal sense of the adverb. (88)

5.4

…car de tant est il amendez de ma priere que touz jorz a eure de midi, en cele eure meïsmes qu’il fu bautisiez, amendera sa force et sa vertu en quel que leu qu’il soit,… (La mort le roi Artu, p. 198, ca. 1230, from BFM) ‘…for so much is he improved by my prayer that always at the hour of noon, at that same hour when he was baptized, it improves his strength and virtue wherever he is,…’

Summary

As we have seen, only two of the four particles have iterative uses, which in both cases are likely to represent extensions of their respective phasal meanings. However, not only does the iterative uses of encore arise significantly earlier than that of déjà, but the latter only qualifies as iterative in a rather loose sense of the term. Thus, where iterative encore asserts that the SoA e is or has been actualized at TT, and presupposes that it had been actualized at one or more occasions prior to TT, iterative déjà asserts that e had been actualized prior to TT, and presupposes that it may become reactualized at one or more occasions at, or subsequent to, TT. Although we may therefore say that the two particles contrast at some level, in as much as encore signals the continuation of a series of events of the same type, while déjà signals the inception of a potential series of such events, it is hardly plausible that the meaning of one is, in an essential way, defined and constrained by the meaning of the other, the way paradigmatically opposed meanings are in structuralist conceptions of the lexicon. Nevertheless, speakers’ metalinguistic knowledge of the fact that encore already possessed both a phasal and an iterative use, may well have been a factor in their choice of the particle déjà, which partially contrasted with encore as a phasal adverb, as a candidate for meaning extension in the direction of iterativity. As argued in ch. 2, sect. 5 supra, and as illustrated by (89) (repeated here for convenience), if two lexemes X and Y are perceived as being

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semantically opposed in some salient use, and if X morever has a different, well-entrenched use, then Y may be spontaneously chosen as a nonce antonym of X, in a context where the intended sense is quite clear, even though that sense is not at all conventionally established for Y. And, of course, if such spontaneous oppositions occur frequently enough, and are perceived as useful by other speakers, the innovative use of Y may end up becoming entrenched. (89)

He traded his hot [i.e. stolen] car for a cold [i.e. legally acquired] one. (from Lehrer 2002: 505)

While habituality is, of course, conceptually related to iterativity in that both refer to the repetition of SoAs, habitual toujours does not appear to enter into any very salient contrast with either of the other two adverbs in their iterative uses. As observed in ch. 4, sect. 2.1, habituality is fundamentally a form of (derived) stativity, so while utterances with iterative déjà and encore focus on specific single occurrences of a given type of SoA, those hosting habitual toujours do not. Rather, such utterances focus on an unspecified multiplicity of occurrences, and express a norm or regularity that holds under certain circumstances. They thus have an atemporal quality not found in utterances with iterative déjà and encore. Given the analyses above, these differences appear evidently attributable to the nature of the source meanings of the three items, and it is intuitively unlikely that toujours would ever evolve into a marker of limited iterativity (be it of an actual or a potential nature). In other words, persistence of the source meaning of toujours is likely to put a brake on the integration of that adverb into an iterative “paradigm” with déjà and encore.

6

DEJA, ENCORE, AND TOUJOURS AS PHRASAL ADJUNCTS

In the various uses discussed above, the four adverbs all function as sentential adjuncts, modifying the host clause – or at least its predicate – as a whole. In this section, I will be concerned with a set of uses in which déjà, encore, and toujours, respectively, fulfil instead the function of phrasal adjuncts, modifying a specific subpart of the host clause, be it an adverbial, a nominal or an adjectival constituent.

6.1

Focus-particle uses of déjà and encore

Both déjà and encore have a content-level use where they function as focus particles, focusing on a clause constituent, which they implicitly relate to a set of contextually given alternatives, rather than on the host clause as a whole (cf. Nølke 1983, König 1991). (We will see in ch. 7 infra that déjà can also be used as a focus particle at the contextual level of utterances.) The criteria for classifying them as focus particles are, firstly, that déjà and encore will move with the focus constituent, with which they also form an intonational unit, cf. (90)-(91), (93)-(94). Moreover, as the examples show, the particles may occur either immediately before or immediately after the focus expression, and in some cases even between a preposition and its complement, cf. (92) and (95) : (90) (91) (92) (93)

Je l’attends déjà depuis deux heures. Depuis deux heures déjà, je l’attends. Je l’attends depuis déjà deux heures. ‘I’ve been waiting for him/her for two hours already.’ Encore en 2003, Vincent aurait voté oui à l’Europe.

Content-Level Uses of the French Phasal Adverbs (94) (95) (96)

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En 2003 encore, Vincent aurait voté oui à l’Europe. ‘As late as 2003, Vincent would have voted yes to Europe.’ Je l’attendrai pendant encore un quart d’heure, puis je m’en irai. ‘I’ll wait for him/her for another fifteen minutes, then I’ll leave.’ Maman m’a donné encore quelques bonbons. ‘Mummy gave me some more candies.’

As examples (90)-(95) show, both déjà and encore can be used as temporal focus particles, but encore also has a (perhaps more common) use as a simple additive focus particle, cf (96). 6.1.1 Déjà and encore as temporal focus particles In the uses exemplified in (90)-(95), déjà and encore focus on a temporal adverbial, rather than on the predicate of the sentence.22 Like their German equivalents schon and noch, the French particles function as additive scalar particles in this use (cf. König 1991: 140f). Thus, with the use of déjà, the focus constituent is identified with the starting point of a co(n)textually given scale. In (90), for instance, the scale in question begins two hours prior to TT, where TT = the moment of utterance. With encore, the focus constituent is instead identified with a point towards the end of such a scale, such that in (93), the relevant time scale is understood to have begun prior to, and continued up until TT, but probably not beyond, where TT = the year 2003. This analysis suggests that the focus particles are closely related to the phasal uses of the two particles. Indeed, the two types of uses appear to be functionally equivalent in all their occurrences. Thus, occurrences like (93) or (97), in which the temporal adverbials focused by the particles are punctual, have exactly the same usage conditions with respect to the possibility of a prior (déjà) or subsequent (encore) change-of-state, and to the earliness of the instantiation (déjà) or, alternatively, the duration of the continuation (encore), as the corresponding sentences containing tokens of the phasal adverbs, cf. (98)-(99) : (97) (98) (99)

Déjà à l’âge de sept ans, elle lisait le latin sans problèmes. ‘Already at the age of seven, she read Latin without any problems.’ Elle lisait déjà le latin sans problème à l’âge de sept ans. ‘She already read Latin without any problems at the age of seven.’ Vincent aurait encore voté oui à l’Europe en 2003. ‘Vincent would still have voted yes to Europe in 2003.’

When the focus constituent of déjà is a durative adverbial, as in (90)-(92), a seemingly paradoxical interpretation arises, namely that the period in question is longer than one might have expected. Nevertheless, it can be argued that all the examples in (90)-(92), and (97)-(98) continue to involve the idea that something has occurred earlier than expected ; thus, when the sentence contains a durative adverbial like depuis deux heures (“for two hours”), déjà expresses that the transition between a period leading up to TT, which can truthfully be described as “for less than two hours” and the inception of one which may be described as “for two hours” has occurred sooner than one might have thought.23 22

One may find peripheral instances like (i), where the particle takes a nominal, rather than a adverbial, constituent as its focus (frequently, but not necessarily, a proper noun, as in the example given), this constituent being indirectly, i.e. via encyclopedic knowledge, associated with a specific time period : (i) Déjà Aristote disait cela. Lit. : ‘Already Aristotle said that.’ 23 The use of déjà with an iterative adverbial as its focus constituent, like in (101) below, can be explained in an analogous fashion.

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It is thus not entirely clear whether we need to distinguish the phasal adverbs and the temporal focus particles in a semantic / pragmatic description. The syntactic difference between the phasal and the focus-particle uses of the two items suggests, of course, that the focus particles cannot straightforwardly be identified with the phasal adverbs, but may constitute extensions of the latter. In support of this, the earliest example of focus-particle encore in my data is from the late 12th century, i.e. almost a century and a half after the first attestation of the phasal adverb (cf. (100)), while the first occurrence of focus-particle déjà appears to be the early 14thcentury extract adduced by Buchi (fc), and reproduced in note 15 supra. In my electronic data bases, I have found no examples of the focus particle prior to the 17th century (cf. (101)), which indicates that this use does not become at all common for several centuries.24 In any case, even if the temporal-focus-particle use of déjà is traced back to 1330, with Buchi’s example, we still have to wait 70 years from the first attested use of phasal déjà in (1) (sect. 3.1 supra) until the focus particle appears. (100)

(101)

Encor ancui l’ateindroiz vos // Se ses escloz savez garder, // Mes gardez vos de trop tarder. (Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain ou le Chevalier au Lion, vv.502426, ca. 1177-81 – from Tobler & Lommatsch 1954 : 245) ‘You may catch up with him yet today // If you can keep track of him // But take care you don’t hesitate too long.’ …et déjà soixante et trois fois // j’ay veu naistre et mourir l’année. (François Maynard, Poésies, 1646, from Frantext) ‘…and already sixty-three times // have I seen the year be born and die.’

On the other hand, the functional similarities between the uses in question are such that an optimal account of them may profitably make use of the notion of gradual actualization of the full meaning potential inherent in phasal déjà and encore, similarly to what was suggested in the description of the relations between distributive and habitual uses of toujours, on the one hand, and the basic temporal sense of that adverbs, on the other. 6.1.2 Encore as an additive focus particle As already noted above, and as demonstrated by exx. (93)-(95), focus-particle encore has additive meaning (cf. also Nølke 1983 : 140ff). Unlike focus-particle déjà, encore is, however, standardly found with focus constituents whose meaning is non-temporal, and which perform argument functions in the host clause, such that the particle simply signals the inclusion of another token of some referent type into a pre-existing set, e.g. (102), where encore weakly presupposes that Aline already possessed a number of t-shirts ≥ 1 prior to the purchase of the one referred to by the focus constituent: (102)

Aline a acheté encore un t-shirt. ‘Aline bought another t-shirt.’

In this use, encore is perfectly neutral as to the possibility of further additions to the set beyond the instance mentioned, contrary to the temporal focus particle, which strongly implicates that the SoA denoted by the host clause does not continue past the time referred to by the focused adverbial. As observed by Nølke (1983: 141), an element of temporal ordering does persist in 24 We may, in fact, be dealing with what Geeraerts (1997: 62) calls “semantic polygenesis”, i.e. the phenomenon whereby a given meaning extension is attested at several different points in the history of a language, but with long intervening periods of non-attestation, such that the extension appears each time to have arisen in an independent fashion.


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the purely additive focus particle, as it is weakly presupposed25 that the referent of the focus expression constitutes an addition to referents of the same type that already existed in the universe of discourse prior to TT. This use of encore is unambiguously attested in my data only in the mid-16th century, cf. (103): (103)

L’advocat ayant la matière à cueur, disoit: Monsieur le president, encore un mot. (Bonaventure des Périers, Les nouvelles recreations et joyeux devis de feu, 1558, from Frantext) ‘The lawyer, who was concerned with the matter, said: Your Honor, one more word.’

In the older texts, however, a number of ambiguous examples can be found from the late 12th century onwards which suggest several possible paths of extension by which this use of encore may have arisen. Chronology would suggest that the additive focus particle is derived from the additive use discussed in 5.2.1 supra, cf. instances such as (104), which may have constituted the necessary bridging contexts for such an extension. Alternatively, the phasal or the iterative uses are possible sources of the focus particle, as suggested by (105) and (106), respectively: (104)

(105)

(106)

Je cuit bien que tu as ancores // Un autre non. (Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval ou le Conte du Graal, vv. 348-49, ca. 1181-85 – from Tobler & Lommatsch 1954 : 248) ‘I do believe you [also have another name / have yet another name].’ “Kahedin, fait Palamidés, se vous ne volés venir avoec moi vers le roiaume de Gorre, nous nous departirom ichi, car chi se depart nostre voie: ceste voie decha, u je me voel metre, s’en vait droit u roiaume de Gorre, dont li rois Baudemagus est sires. Et se vous baés orendroit a cevauchier vers la Petite Bretaingne, ceste autre voie vous i menra tout droit. Et se vous volés encore une piece cevauchier pour veoir les merveilleuses aventures du roiaume de Logres, avoec moi poés cevauchier… (Tristan en prose, P121, 13th cent. – from BFM) “Kahedin, said Palamides, if you do not want to come with me to the kingdom of Gorre, we will part here, for here our ways part: this road here, by which I will go, goes straight to the kingdom of Gorre, where King Baudemagus reigns. And if you wish now to ride to Brittany, this other road will take you straight there. And [if you still want to ride a bit with me / if you want to ride another bit with me] to see the marvelous adventures of the kingdom of Logres, you can ride with me…’ Si demanderent li Franchois leur paiement a l’empereur, et li empereres respondi qu’il avoit si se chité raience et ses gens qu’il ne leur avoit que paier, mais dounaissent lui un terme, et par dedens il se pourvesroit qu’il les paieroit. Il li dounerent, et quant li termes fu passés, il ne les paia nient, et li baron redemanderent de rekief leur paiement. Et li empereres redemanda encore un respit, et on li donna. (Robert de Clari, La conqueste de Constantinople, p. 58, early 13th cent. – from BFM)

25 Nølke (1983: 141) himself speaks of a temporal ”implicature”, but the notion of weak presupposition strikes me as a more appropriate description of this element of meaning, given that an utterance of (i), a negated version of (102), similarly appears to take for granted that Aline already possesses at least one t-shirt: (i) Aline n’a pas acheté encore un t-shirt. ’Aline didn’t buy another t-shirt.’

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Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface ‘Thus, the French asked the emperor for their pay, and the emperor replied that he had paid so much ransom for himself and his men that he did not have the wherewithal to pay them, but that they should give him a date of payment, and he would see to it that he paid them within that time. They gave him one, and when the date had passed, he paid them nothing, and the barons again asked for their pay. And the emperor [asked for a respite again / asked for another respite], and it was given him.’

In fact, in all probability, there is no need to choose between these three alternative sources: as argued by Geeraerts (1997: 60), meaning extensions in a prototype-based semantics are assumed to have the structure of a clustered set, such that new uses may originate in several existing ones at the same time.

6.2

Encore and toujours as degree adverbs

The final type of content-oriented uses to be discussed here is the very common use of encore, and the somewhat more marginal use of toujours as intensifying, presuppositional degree adverbs (cf. Bolinger 1972) modifying a syntactically gradable adjective or adverb in the comparative degree (cf. Lyons 1977: 271ff, Whittaker 2002).26 The uses in question are exemplified in (107)-(108). It is clear from these examples that the scope of the degree adverbs is restricted to the comparative form alone, as evidenced by the fact that, in (107), encore occurs, not in the canonical position of phasal adverbs immediately after the auxiliary, but rather following the non-finite main verb, while in (108), toujours is inserted between the preposition avec and its complement. (107)

(108)

Le premier roman de Duschnock a eu beaucoup de succès. Le deuxième s’est vendu encore mieux. ‘Duschnock’s first novel was a great success. The second one sold even better.’ Elle me regardait avec toujours plus d’inquiétude. ‘She looked at me with ever more disquiet.’

As degree adverbs, encore and toujours are only used in comparisons of inequality. Both can be used in comparisons involving one and the same entity at different points in time, e.g. (108), in which the degree of disquiet perceived in the subject referent’s gaze at TT is compared to that of TT-i, TT-j,… etc., or (109), in which the degree of apparent stupidity of Hugues’ girlfriend is compared with respect to two different occasions, TT-i and TT, with the earlier occasion serving as the standard of comparison. The use of the degree adverbs with the comparative form of an adjective or adverb evokes gradability scales, for instance, in the case of (109), a scale of stupidity of the type seen in Figure 6.5. (109)

Je n’apprécie pas la nouvelle copine de Hugues: elle m’a semblé encore plus bête hier soir que la première fois que je l’avais vue. (#Là, je ne l’avais pas trouvée bête du tout.) ‘I don’t like Hugues’ new girlfriend. She seemed even more stupid to me last night than the first time I met her. (I didn’t think she was at all stupid then.)’

26 In using the term ”syntactically gradable”, I follow Whittaker (2002: 4), who observes that syntactic and referential (or ontological) gradability are, in principle, independent properties.


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[Figure 6.5: An example of a gradability scale]

rather stupid

stupid

very stupid

extremely stupid

In such examples, what is asserted is an (at least apparent) increase in the property denoted by the adjective scoped by encore or toujours, and it is presupposed that the property as such was already present in the subject referent on the earlier occasion(s) with respect to which the comparison is made, as shown by the infelicity of the continuation (in parentheses) of (109). Since, as noted by Ducrot (1970: 47), this presuppositional property is not shared by unmodified comparatives (witness the fact that (110) does not suggest that Hugues’ girlfriend necessarily struck the speaker as stupid when they first met), it must be attributed to the presence of encore / toujours: (110)

La nouvelle copine d’Hugues m’a semblée plus bête hier soir que la première fois que je l’ai vue. ‘Hugues’ new girlfriend seemed more stupid to me last night than when I first met her.’

Thus, encore / toujours signal that, even if the (explicit or implicit) second term of comparison, for instance, in (109), Hugues’ girlfriend at TT-i (where TT-i = “the first time I met her”), already occupied a point some way towards the right-hand end of a finite scale, that scale nevertheless extends at least up to and including the point where we find the first term of comparison (in the case of (109), Hugues’ girlfriend at TT (where TT = “last night”). There is a very obvious sense relation between the intensifying sense discussed here and the phasal, continuative, sense of the particles, a sense relation that is perhaps particularly evident when one compares the examples with degree adverbs to examples like (111), where phasal encore / toujours have scope over a predicate, s’accentuer, which itself denotes the gradual intensification of an already on-going process. With the insertion of phasal encore / toujours, the complement clause of (111) comes to presuppose the actuality of the SoA S’ACCENTUER(LA DIFFÉRENCE ENTRE LES ETHNIES) during the time TT-i leading up to TT (cf. the analyses in sections 4.2-4.3 supra). The combination of that presupposition with the particular type of predicate used here of necessity results in a comparative interpretation. (111)

Avec la mondialisation, on peut craindre que les différences entre les ethnies s’accentue encore / toujours dans les années à venir. ‘With globalization, we may fear that the differences between ethnic groups will still increase in the years to come.’

In view of this sense relation between the two uses, the functional extension of encore and toujours from the phasal-adverb use to the degree-adverb use can be explained as due to reanalysis of the scope of the particles. As (112)-(113) show, encore and toujours in their phasal, sentential-scope uses occur freely in contexts where they immediately precede a comparative form of an adjective or adverb, such contexts potentially lending themselves to scope ambiguities. (112)

J’ai commencé à lire ton manuscrit, mais il me reste encore plus de 50 pages.

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(113)

‘I’ve started reading your manuscript, but I still have more than 50 pages to go.’ Michel est toujours plus agréable quand il a un peu bu. ‘Michel is always nicer when he’s had a few drinks.’

The meaning extension from phasal adverb to degree adverb can plausibly be analyzed as being metonymical in nature. As already discussed in various places, time may be conceptualized as a scale of successive points, to which the inception and / or duration of states-of-affairs expressed by the phasal adverbs is related. In the degree-adverb use of encore and toujours, the scalarity that thus inheres in the meaning of the phasal adverbs is foregrounded as such through its restriction to a property denoted by a single constituent of the clause, whereas the element of temporal development, which is a feature of the SoA as a whole, is backgrounded. With encore, this backgrounding of the temporal element of meaning is carried further than with toujours, in as much as the former, but not the latter, particle can be used in comparisons of inequality involving two different entities, and in which no temporal development, nor no temporal presupposition, is involved, as in (114): (114)

Luc est encore plus beau qu’Adrien. (#Ce dernier n’est pas beau du tout.) ‘Luc is even better-looking that Adrien. (The latter isn’t at all goodlooking.)’

An utterance of this sentence does not assert or suggest that Luc’s attractiveness has increased as compared to some earlier time. Nor does it presuppose that Luc was better-looking that Adrien at any such time prior to TT. Instead, the use of encore presupposes that the positive degree of the adjective applies not only to the first term of comparison, in casu Luc, but also to the second term of comparison, in casu Adrien, such that the referent of both terms can be located somewhere on the non-left-most part of the scale in Figure 6.6 infra (from “plain” beau and upwards) (cf. the infelicity of continuing (114) as indicated in the parentheses). In as much as the second term of comparison constitutes the standard, this means that the applicability of the term beau begins, in an abstract sense, prior to the consideration of the first term of comparison. Hence, an utterance of (114) asserts that when moving from an appreciation of Adrien’s attractiveness to an appreciation of Luc’s, one will move further towards the right-hand end of the scale in Figure 6.6. [Figure 6.6: Physical attractiveness as a gradable property]

rather handsome

handsome

very handsome

extremely handsome

Apart from the use of encore exemplified in (114), the discussion so far may have given the impression that there is no difference in meaning between encore and toujours as degree adverbs when used in examples like (108)-(109). That is not the case. While encore allows for the comparison of only two different points in time, toujours implies three or more, such that a (real or apparent) increase in the property in question has been observed at least once prior to TT. This requirement on the use of intensifying toujours should not come as a surprise when


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we consider that the temporal source meaning of that particle expresses a general rule or disposition, as discussed in sect. 3.2. Moreover, with encore, it is intimated that the referent of the second term of comparison is situated so far along the right-hand end of the relevant scale that comparison with other referents beyond that denoted by the first term of comparison is unlikely to continue to yield further increase in the property under consideration; indeed, the fact that even the first term of comparison is observed to instantiate such an increase may be felt to be at least somewhat unexpected. With toujours, on the other hand, there is no such expectation that an extreme degree of the property will necessarily be reached in the future, and increase may, in principle, continue indefinitely. Again, this is in conformity with what we might expect given the difference we observed in sections 4.2-4.3 supra, between the respective phasal meanings of the two particles, whereby phasal encore, but not phasal toujours, requires for its felicitous use that a future transition into ~e be conceivable. While the examples seen so far represent unambiguous instances of either the phasal or the intensifying reading of the particles, examples can easily be found where both readings are potentially applicable, cf. (115)-(116), both of which are from approximately the periods where intensifying encore and toujours are first unambiguously attested, i.e. the early 13th century and the early 17th century, respectively (cf. (117)-(118)). It is likely, therefore, that (115)-(116) represent the type of bridging contexts that led to the rise of the degree adverbs: (115)

(116)

(117)

(118)

Sire, dist il, vostre merci. // A ceste damoisele ci // Vous pri c’ox pardounés vostre ire; // Et si vous veul encor plus dire, // Dont je vous veul forment priier, // Ke welliés que ce chevalier // Ait par vostre otroi vostre suer, // Car il l’ainme de tout sen cuer, // Et je quit bien qu’ele aime lui; (L’Atre périlleux, vv. 4419-27, mid-13th cent. – from BFM) ‘Sire, he says, Your Grace. I ask you that you will renounce on your anger against this maiden; And, indeed, I [still want to say something more / want to say even more], So I strongly want to ask you that you grant that this knight may have your sister by your consent, For he loves her with all his heart, And I believe that she loves him;’ Mais si l’esperance est esteinte, // pourquoy desir, t’efforces-tu // de faire une plus grande atteinte? // C’est que tu nays de la vertu, // et comme elle est toujours plus forte, // et sans faveurs et sans appas, // quoy que l’esperance soit morte, // desir, pourtant tu ne meurs pas. (Honoré d’Urfé, L’astrée, vol.1, book 3, p. 96, 1612 – from Frantext) ‘But if hope is extinguished, // why, desire, do you endeavor // to reach higher? // It is because you are born of virtue // and as it [is always stronger / grows ever stronger], // both without favors and without attractions, // even though hope is dead, // desire, nevertheless you do not die.’ …car je li ai tolu partie de ses homes, qui l’ont lessié por venir a moi por la grant compaignie qu’ils voient que je lor port. Car il ne me demandent riens que je ne lor doigne, et encore assez plus. (La queste del Saint Graal, ca. 1220, p. 108 – from BFM) ‘…for I took a share of his men, who left him to come to me because of the great fellow-feeling that they see that I have for them. For they ask me nothing that I do not grant them, and even much more.’ Ma niepce est toujours plus résolüe; je l’allay voir hier au soir; elle me dict qu’elle eust desiré de prendre l’habit le jour de Pasques. Il y en a desja sept

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Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface qui ont prins l’habit devant qu’elle… (Nicolas de Peiresc, Lettres à sa famille [1625], vol. 6, p. 142, 1602 – from Frantext) ‘My niece becomes ever more determined; I went to see her last night; she told me that she would have wished to take the veil on Easter day. There are already seven who have taken the veil before her…’

6.3

Summary

In this section, we have reviewed a set of uses where déjà, encore, and toujours have subsentential scope, modifying in various ways different types of constituents of the host clause. I argued that the temporal focus-particle uses of déjà and encore were semantically (if not syntactically) identical to the phasal adverbs, and that it is therefore an open question whether they constitute sense extensions at all. Still, the diachronic data, and the fact that neither toujours nor enfin has such a use, point to a difference in status between the phasal adverbs and the focus particles. The additive focus particle encore, and the two degree adverbs encore and toujours, on the other hand, are probably fairly uncontroversial sense extensions. It was shown that the phrasal adjunct uses are in all cases attested later than the temporal or phasal source uses of the particles. In all these uses, the particles have undergone a reduction in scope, from the sentential to the phrasal level. In the case of encore as an additive focus particle, and of encore / toujours as degree adverbs, some degree of semantic bleaching has occurred, by the firm backgrounding of the temporal dimension of their source meanings. Finally, the syntagmatic variability of the latter three uses is greatly reduced, the additive focus particle obligatorily appearing in the position immediately preceding the central determiner of an NP, and the degree adverbs appearing in first position in an adjective or adverb phrase. In terms of Lehmann’s (1985) diagnostics, discussed in ch. 3, sect. 3.1 supra, all the phrasal adjunct uses of the particles can thus, to a greater or lesser degree, be seen as instances of grammaticalization.

7 GENERAL SUMMARY In this chapter, I have attempted to give a reasonably exhaustive analysis of the various content-level uses of déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin. Of the four particles, encore has evolved the most from its source meaning: it has the largest number of different uses, and although all of these have been argued to be to some extent motivated by the phasal source meaning of the marker (possibly via an intermediate step), the temporal / aspectual element is quite weak in three of them, viz. the additive sentential adjunct use, the additive focus particle use, and the degree adverb use. Enfin, on the other hand, has the fewest content-level uses of the four. We shall see in the next chapter that this particle does, however, possess a large spectrum of context-level uses, which are, in fact, more frequent, and perhaps also cognitively more salient, than its content-level uses in contemporary French, contrary to what is the case with the déjà, encore, and toujours. The uses of the four particles that have been described here are inventoried and presented in synoptic form in Table 6.1 infra, together with the dates of their respective first appearances in my data base.


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As will be seen, there is no obvious systematicity to this table: only one type of use, namely the phasal use, is shared by all four particles, and here the dates indicate that each particle developed this use in at least relative independence of the other three. The same is true of those uses that are shared by only two of the particles. Whatever “paradigmaticity” we see in these four particles is therefore more likely to be an artefact of the analysis than to reveal any profound truths about the nature and structure of language. In fact, it may be the very unsystematicity of this table, and the gaps in a number of the cells, that reveal the more interesting truth about semantic organization. [Table 6.1: Content-level uses of the four adverbs] Sentential adjunct function déjà Temporal ? 13th c. Generic × Phasal √ 13th c. Iterative √ late 17th c. Habitual × Additive ×

encore × × √ 11th c. √ 12th c. × √ late 11th c.

toujours √ 11th c. √ 17th c. √ early 13th c. × √ early 13th c. ×

enfin √ 11th c. × √ early 17th c. × × ×

Phrasal adjunct function déjà Temporal FP √ earl.14th/17th c. Additive FP × Degree adverb ×

encore √ late 12th c. √ 16th c. √ early 13th c.

toujours × × √ early 17th c.

enfin × × ×

In all the above analyses, I have attempted to show how the extensions tie in naturally with the source meanings, and I have sought to exemplify the type of contexts of use of the source items that may plausibly have given rise to specific extensions. The other, more speculative, side of this coin is the hypothesis that the persistence of source meanings can also provide an at least partial explanation for why some extensions do not take place, and that the notion of persistence thus might ultimately have at least some predictive power. Now, as already pointed out in ch. 3, sect. 5, attempting to explain why something does not happen is a far more difficult task than explaining why something else does. In the case of semantic / functional changes like the ones charted here, the factual non-existence of an otherwise logically possible use of a lexical item may be due to any number of factors. Nevertheless, given a sufficiently detailed analysis of existing uses of a set of lexical items with comparable functions, one might venture to account for at least some non-occurring extensions of the meaning or use of individual lexemes. In the present chapter, the notion of persistence has been used to explain several facts about the synchronic uses of déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin, both as regards existing and non-existing elements of meaning.

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Existing elements: • The fact that phasal enfin conveys the idea that the SoA e in its scope has been instantiated comparatively late was explained as due to the fact that the original temporal sense of the adverb marks the SoA as being the last in a series of several successive events. • The fact that degree-adverb toujours implies the comparison of at least three different points in time (as opposed to just two in the case of degree-adverb encore) was attributed to persistence of the general-rule meaning of the temporal source adverb. Non-existing elements: • The fact that phasal toujours is not prospective in meaning, unlike encore. This was attributed to persistence of the stative meaning that inheres in temporal toujours. • The fact that toujours does not develop a true iterative use, focusing on specific, single occurrences of a given type of SoA, whereas déjà and encore do. Once again, the stative, generic character of the temporal source meaning was argued to militate against the rise of such a use, and to favor an habitual meaning extension instead. • The fact that encore and toujours should have developed additive or intensifying uses, while déjà and enfin have not. This is hardly surprising when we consider the source meanings of the latter: phasal déjà is inchoative, and temporal enfin marks a single occurrence of a SoA preceded by a sequence of SoA of a different kind. Hence, neither lexeme is very well suited to express addition or intensification, both of these presupposing the existence prior to TT, either of entities of the same type as that which is being added, or of some degree of the intensified property. If the notion of persistence in semantic / functional change is taken seriously, the non-existence of additive or intensifying uses of déjà and enfin appears relatively predictable. The hypothesis that the idea of persistence might possess some predictive power is, of course, in need of more detailed elucidation. It will be pursued somewhat further in the next chapter, which considers the context-level uses of the four particles.

7 CONTEXT-LEVEL USES OF THE FRENCH PHASAL ADVERBS

1 INTRODUCTION This chapter will analyze those uses of déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin that function primarily at the context level, that is, those uses in which the particles have been subject to some degree of “pragmaticalization”, as defined in ch. 3, sect. 3.2 supra. As was the case with their content-level uses, the context-level uses of the particles can be subdivided into various types, chief of which are, on the one hand, a set of “modal” uses, in which the scope of the particles remains restricted to the propositional or sub-propositional level, and on the other hand, a set of “connective” uses, in which the particles mark relations between their host utterance and the prior or upcoming discourse. I will start by discussing the former type of uses, subsequently moving on to the latter kind, and I will end the chapter by considering a third, more marginal, group of what I call (for lack of a better term) “interactional” uses of the particles in which they function as downtoners or boosters of directive or exclamative speech acts. As in the previous chapter, where two or more of the four particles have similar uses, the individual particles will, as in the preceding chapter, be discussed in the order déjà, encore, toujours, enfin.

2

“MODAL” USES

In what I call their “modal” uses, the phasal adverbs have clearly moved out of the temporal / aspectual realm. Nothing much hinges on the choice of the term “modal” to describe these uses. The term is used lato sensu, to indicate that, in these cases, the particles express a

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subjective evaluation, and implicitly invite comparison with alternative states-of-affairs (SoA).1 The uses in question can be subdivided into several categories, which appear, however, to differ essentially in terms of the types of item with which the particles collocate, and rather little in terms of actual semantic substance.

2.1

“Scalar” use

In the “scalar” use, déjà, encore, and toujours (but not enfin) may be used in collocation with scalar or gradable predicates, as in (1)-(3): (1)

(2)

(3)

A. Il paraît que ma tante m’a légué au moins 10.000 euros. Peut-être même plus – du moins, j’espère ! B. 10.000 euros, c’est déjà une somme ! ‘A. I’m told my aunt has left me at least 10,000 euros in her will. Perhaps even more – so I hope, in any case! B. 10,000 euros is a decent sum in itself! A. Je suis bien embêté. Ma tante a légué la plus grande partie de sa fortune à un refuge animalier, et je n’aurai que 10.000 euros… B. Ben, 10.000 euros, c’est encore une somme. A. I’m really annoyed. My aunt has left the better part of her fortune to an animal shelter, and only 10,000 euros to me… B. Well, 10,000 euros is still a decent sum. A. On a fait une collecte parmi les parents afin de pouvoir rénover l’aire de jeux de l’école, et on n’a eu que 1.000 euros. B. Hm! Enfin, c’est toujours de l’argent. ‘A. We took up a collection among the parents in order to renovate the school’s playground, and we only got 1,000 euros. B. Hm! Well, it’s always money.’

In this “scalar” use, as in the “categorizing” use that will be discussed in sect. 2.2 infra, the syntax of the particles in intonationally unmarked declaratives is the same as in their basic phasal use, and, just as in the latter use, they scope their entire host clause, i.e. they function as standard sentence adjuncts. Contrary to what was seen to be the case for their basic temporal-aspectual uses, however, these modal uses of the particles cannot be negated, and cannot receive nuclear stress in assertive contexts (except metalinguistically, at best), cf. (4)-(5). Nor can they be used in isolation, cf. (6): (4) (5) (6)

*?10.000 euros, ce n’est pas déjà une somme. ’10,000 euros is not a decent sum in itself.’ *?10.000 euros, c’est ENCORE une somme. ’10,000 euros is STILL a decent sum.’ A. 1.000 euros, c’est de l’argent, à ton avis ? B. *?Toujours. ‘A. Is 1,000 euros money, in your opinion? B. Always.’

What underlies the examples in (1)-(3) is an implicational scale <money, a decent sum, a fortune> of the abstract form <W(eaker item), S(tronger item)>, such that the truthful utterance 1 Fuchs (1988) also speaks of these uses of déjà, encore, and toujours (as well as some of those that are discussed below under the heading ”connective” uses) as modal. She neglects, however, to make clear what exactly is meant by the term.

Context-Level Uses of the French Phasal Adverbs

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of “X is S” will entail the truth of “X is W”, but not vice versa, whereas an utterance of “X is W” will conversationally implicate “~(X is S)” (cf. Horn 1989: 231f, Levinson 2000: 79). For rhetorical purposes, S will therefore normally constitute a stronger argument for some conclusion than W. Although it does seem that (semantic or pragmatic) entailment scales are typically involved, déjà, at least, also occasionally allows for more ad hoc kinds of scales, which do not involve entailment (but which do involve implicature), where the rhetorical force of the different rungs on the scale is entirely context-dependent, cf. the invoked scale in (7) (cf. Hirschberg 1991: 114). It is less clear, however, that scalar encore and toujours are compatible with such ad hoc scales: the corresponding example with encore in (8) seems less natural, and it is difficult to completely abstract from the phasal value of the adverb. In (9), the scalar reading of toujours seems downright impossible (the temporal reading being conceivable, on the other hand): (7)

(8)

(9)

…il y avait pas la famille de Marseille notamment, et eux on est déjà obligés de les inviter, puis je m’en ferai un plaisir de les inviter plus exactement (François, 50) ‘…the family from Marseille, in particular, wasn’t there, and we’re obliged to invite THEM, to begin with, and also, I’ll be happy to invite them, to put it more precisely’ ?Franchement, je ne m’en ferai pas un plaisir d’inviter la famille de Marseille, mais on y est encore obligés. ‘Frankly, I won’t be happy to invite the family from Marseille, but we still have to.’ *?Franchement, je ne m’en ferai pas un plaisir d’inviter la famille de Marseille, mais on y est toujours obligés. ‘Frankly, I won’t be happy to invite the family from Marseille, but we always have to.’

The markers differ among themselves with respect to their argumentational properties. Moreover, these argumentational properties can in all three cases be related directly to the temporal / aspectual source meanings of the morphemes. 2.1.1 Déjà Starting with modal déjà, its use indicates that the predicate chosen to describe the SoA in question is located higher up on the scale of values than might have been expected. Recall that phasal déjà was analyzed in ch. 6, sect. 4.1 supra as marking that events had progressed far enough along the time line for the inception of the SoA e to be a fact at TT, and as not only presupposing the possibility that a change of state from ~e to e had taken place prior to TT, but also, commonly, as implicating that this change of state had occurred early. At the same time, phasal déjà does not assert, presuppose, imply or implicate anything whatsoever about a possible future change from e back to ~e; in other words, in the absence of information to the contrary, e can by default be assumed to persist beyond TT. “Scalar” déjà can be related metonymically to the phasal sense, by subjectification (cf. Traugott & Dasher 2002: 30), in as much as the notion of objective movement along the time line that is inherent in the latter implies the (subjective) process of mentally scanning a scale of (temporal) values (cf. Löbner 1989: 167). Parallel to the basic phasal use, where déjà marks that events have progressed far enough along the time line for the inception of the SoA e to be a fact at TT, “scalar” déjà marks that, at TT, the situation has evolved sufficiently for a given point on the relevant value scale to be applicable to its description.

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Note that, as (7) supra shows, points even higher on the same scale may be applicable as well. Indeed, just as the basic phasal sense of déjà was seen in ch. 6, sect. 4.1 to require for its felicitous use that the SoA in its scope allows for further accretion of values along the time scale, “scalar” déjà requires that the applicability of rungs higher on the scale be at least conceivable. In the case of the “scalar” sense of the marker, however, this constraint does not necessarily imply any temporal succession of the SoAs involved. Moreover, the common implicature of prematurity that attaches to phasal déjà is carried over to the scalar sense of the particle, such that use of scalar déjà typically implicates that the predicated value represents a higher rung on the scale than might have been expected.2 Like the temporal scale underlying the use of phasal déjà, the implicational scale evoked by the predicate of a clause containing scalar déjà is a directed one, and déjà instructs the hearer to start his mental scanning of it at its inception, i.e. at that end of the scale that contains the implicationally (hence, also rhetorically) weaker values. As a consequence of this directedness, any subsequent evolution of the SoA can be assumed to be towards higher values on the scale, but crucially, interaction of déjà with the maxim of Quantity will, by default, give rise to an upper-bounding implicature, such that the hearer will be justified in inferring that these higher values do not yet obtain. As (10) shows, however, this does not mean that scalar déjà is incompatible with predicates located towards the upper end on the relevant scale, only that at least one stronger value should be conceivable. This example further demonstrates that the presence of scalar déjà does not necessarily suggest the speaker’s expectation that the current SoA will, indeed, eventually evolve in the direction of such higher values.3 (10)

Cela a été un bon moment de vie commune, on se racontait nos histoires, on papotait crème de beauté… Malgré cela, on n’est pas devenues amies pour autant. Depuis Cannes, Natacha et moi ne nous sommes pour ainsi dire pas revues. Mais bon, on a fait quelque chose ensemble, un film, un prix… c’est déjà énorme. (Marie Claire, October 1998, p. 138) ‘We had a good time together, we talked about our lives, we chatted about beauty creams… In spite of that, we didn’t become friends. Since Cannes, Natacha and I have barely seen each other. But you know, we did something together, a movie, an award… that’s huge in itself.’

According to this analysis, B’s utterance in (1) will thus function pragmatically as an argument for an implicit conclusion to the effect that A has reason to be pleased: not only is the SoA marked as a positive one, but things might quite conceivably have been worse, and there is at least a chance that they may eventually turn out even better than they appear at TT. This use of déjà is found in my data from the late 17th century onwards, cf. (11). (Note that, despite the word order, the adverbial par la force must be understood being in the scope of 2 In some cases, the predicated value may represent the lowest rung on the scale, as in (i). In such instances, it is the fact that the scale is at all relevant to the description of the SoA that can be seen as unexpected. (i) 1000 euros, c’est déjà de l’argent! ’1000 euros, that’s money in itself!’ 3 This means that, although their papers are in several respects seminal, the analyses of the scalar uses of déjà offered by Muller (1975: 32ff) and by Martin (1980: 170) are not quite accurate, to the extent that they both imply a possible development in time of the SoA.


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déjà, in order for the discourse to be meaningful: the scale of values invoked here is thus .) Bridging contexts like that exemplified in (12) can be found a century earlier: (11)

(12)

Près de moi, par la force, il est déjà Sosie; // Il pourroit bien encor l’être par la raison. (Molière, Amphitryon, I.ii, p. 385, 1668 – from Frantext) ‘Close to me, by force alone, he’s Sosie; // He might well be so by reason, too. …Le Roy, pour nous guairir, veult, suivant l’ordonnance // Du médecin Miron, faire saingner la France. Le Huguenot: Mais Miron a desja fort mal pensé la Paix, // Puisque d’elle provient la guerre desormais; // Et encores plus mal ordonné la saingnée, // Pour mettre France au sang et au fil de l’espée. (Pierre de l’Estoile, Registre-journal du regne de Henri III [1587], t. 5, p. 67, 1585 – from Frantext) ‘…To heal us, the King wants, following the prescription // of the physician Miron, to bleed France. The Huguenot: But Miron has already conceived the Peace very badly, // Since war now grows out of it; // And even more badly prescribed the bloodletting, // To put France to blood and sword.’

In terms of mechanisms of diachronic sense change, what has taken place in the extension from the phasal to the scalar use of déjà is a metonymical figure-ground shift, as described in ch. 3, sect. 4.2 supra: with phasal déjà temporal development is foregrounded, while the notion of a scale of values is part of the background. With modal déjà, scalarity is foregrounded, and the idea of temporal development recedes into the background, to the point of disappearing altogether, as in (7), for instance. Further, the subjective evaluative element already present in phasal déjà is clearly accentuated in the scalar use. 2.1.2 Encore Scalar encore likewise suggests that things are better than they might appear. However, from a rhetorical point of view, it is weaker than déjà. Thus, whereas B’s utterance in (1) supra could be said to function as an implicit argument for the conclusion that A should be pleased, the parallel utterance in (2) instead supports only the weaker conclusion that A does not have reason to be displeased. As with déjà, this property can be related to the semantics of the phasal use of the adverb: in ch. 6, sect. 4.2, the latter was analyzed as asserting the continued existence of the SoA e at TT, while conventionally implicating the possibility of a change of state into ~e at some future time TT+i. No suggestion of a prior change of state from ~e into e was involved in the phasal use of encore, on the other hand. The consequence of this for the scalar use of the adverb is that the hearer is instructed to scan the relevant scale of values counter-directionally, i.e. starting from the stronger values, and moving towards the weaker values, such that a subsequent evolution – if any – of the SoA (or simply a more mature evaluation of it) may conceivably have as its result that the SoA will no longer be evaluable in terms of that scale at all. This invests scalar encore with a concessive nuance, which, as we will see below, is accentuated in several of the connective uses of the particle. A concessive relationship is defined here as one where there is a perceived incompatibility between two facts, propositions, or speech acts, the validity of both of which must nevertheless

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be acknowledged. The incompatibility in question may be perceived by one or all of the discourse participants or by some other, possibly only virtual, individual(s). Rhetorically, the effect of a concessive relationship is to weaken or even cancel the argumentational force of one of the two facts, propositions, or speech acts thus related. Note, however, that like déjà, scalar encore is compatible with predicates located in the upper part of the relevant scale, just as long as one can conceive of predicates that would be located even higher up on that same scale: (13)

A. A vingt ans, Solange a eu le prix Molière; à trente ans, elle a été virée de la Comédie-Française; et à quarante ans, elle ne joue plus que dans des théâtres de province. B. Enfin, vu qu’il y a 80% de chômage parmi les comédiens, c’est encore fabuleux! ‘A. At twenty, Solange received the Molière award; at thirty, she was fired from the Comédie-Française; and now that she’s forty, she only appears in small-town playhouses. B. Well, given that there’s 80% unemployment among actors, that’s still fantastic!’

We’ve already seen, in connection with exx. (7)-(9), that déjà and encore seemed to differ in the degree to which they were compatible with scales that were not linguistically coded, but mere ad hoc creations. There appears to be a further difference between the two particles, namely that while déjà allows for scales of undesirable values, as in (14) (pace Franckel 1989: 271 et passim), the use of scalar encore in such contexts is more dubious: thus, (15) represents the only type of example I have found of encore with an evaluatively negative predicate, and notably, in this kind of context, the marker is open to a competing (and mutually compatible) aspectual (phasal or iterative) interpretation: (14)

(15)

…du 1024*720 sur un ecran 17" c'est déjà moche alors du 1920x1080 sur duu (sic) 37" beurk si on est pas a 4-5 mètres de l'ecran. (http://forum.hardware.fr/hardwarefr/HardwarePeripheriques/Full-HD1080p-1200-sujet-26362-5.htm) ‘…1024x720 on a 17” screen is ugly in itself, so 1920x1080 on 37” yecch if you’re not 4-5 meters away from the screen.’ Faut vous réveiller les gars, le mitsu est le seul actuellement à nous faire des fotos [sic] en 300000 pixel sur un format 640 / 480... plus on étale un meme nombre de pixel sur une grande surface, plus les pixel sont espacé, d'ou [sic] des fotos bof... faites simplement un test : prenez la foto du m341i, envoyer sur ordi, mettez là [sic] en 480 / 320 avec la meme résolution et faites de meme ac [sic] tous les autres portables sur le marché... alors ? vos test [sic]? vous dites koi [sic]? (Réponse) Je dis que c'est encore moche et que le sagem X6 fait du bien meilleur boulot (http://iforum.imodize.com/viewtopic.php?p=7442&sid=26f1b16e91eee8374 32736d5b73cf668) ‘Wake up guys, the mitsu is currently the only one that makes photos with 300,000 pixels in a 640 / 480 format… the more you spread out the same


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number of pixels on a large surface, the more space there is between the pixels, so you get blah photos. Just do a test: take the photo from the m341i, send it to a computer, put it in 480 / 320 with the same resolution and do the same with all the other cell phones on the market… So? Your tests? Whaddya say? (Reply) I say it’s still ugly and that the sagem X6 does a much better job’ The scalar use of encore is not clearly attested in my data until the mid-17th century (cf. (16)). It may be, however, that this use of the particle actually goes as far back as the 13th century, with the example in (17), where one might perhaps understand encore as indicating that the brooch in question is less valuable than the clothes, but nevertheless valuable enough to be treasured. The interpretation of the latter extract is problematic, however, because of its (in all probability) ironic tone, but a scalar interpretation (as opposed to a straightforward phasal one) appears to be supported by the parallel structure of the non-ironic (18), where a phasal interpretation does not seem entirely natural, as no mention has been made of the value of the horse (or of anything else) previously in the passage. Perhaps the most adequate interpretation is that these latter two examples constitute evidence of the existence of plausible bridging contexts between the aspectual and the scalar sense of encore: (16)

(17)

(18)

Quand l’injustice, le désordre et la crainte ne l’accompagneroient pas, elle auroit encore assez d’horreurs, pour étonner tous les hommes: (JeanFrançois Senault, De l’usage des passions, p. 167, 1641 – from Frantext) ‘Even if injustice, disorder, and fear did not accompany it, it would still have enough horrors to astonish all men’ Quant li chamberlenz prist congié, // un sorcot, qui fleroit la graine, // qui fut fez en cele semaine, // d’escarlate et de vairs entiers // li fist li gentils chevaliers // aporter par un soen vallet ; // si fres et si cler et si net // l’a cil pris, qui l' en mercia. // “Ha ! Dex, fet Juglés, com ci a // biau sorcot et net por esté !” // Une chape, qui ot esté // tote fresche o tot le sorcot, // qui la graine encore flerot, // refet lués son oste aporter. // Erroment, sanz plus arrester, // dona Juglet sa roube hermine. // Puis qu’il a tot mis a la mine, // je ne sai qu’il en feïst el. // La bone dame de l’ostel // dona trop bon fermail a cote. // “Gardez le bien, fet il, bel oste, // qu' il vaut encore . XIII . livres. (Jean Renart, Le Roman de la rose, ou de Guillaume de Dole, ca. 1210, vv. 1817-36 – from BFM) ‘When the chamberlain said goodbye, the noble knight had one of his servants bring him a tunic of fine linen, lined with whole squirrel furs, which smelled of dye, having been made that same week; this one [= the chamberlain] took it, and thanked him for it, it being so new and sparkling and clean. “Ah, God, went Jouglet, what a handsome tunic, and one which is suitable for summer!” Immediately, he had a coat brought for his host that was as new as the tunic which still smelled of dye. Without waiting any longer, he straightaway gave Jouglet his ermine robe. Since he had staked everything, I don’t know what else he could have done. To the good lady of the house he gave a very good brooch. “Take good care of it, he said, beautiful hostess, for it is worth 13 pounds, after all / it is still worth 13 pounds.”’ Tout premier vous dirons d’un chevalier qui fu pris au bordel, au quel l’en parti un jeu, selonc les usages du païs. Le jeu parti fu tel, ou que la ribaude le

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Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface menroit par l' ost en chemise, une corde liee aus genetaires, ou il perdroit son cheval et s’armeure, et le chaceroit l’en de l’ost. Le chevalier lessa son cheval au roy et s’armeure, et s’en ala de l’ost. Je alai prier au roy que il me donnast le cheval pour un povre gentil home qui estoit en l’ost, et le roy me respondi que ceste priere n’estoit pas resonnable, que le cheval valoit encore . IIIIxx . livres. (Jean de Joinville, La vie de Saint Louis, 1298-1309, P505506 – from BFM) ‘First of all, we’ll tell you about a knight who was caught in a brothel, to whom a choice was given according to the custom of the country. The choice was that either the whore would drag him through the camp in his shirt, with a rope tied around his testicles, or he would lose his horse and his armor, and be chased from the camp. The knight handed over his horse and armor to the King, and left the camp. I went to the King to ask that he give me the horse for a poor nobleman who was in the camp, and the King answered that this request was unreasonable, for the horse was worth 80 pounds, after all / was still worth 80 pounds.’

2.1.3 Toujours Finally, we come to the related use of toujours, as in (3) supra. In accordance with the basic temporal meaning of this adverb (described in ch. 6, sect. 3.2), the “scalar” use of toujours is argumentationally non-directed, and it may not even be fully appropriate to refer to it as scalar. As used in (3), toujours suggests that in whichever context, and whichever way you choose to consider the amount of 1,000 euros, one thing will invariably be true, namely that it’s money. In this sense, scalar toujours is a weakly concessive marker. The conclusion aimed at by the use of the particle is an essentially neutral one, on the order of “If I were you, I’d be neither greatly pleased nor greatly disappointed”, and it does not evoke or invoke the existence of any particular conclusion, be it either stronger or weaker, that might be drawn from alternative states of affairs. Because of this neutral argumentational aim, toujours, when combined with scalar predicates, is compatible only with items located on the lower half of the relevant scale, i.e. the rhetorically weaker predicates, unlike what we saw to be the case for déjà and encore. Hence, only (19), but not (20), constitutes a felicitous exchange: (19)

(20)

A. Solange n’aura peut-être pas le prix Molière, mais elle joué dans une vraie pièce, dans un vrai théâtre. B. Oui, c’est toujours quelque chose. ‘A. Solange may not get the Molière prize, but she did after play, in a real theater. B. Yes, it’s always something.’ A. Solange n’aura peut-être pas le prix Molière, mais elle joué dans une vraie pièce, dans un vrai théâtre. B. *?Oui, c’est toujours beaucoup ! ‘A. Solange may not get the Molière prize, but she did after play, in a real theater. B. Yes, it’s always a big thing!’

a quand même

all act in a real

a quand même

all act in a real

This basic neutrality explains the fact that (as observed by Franckel 1989: 303) utterances containing “scalar” toujours may, depending on the context, be oriented either towards a (weakly) positive or towards a negative conclusion. Thus, in (21), the addressee is weakly encouraged to call the third party in question, whereas, in (22), the speaker is instead attempting to dissuade the hearer from further discussion:


(21) (22)

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Tu peux toujours lui téléphoner. Ça ne fera pas de mal. ‘You can always call him/her. It won’t hurt.’ Tu peux toujours causer. Ça ne changera rien. ‘You can talk as much as you want. It won’t change anything.’

Presumably, it is the static nature of the basic temporal meaning of toujours which is responsible for its being able to offer only weak support for positive conclusions, for something which is invariably the case will typically make little or no difference to the potential consequences of a given SoA (cf. Némo 2000: 503). If this is correct, it can be argued that both constructions in (21)-(22) fundamentally have the same weakly positive sense, but that when the predicates co-occurring with toujours denote actions which, in context, appear to have little chance of success, the presumed lack of significant effect of the proposed action will endow the utterance with an ironic tinge which accounts for the negative interpretation. Such a weakly positive sense would explain why, like encore, scalar toujours is incompatible with predicates which are quite clearly valued negatively in the context. Thus, in (23), a variation on (15) supra, only a continuative, phasal, reading of toujours is possible: (23)

A. Alors? Vos tests? Vous dites quoi? B. Je dis que c’est toujours moche. ‘A. So? Your tests? Whaddya say? B. I say it’s still ugly.

Clear instances of the scalar use of toujours do not appear in my data until the mid-to-late 17th century, as in (24) infra. Due to the presence of the accompanying parenthetical concessive clause, the generic statement in (25) represents a plausible bridging context between the temporal and the scalar use: (24)

(25)

2.2

Car pour Monsieur votre vicomte, quoique vicomte de province, c’est toujours un vicomte,... (Molière, La Comtesse d’Escarbagnas, I.ii, p. 572, 1673 – from Frantext) ‘For as for Mylord your viscount, although he’s a provincial viscount, he’s always a viscount,...’ Mais il faut vous laisser, le jour d’une hyménée / Est toujours, quoy qu’on die, une grande journée, (Philippe Quinault, Stratonice, II.iv, p. 27, 1660 – from Frantext) ‘But I must leave you, a wedding day / is always – whatever people say – a great day,’

“Categorizing” use

All three particles have a use which is strongly reminiscent of the scalar one, but in which it is not the predicate of the host clause that must be understood as occupying a rung on some scale, but rather its subject, as in (26)-(28). Each of these examples might, for instance, be felicitously uttered in a context where the town of Menton had been suggested as a possible vacation spot, and where the speaker and / or the hearer was known to prefer France to all other countries: (26)

Menton, c’est déjà la France

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(27) (28)

‘Menton is already in France.’ Menton, c’est encore la France. ‘Menton is still in France.’ Menton, c’est toujours la France. ‘Menton is always in France.’

To my knowledge, this use was first identified by König (1977: 184), who observes that it is found with subject referents that are somehow marginal instances of the category or class referred to by the predicate. Thus, Menton being a small nondescript border town, (26)-(28) are felicitous utterances, whereas (29)-(31) are not: (29) (30) (31)

#Paris, c’est déjà la France. ‘Paris is already in France.’ #Paris, c’est encore la France. ‘Paris is still in France.’ #Paris, c’est toujours la France.’ ‘Paris is always in France.’

The difference between the three constructions in (26)-(28) is that, with déjà, the hearer is instructed to conduct, or to imagine conducting, a directed mental scanning of (a map of) France, proceeding from some location outside of France moving towards the periphery and subsequently towards the center of that country, and to understand Menton as a town which he is likely to encounter at an early stage of the scanning process. With encore, the scanning process proceeds in the opposite direction, from center to periphery, and Menton will then be encountered at a comparatively late stage of the process. Finally, with toujours, the scanning process is non-directional, such that the hearer is given to understand that whichever way he chooses to carry it out, the fact that Menton is part of France will remain an inescapable (even if perhaps not very interesting) conclusion. All three particles may occur in this use in contexts that are far less concrete that (26)-(28), such as those exemplified in (32)-(34). Here, the presence of the particles compels the hearer to conceive of the category referred to by the predicate of the host clause as one which is endowed with an internal prototype structure, such that some birds are more “bird-like” than others (cf. Rosch 1977). Notice that the particles are not felicitous in exx. (35)-(37), which feature a comparatively prototypical bird as their subject: (32) (33) (34) (35) (36) (37)

Un pingouin, c’est déjà un oiseau. ‘A penguin is at least some kind of a bird.’ Un pingouin, c’est encore un oiseau. ‘A penguin is still some kind of a bird.’ Un pingouin, c’est toujours un oiseau. ‘A penguin is always some kind of a bird.’ #Un moineau, c’est déjà un oiseau. ‘A sparrow is at least some kind of a bird.’ #Un moineau, c’est encore un oiseau. ‘A sparrow is still some kind of a bird.’ #Un moineau, c’est toujours un oiseau. ‘A sparrow is always some kind a bird.’


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These categorizing uses of the particles are fairly clearly related both to the scalar ones and to the basic temporal / aspectual uses. The idea of lower vs higher rungs on a scale have, in the categorizing use, been projected onto that of peripheral vs central exemplars of the category denoted by the predicate of the clause, and the directionality (or lack of it) implied by the different particles remains fundamentally the same in both uses, the direction “from-lowertowards-higher-rungs” implied by déjà being mutatis mutandis the equivalent of the direction “from-peripheral-towards-central-exemplars”, and similarly for the opposite directionalities implied by encore. Likewise, these categorizing uses retain a link to the temporal / aspectual uses of the three particles: the mental category scan performed can be assumed to occupy a certain (if small) amount of time, and in the case of déjà and encore, the subject referent is marked as so marginal with respect to the category denoted by the predicate that the transition between exterior and interior of that category may, in the case of déjà be said to have been completed at an earlier point in the scanning process than one might have expected, while in the case of encore, the transition between interior and exterior will rather be completed only at a later point than might be expected. With the use of toujours, on the other hand, the speaker suggests that the precise direction of scanning is of no consequence, either to the categorization of the subject entity, or to her rhetorical goals, for whichever way one chooses to look at the subject entity, one fact remains valid at all times, namely that it fulfills the criteria for being classified as an instance of the predicate category, this being all that matters for current purposes. One may legitimately wonder whether there is any reason to distinguish the scalar and the categorizing use at the semantic level. It is true that, as shown by exx. (29)-(31) and (35)-(37), categorizing déjà and encore are not compatible with subjects denoting central representatives of the category in question, whereas the scalar use is compatible with predicates that occupy a rung high on the relevant scale, as exx. (10) and (13) showed. I noted, however, with respect to the latter examples, that even higher rungs on the relevant scale must be imaginable for déjà and encore to be felicitously used, and we saw that, in the case of toujours, only predicates denoting lower rungs on the scale were compatible with the marker (cf. (19)-(20)). In other words, the essential difference between the two uses appears not to lie in their respective meanings, but to be a matter of the constituent (predicate or subject) that they take in their scope. The diachronic data do not seem to offer decisive evidence for an actual semantic distinction, either. Ex. (38), which is some 80 years younger than what I noted was the first attestation of the scalar use (in (11) supra), appears to me to be the first attestation of the categorizing use of déjà in my data, in as much as the phrase le plus je ne sais quoi de tous in the next-to-last sentence of the excerpt suggests that an ad hoc ranking of the various subject entities mentioned is being performed. Nevertheless, the two examples are so close in meaning and structure that is seems difficult to make a principled distinction between them. As for categorizing encore, the earliest instance I have found in my data base is the one in (39), which is contemporaneous with the first attestation of the scalar use of the particle (cf. (16) supra). Similarly, on the assumption that extremes of behavior are typically felt to be intolerable, but that some instances may be less intolerable, and hence more marginal, than others, ex. (40) seems to be a first attestation of categorizing toujours, but again, it is contemporaneous with the scalar use in (24) supra:

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(38)

(39)

Je me souviens qu’un jour il me trouva lisant une brochure, intitulée le je ne sais quoi. Je connais cet ouvrage, me dit-il; l’auteur y fait un grand éloge de ce je ne sais quoi, et l’auteur a tort; le je ne sais quoi est vu en beau, et seroit toujours vu en laid si on le connoissoit bien. C’est à tort que l’on nomme ainsi le trouble de deux cœurs qui voudroient s’unir. Qu’un amant adore une femme aimable, ce qu’il sent pour elle, il sait bien quoi; ce qu’il voudroit lui dire, il sait fort bien quoi, et ce qu’il voudroit faire pour lui en donner des preuves, il sait encore mieux quoi. Cette femme, que je suppose n’avoir jamais aimé, est touchée de l’amour de cet amant; elle nous tromperoit, si elle nous disoit qu’elle ne sait pas ce que c’est que ce sentiment qui se développe en elle: elle y résiste, elle veut l’éviter; elle sait bien pourquoi. Quel est donc ce je ne sais quoi, lui dis-je? C’est, me répondit-il, le serment qu’une femme fait d’aimer son mari, qu’elle ne connoit point; comme il n’est fondé sur rien, c’est déjà un je ne sais quoi: c’est le plaisir que le mari prétend lui procurer, qui est encore un je ne sais quoi, parce qu’il n’y a que l’amour seul, qui n’est presque jamais entre eux, qui fait savoir ce que c’est que ce bonheur: c’est la jalousie de ce mari qui est souvent fondée sur je ne sais quoi, et son déshonneur prétendu, attaché à la conduite de sa femme, qui est le plus je ne sais quoi de tous. Ainsi, puisque vous voulez le savoir, le je ne sais quoi est le génie des maris. (Abbé de Voisenon, Histoire de la Félicité, p. 110ff, 1751 – from Frantext) ‘I remember that one day he found me reading a pamphlet entitled je ne sais quoi. I know this work, he told me, its author greatly praises this je ne sais quoi, and the author is wrong; the je ne sais quoi is idealized, and would always be reviled if people knew what it was. It’s a mistake to use this expression to refer to the agitation of two hearts that would be one. If a suitor adores a lovable woman, what he feels for her, he knows well; what he would like to say to her, he knows very well, and what he would like to do to prove it to her, he knows even better. This woman, who I suppose has never loved, is touched by the love of this suitor; she’d be deceiving us if she were to say that she doesn’t know what this feeling is that’s growing inside her: she resists it, she wants to flee from it; she well knows why. So, what is this je ne sais quoi, I asked him? It’s, he answered, the oath that a woman swears to love her husband whom she doesn’t know; having no basis, it’s a kind of je ne sais quoi; it’s the pleasure that the husband intends to give her, which is another je ne sais quoi, because only love, which almost never exists between them, can tell you what happiness is: it’s the jealousy of this husband, which is often based on je ne sais quoi, and his potential disgrace attaching to his wife’s conduct, which is the most je ne sais quoi of all. Thus, since you ask, the je ne sais quoi is the genius of husbands.’ Le Duc. Je suis plus mal encor avec la Comedie, // Car en fin, Almedor, il faut que je te die // Qu’elle m’a suscité le trouble où tu me vois, // Et dépravé le goust des plaisirs que j’avois. Almedor. Mais depuis quand, Monsieur, et par quelle advanture ? Le Duc. Par un Ange mortel, miracle de Nature, // Un bel œil don’t le doux et modeste regard // M’a lancé dans le cœur un invisible dard. Almedor. Fut-ce point à l’Aminte, ou bien à l’Andromire? Le Duc. C’est ce qu’à point nommé je ne sçaurois te dire: // Car tous les sens ravis en ce divin objet, // Je n’en goustay non plus les Vers que le sujet.


(40)

2.3

183

// Cependant on acheve, et, la piece finie, // Ma beauté se retire avec sa compagnie, // Et me laisse le cœur percé d’autant de traits // Que mes yeux dans les siens remarquerent d’attraits, // Sans avoir pû depuis ny revoir cette belle, // Ny luy montrer le feu que je nourris pour elle. Almedor. Et la cognoissez-vous? Le Duc. Je la cognois fort bien. Almedor. C’est encore un moyen... Le Duc. Qui ne me sert de rien: // Car sans parler icy de la fille d’Acryse, // C’est qu’on ne garde point le thresor de Venise // Avecque tant de soin et de loyauté, (Jean Mairet, Les Galanteries du duc d’Ossonne, I.i., p. 141, 1636 – from Frantext) ‘The Duke. I dislike the playhouse even more, / For after all, Almedor, I must tell you / That it has caused the state of excitement that you find me in, / And has deprived me of my former taste for pleasures. Almedor. But since when, My Lord, and how? The Duke. By a mortal Angel, a miracle of Nature, / A beautiful eye whose sweet and modest look / Shot an invisible arrow into my heart. Almedor. Was it not at the Aminte, or at the Andromire? The Duke. That is just what I cannot tell you: / For all my senses having been robbed by this divine object, / I paid no more attention to the verse than to the subject. / In any case, they reach the end, and once the play was over, / My beauty leaves along with her company, / And leaves my heart pierced by as many arrows / As my eyes noticed of attractions in hers, / Without having been able since then to either see this beauty again, / Or to show her the passion that I feel for her. Almedor. And do you know who she is? The Duke. I know very well who she is. Almedor. That’s still a means... The Duke. Which does me no good: / For without speaking here of the daughter of Acryse, / Not even the treasure of Venice is guarded / With such care and loyalty,’ De vous et de Mme Du Fresnoy, on en pétrirait une personne dans le juste milieu. Vous êtes aux deux extrémités, et assurément la vôtre est moins insupportable, mais c’est toujours une extrémité. (Mme de Sévigné, Correspondance, t. 1, p. 449, 1672 – from Frantext) ‘Out of yourself and Mme Du Fresnoy, one might form a well-balanced person. You are at the two extremes, and, to be sure, yours is less intolerable, but it’s still an extreme.’

Non-temporal focus-particle use

In the third modal use, found only with déjà, the syntax of the particle resembles that of the temporal focus particle discussed in ch. 6, sect. 6.1.1 supra; in other words, déjà takes in its scope a constituent of the host clause, rather than the clause as a whole, as exemplified in (41): (41)

Déjà son visage me déplaît. ‘His very face displeases me.’

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In this focus-particle use, déjà does not, however, have temporal / aspectual meaning, but rather instructs the hearer to understand the utterance as evoking an ad hoc scale of items that might conceivably occur in the syntactic and semantic slot filled by the item in focus in the given host clause. These items are ordered according to the felicity with which they might actually be used in this specific context of utterance. With respect to (41), such an ad hoc scale might, for instance, take the following form (moving from less to more predictable, hence from rhetorically stronger to rhetorically weaker, items) . In this context, déjà thus marks that by the time the conceptualizer will have scanned the scale up to and including the subject entity, a transition will also have been completed between nonapplicable and potentially applicable subjects of the predicate DISPLEASE THE SPEAKER(x). Or, to put it differently, while the mere mention of ‘his’ name may not be enough to cause displeasure in the speaker, seeing ‘his’ face is. Furthermore, by implication, ‘his’ behavior may be assumed to constitute an even greater source of distaste, and hence, to be even more obviously applicable as an argument of the clause predicate, and déjà thus belongs to the group of additive focus particles (cf. König 1991, Nølke 1983). Precisely because the focus constituent is, in the given context, a less predictable argument of the predicate than items higher on the scale would be, it is also a more informative and rhetorically stronger item. We may therefore say that the borderline between nonapplicable arguments and applicable ones has been crossed sooner than one might have expected, an interpretation which, of course, provides a conceptual link to the basic phasal sense of the particle. Like the categorizing use, this non-temporal focus-particle use of déjà seems very similar to the scalar use at the semantic level. A number of factors, however, militate against seeing it as a mere contextual variant of the latter: First, the syntactic difference between the two. Secondly, whereas scales evoked by “scalar” déjà are, as we saw above, oriented from rhetorically weaker towards rhetorically stronger items, those evoked by the focus particle are oriented in the opposite direction. Finally, the focus particle appears to be a good deal more recent than both the scalar use and the temporal focus particle use discussed in ch. 6, sect. 6.1.1, being first clearly attested in my data towards the mid-19th century, cf. (42) infra. The ambiguous example in (43) illustrates a plausible type of bridging context between the phasal use and the non-temporal focus particle use. It is plausible, based on the above considerations, that the non-temporal focus particle use should be seen as representing an independent sense of déjà. (42)

Monsieur Jules, me dit-elle, non sans qu’un souffle de rougeur colorât ses joues, nous avons apporté avec nous ce portrait de mon père que vous connaissez... notre désir serait d’en avoir deux copies. J’espère que vous voudrez me faire le plaisir de vous charger de ce travail. Votre talent nous est une garantie qu’il répondra à notre attente, quand déjà le souvenir que vous avez conservé de mon père bien-aimé est un motif qui me touche plus encore. (Rodolphe Toepffer, Nouvelles genevoises, p. 216, 1839 – from Frantext) ‘Mr Jules, she said, not without a touch of redness coloring her cheeks, we have brought with us this portrait of my father, which you know... our wish would be to have two copies of it. I hope you will do me the favor of accepting this task. Your talent is a guarantee that it will conform to our expectations, even if the memory that you have preserved of my beloved father is in itself a motive that touches me even more.’

Context-Level Uses of the French Phasal Adverbs (43)

2.4

185

n.b. nous espérons calculer un jour combien d’années la terre doit durer encore; et déjà à vue d’œil nous pouvons décider que son empire ne cessera que dans soixante-quinze millions d’années. (Abbé Augustin Barruel, Les Helviennes ou Lettres provinciales philosophiques, Letter 28, p. 280, 1781 – from Frantext) ‘NB! We hope one day to calculate how many more years the earth will last; and (already) a quick glance (alone) allows us to decide that its empire will not cease for another seventy-five million years.’

A note on enfin / finalement

The reader will have noticed that no mention has been made of modal uses of enfin. Indeed, that particle does not appear to have any uses resembling those discussed in 2.1-2.3. Thus, (44)-(45) are not felicitous as parallels to (1)-(3) and (32)-(34):4 (44)

(45)

A. Cette année, mon employeur m’a donné 10.000 euros en prime. Evidemment, ça ne me permettra pas d’acheter une voiture neuve, mais je pourrai quand même remplacer ma vieille bagnole par un modèle d’occasion plus récent. B. *Oui, 10.000 euros, c’est enfin une somme. ‘A. This year, my employer gave me a 10,000 euro bonus. Obviously, I can’t buy a brand new car with that, but I will be able to replace my old wreck with a more recent used model. B. Yes, 10,000 euros is enfin a decent sum.’ *Un pingouin, c’est enfin un oiseau. ‘A penguin is enfin some kind of a bird.’

In fact, as we will see below, the general evolution of enfin, starting in the 16th century, is towards increasing syntactic autonomy, such that, once the two parts of this erstwhile prepositional phrase coalesce into a single unanalyzable particle, the latter rapidly acquires the prototypical properties of discourse markers, viz. lack of integration into the syntactic structure of the host clause, and a tendency to constitute an independent tone unit. The emergence, in the 17th century, of a syntactically integrated scalar / categorizing sense of enfin would thus have reversed the direction of development in which the marker had already set out. A second reason for the lack of a scalar / categorizing sense of enfin might be sought in the persistence of central facets of the temporal / aspectual semantics of that particle: because phasal enfin marks the transition between the SoAs ~e and e as a comparatively late one, it is less well suited than déjà to suggest a possible ulterior development towards higher rungs / more central exemplars of the relevant scale / category. At the same time, being a retrospective marker like déjà, it is unsuited to suggest an ulterior development towards even lower rungs / less central exemplars the way encore may. Finally, enfin would be infelicitous as a marker of neutral evaluation like toujours, given that it invariably conveys the idea of a change of state. It is, in fact, striking that in none of the languages with which I am familiar does one find a scalar / categorizing sense of those adverbs that are functionally equivalent to enfin in its temporal / aspectual sense, whereas, in several instances, one does find such senses for 4 It is, of course, possible to say both Enfin, c’est une somme or Un pingouin, enfin, c’est un oiseau. These, however, are not parallel to the modal uses of déjà, encore, and toujours, but would instantiate one of the connective uses (different interpretations being available as a function of specific contexts of occurence) of enfin, to be discussed in sect. 3.4 infra.

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equivalents of déjà, encore, and / or toujours. If the meanings of particles were principally a result of the paradigmatic relations they enter into, and if they had no inherent semantic substance, there does not seem to be any logical reason why modal senses should not exist for enfin or its equivalents. It must be mentioned, however, that it is possible to use the adverb finalement, a near-synonym of enfin in its temporal sense, in a subset of uses of the latter, in contexts that are at least superficially similar to those we saw with modal déjà, encore, and toujours, cf. (46)-(47): (46)

(47)

A. Cette année, mon employeur m’a donné 10.000 euros en prime. Evidemment, ça ne me permettra pas d’acheter une voiture neuve, mais je pourrai quand même remplacer ma vieille bagnole par un modèle d’occasion plus récent. B. Oui, 10.000 euros, c’est finalement une somme. ‘A. This year, my employer gave me a 10,000 euro bonus. Obviously, I can’t buy a brand new car with that, but I will be able to replace my old wreck with a more recent used model. B. Yes, in the end, 10,000 euros is a decent sum.’ Un pingouin, c’est finalement un oiseau. ‘In the end, a penguin is some kind of a bird.’

Finalement is nevertheless not a precise parallel of déjà, encore, and toujours, for unlike the latter three, it essentially marks a reformulative conclusion in such contexts (cf. Schelling 1982, Roulet 1987, Hansen 2005a). That is, it indicates that the speaker is summing up the explicit or implicit contents of a preceding series of utterances, typically – as exemplified in (46) – in a context where opposing arguments are implicitly weighed against one another, such that the finalement-marked utterance can be seen as settling the matter (at least according to the speaker)(cf. Schelling 1982). Thus, no appeal to scales or to internally structured categories need be made in the description of finalement, which moreover functions principally as a discourse connective by putting special constraints on relationship between the contents of the previous discourse and those of its host utterance. This adverb will not be dealt with further in the present study.

2.5

Summary

In this section, I have analyzed three types of “modal” uses of déjà, encore, and toujours, i.e. uses in which the particles mark a subjective evaluation of some state-of-affairs, typically conveying some degree of counter-expectation. I concluded that, although the first two types of uses varied in terms of the scope or the syntax of the particles, the basic semantic content of the individual particle was the same in both types of contexts, such that the categorizing uses of the particles could be seen as modulations on the scalar senses of each item. These scalar senses could themselves be analyzed as subjectified extensions of the basic temporal / aspectual senses described in ch. 6. Despite its admittedly very close affinity to the scalar sense, the non-temporal focus-particle use of déjà was, however, argued to be an independent sense, due on the one hand to its different syntactic properties, and on the other hand, to the fact that the scales evoked by the focus particle were shown to be oriented in the opposite direction of those invoked by particle in its scalar sense.


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Like the phasal senses of the adverbs, the scalar senses appear, at some level, to be paradigmatically related, although, as we just saw, enfin (and its “twin” finalement) is now excluded from the putative paradigm. Furthermore, these scalar senses actually do appear to arise during roughly the same period of time – interestingly, with encore seeming to lead the way, similarly to what we observed with respect to the content-level uses of the particles. This is perhaps unsurprising given the fairly high degree to which elements of the basic temporal / aspectual meanings of the three particles were observed to persist in their scalar senses: intuitively, it seems a relatively small step from the phasal use of encore to that in (16), and once that step has been taken, parallel extensions of déjà and toujours may easily suggest themselves, in as much as all three markers can be said to signal different perspectivizations of the closely related scenario frames described in ch. 4, sect. 3.1.2 supra. However, while déjà and encore seem to contrast quite neatly, toujours is less well integrated in this putative scalar paradigm. Indeed, in the case of this adverb it seems to be not so much the phasal meaning as the temporal meaning that persists. In other words, the degree of contrast between the individual markers may be more a consequence of their (inherent and essentially independent) meanings than the source of those meanings.

3 CONNECTIVE USES Also functioning at the context level, we find a whole series of uses of déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin as discourse connectives. As such, the particles mark or create5 particular types of relationships between their host utterance and either the prior or the upcoming discourse co(n)text.

3.1

Déjà

As a discourse connective, déjà is found in two different constructions, both of which are primarily – although not exclusively – associated with relatively informal speech: one in which it occurs in thematic position in the host clause and constitutes an independent tone group, as in (48), and one in which it combines with the subordinating conjunction que, as in (49), to form what looks superficially like an adverbial subordinator, but is perhaps rather an “averbal” main clause followed by a complement clause, as evidenced by the fact that it is typically followed by a coordinated “canonical” independent clause (cf. Guimier 1998): (48)

J’ai bien aimé ce film: déjà, le sujet est original, et puis, les images sont très belles.

5 It has become a common-place of research on discourse connectives, and on discourse markers more generally, that they are optional elements, in the sense that their role is said to be that of making explicit co(n)textual relationships that may be perceived independently of their presence in an utterance. While markers are, indeed, frequently optional in this sense, it must be pointed out that such is not necessarily the case. As shown by Rossari (2000: 32), some markers, such as de toute façon in (i), cannot be deleted without radically altering the interpretation of the discourse. Thus, with de toute façon present, the second sentence of (i) will be understood to mean (among other things) that there was no causal relationship between the two events recounted. If de toute façon is removed, however, hearers will tend to infer the existence of precisely such a causal relationship (cf also Hansen 2006: 26): (i) Max a oublié de se rendre à la réunion. De toute façon, le comité a décidé d’ajourner cette réunion. ’Max forgot to go to the meeting. In any case, the committee decided to postpone this meeting.’

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(49)

‘I liked this movie: for one thing, the subject is original, and then the shots are very beautiful.’ Je n’aime pas Max: déjà qu’il fume comme un pompier, mais en plus il est agressif. ‘I don’t like Max: not only does he smoke like a chimney, but he’s also aggressive.’

It seems fairly clear that the “thematic” use of déjà is related to the scalar use. It is not, however, identical to it. For one thing, a clause containing scalar déjà may function independently, whereas a clause introduced by thematic déjà appears to demand a continuation6, that is, it instructs the hearer to understand the contents of the host clause as forming the first argument of a series oriented towards the same conclusion, cf. (50)-(51): (50)

(51)

[A wife to her husband who feels that their son might have been ranked no. 1 in his class if he’d made more of an effort] Ecoute, être le deuxième, c’est déjà pas mal! ‘Listen, being no. 2 is really quite good in itself!’ Déjà, son projet de recherche est pas mal, et puis, elle est douée pour l’enseignement. A mon avis, on devrait le lui donner, ce post-doc. ‘To begin with, her research project is really quite good, and moreover, she’s a gifted teacher. In my opinion, we should give her this post-doc position.’

Secondly, although arguments marked by scalar déjà may, of course, be buttressed by further arguments for the same conclusion, it seems felicitous to do so only if predications are used that are part of the same scale as that used in the déjà-marked utterance, as shown by the contrast between (52) and (53). Thematic déjà, on the other hand, allows for additional arguments that do not form a scale with the predicate of its host clause, and which are thus not necessarily perceived as rhetorically stronger than the initial déjà-marked argument, cf. (54). However, the existence of a scalar relationship among the arguments is, of course, not precluded, in so far as such a relationship is fully compatible with what I argue to be the coded meaning of the marker: (52)

(53)

(54)

6

J’aime bien habiter ici: en elle-même, la maison est déjà très grande, et avec la terrasse abritée, la surface habitable est vraiment énorme. ‘I like living here: just the house is very large in itself, and with the sheltered terrace, the living space is really huge.’ ??J’aime bien habiter ici: la maison est déjà très grande, puis elle est bien située, et enfin elle n’est pas chère. ‘I like living here: the house is very large in itself, also, it’s well situated, and finally, it’s not expensive.’ J’aime bien cette maison: déjà, elle est très grande, puis elle est bien située, et enfin elle n’est pas chère.

The continuation may, however, remain implicit, i.e. left to the hearer’s imagination, as in (i). In such cases, the presence of thematic déjà indicates that further arguments for the speaker’s intended conclusion are available, even if they are not expressed: (i) A. On devrait lui donner ce post-doc, à ton avis? B. Pourquoi pas? Déjà, son projet de recherche est pas mal… ’A. Should we give her this post-doc position, do you think? B. Why not? To begin with, her research project is really quite good…


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‘I like living here: for a start, the house is very large, secondly, it’s well situated, and finally, it’s inexpensive.’ Thus, while scalar déjà operates on the semantic content of the predicate in its scope, instructing the hearer to identify a scale on which this predicate can be understood to occupy some rung below the highest one, thematic déjà functions as a conjunctional adverb, operating on the speech act, by presenting it as constituting the first of a series of arbitrarily ordered arguments. It is likely that there was originally a closer link between the thematic and the scalar use of the particle, for the rhetorical structure found in the earliest examples of thematic déjà in my data base is one where the arguments are, in fact, ordered according to their perceived strength with respect to the conclusion being aimed at. In other words, they form at least an ad hoc pragmatic scale, where déjà marks a relatively weak argument, followed by one or more stronger ones, cf. (55). However, in most of the contemporary examples I have come across, there is no very obvious difference in rhetorical force between the déjà-marked argument and that or those which are presented in parallel, cf. (56), where the order of the two arguments might quite felicitously have been reversed as in (57). Assuming that the thematic use of déjà is indeed an extension of its scalar use, the scalar semantics of the particle appears, in contemporary French, to have been bleached to the point where déjà simply marks the first argument that occurs to the speaker: (55)

(56)

Transportons-nous par la pensée, à la surface du soleil, et de-là contemplons la terre et les planètes. Tous ces corps nous paroîtront se mouvoir d’occident en orient, et déjà, cette identité de direction est un indice du mouvement de la terre; mais ce qui le démontre avec évidence, c’est la loi qui existe entre les temps des révolutions des planètes, et leurs distances au soleil. (PierreSimon Laplace, Exposition du système du monde, Book 2, p. 102, 1796 – from Frantext) ‘Let us transport ourselves in thought to the surface of the Sun, and from there let us contemplate the Earth and the planets. All these bodies will seem to us to be moving from west to east, and this identity of direction is a first indication of the movement of the Earth; but what demonstrates it with certainty is the law that governs the relationship between the time of rotation of the planets and their distances from the Sun.’ A. ...et alors LE ROBERT SUR CD-ROM ça à mon avis ça doit être mais LE KIFFE total, B. – mouais / - / A. – ben si e quand tu veux vraiment faire des recherches e & et gagner du temps c’est *très bien* && B. & ouais et c’est hyper cool mais bon moi && je me dis toujours t’as quand même e déjà t’as pas le contact avec la moi j’aime bien le contact avec l’objet e livre, déjà donc e (h) aller voir dans un dictionnaire [...] et l’autre truc e c’est que par exemple si t’as une panne de courant ben t’es pas dans la merde pour trouver ton mot quoi (Reumaux, 1) ‘A. ... and then LE ROBERT ON CD-ROM in my opinion that has to be just totally AWESOME, B. – myeah / - / A. – well if er when you really want to look up a number of things er & and save time it’s *very nice* &&

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(57)

B. & yeah and it’s super-cool but well && I always say to myself after all you don’t have er for one thing you don’t have the contact with the I like the contact with the physical er book, so for one thing er (h) to go look in a dictionary [...] and the other thing er is that for instance if you have a power failure well you’re not in deep shit when you want to find your word you know’ mais bon déjà par exemple si t’as une panne de courant ben t’es pas dans la merde pour trouver ton mot quoi et l’autre truc c’est que t’as quand même e t’as pas le contact avec la moi j’aime bien le contact avec l’objet e livre, donc e (h) aller voir dans un dictionnaire ‘but well for instance if you have a power failure well you’re not in deep shit when you want to find your word you know and the other thing is that after all you don’t have er you don’t have the contact with the I like the contact with the physical er book, so er (h) to go look in a dictionary’

The connective déjà que, exemplified in (49), is similar to the extent that it introduces arguments that cannot necessarily be ordered on a scale from weaker to stronger, but may be of similar force. Like thematic déjà, déjà que also marks the first argument of a list whose members are joined by an additive relationship. Accordingly, the immediately following argument is often introduced by the additive marker en plus (“on top of that”), as in (49), or in the authentic (58): (58)

...déjà que le boxeur a les yeux qui se brouillent, quand il reçoit plein de coups de poing dans la figure, si en plus le menton de l’adversaire est caché par une barbe ça deviendrait vraiment difficile de viser pour les uppercuts. (Nouvel Observateur, no. 1774, 46) ‘...not only can the boxer not see straight when he gets punched in the face a lot, if the adversary’s chin is also hidden by a beard aiming the uppercuts would be really difficult.’

Unlike what is the case when arguments are marked by thematic déjà, however, the conclusion aimed at may not be warranted by the déjà que-marked argument alone, but only by that argument in conjunction with the subsequent one(s). Thus, in (59), the reader is not necessarily meant to infer that a large mouth is unattractive as such, but rather that, when marred by a herpes sore, a large mouth becomes too large, and hence, unsightly: (59)

Je me mis à avoir de l’herpès, un genre de bouton de fièvre, d’origine nerveuse, qui se place en général sur les lèvres. J’étais chouette avec mon “plouf” sur la bouche! Déjà qu’elle est grande, mais avec ce truc-là, c’était une entrée de métro! (from Bardot 1996: 183) ‘I started to get herpes, a kind of cold sore of nervous origin that generally appears on the lips. I looked really great with my “blob” on the mouth! It’s big enough as it is, but with that thing, it was a subway entrance!’

A further difference between the two markers is that while clauses introduced by thematic déjà contain information that is presented as contextually new, the content of clauses introduced by déjà que is presented as given, and as forming the background for the main message, namely the additional “clincher” argument and the conclusion that follows therefrom, cf. the two different versions of (60).

Context-Level Uses of the French Phasal Adverbs (60)

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A. Alors, vous allez déménager bientôt? B. Ben, on est allé voir une très belle maison la semaine dernière, mais finalement, je n’ai pas envie de l’acheter. Déjà, l’école du quartier n’a pas bonne réputation, et puis, le chemin de fer passe juste à côté./?Déjà que l’école du quartier n’a pas bonne réputation, mais en plus le chemin de fer passe juste à côté. ‘A. So, will you be moving soon? B. Well, we had a look at a very beautiful house last week, but in the end, I don’t want to buy it. To begin with, the local school doesn’t have a good reputation, and what’s more, the railroad passes right by the house. / Not only is there the fact that the local school doesn’t have a good reputation, but also, the railroad passes right by the house.’

A final significant difference between the two connectives is that the contents of clauses marked by déjà que are invariably viewed negatively in the context, i.e. as oriented towards a conclusion that the speaker considers undesirable. This does not mean that the state of affairs denoted by a déjà que-marked clause must inherently be negatively evaluated: as (61) shows, the fact that someone is tall, handsome and charming, a state of affairs that must surely be considered a positive thing in and of itself, may well, in some contexts, be viewed as detrimental to someone else: (61)

A. Tu savais que le nouveau copain de Géraldine est vice-président d’une multinationale? B. Ce n’est pas vrai! Déjà qu’il est grand, beau et charmant, si en plus il a de l’argent, nous autres, on n’aura plus aucune chance auprès d’elle! ‘A. Did you know that Geraldine’s new boyfriend is the vice president of a multinational company? B. You’re kidding! Not only is he tall, handsome and charming, if he also has money, the rest of us won’t stand a chance with her!’

Déjà que is, by all appearances, of recent coinage, the earliest example in the Frantext data base being from 1936, and characteristically, from a novel by the avantgarde author Céline, famous for his unconventional style replete with structures and vocabulary characteristic of informal-bordering-on-vulgar speech: (62)

Madame Des Pereires, fort nerveuse, essayait de remettre un peu d’ordre... que ça ait pas l’air trop étable... déjà que c’était normalement une terrible pétaudière, alors depuis cette cohue, y avait plus un sifflet d’espace! (LouisFerdinand Céline, Mort à crédit, p. 527, 1936 – from Frantext) ‘Madame Des Pereires, who was very tense, was trying to tidy up a bit... the place mustn’t look too much like a barn... it was enough of a frightful mess under normal circumstances, so with this crowd, there wasn’t the slightest room left at all!’

The marker may have originated in constructions such as (63) and (64), where déjà has its basic phasal value, and que is a complementizer. In these examples, the matrix clause presents the complement clause as either mutually obvious ((63)) or presupposed ((64)), and in both cases, the contents of the complement clauses are evaluated negatively. Given the existence of both scalar and thematic déjà, it is conceivable that déjà in constructions like (63)-(64) may have been reanalyzed as having scope over the complement clause instead of the matrix clause:

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(64)

3.2

voilà déjà que vous commencez à ne pas m’écrire: c’est mal. (Germaine de Staël, Lettres diverses: 1792-15 mai 1794, p. 399, 1794 – from Frantext) ‘so you’ve already started not to write to me: that’s bad.’ Vous savez déjà que pour le grand public, pour vous, gens du monde, un dadaïste est l’équivalent d’un lépreux. (Tristan Tzara, Manifestes, lampisteries, articles: 1912-1924, p. 419, 1924 – from Frantext) ‘You already know that to the public at large, to you, men and women of the world, a Dadaist is the equivalent of a leper.’

Encore

The particle encore is found in three different connective constructions in modern French, all of which can be characterized as expressing some form of concession. The first type of construction, exemplified in (65)-(66), is one in which encore combines with the subordinating conjunction que to form a complex adverbial subordinator. The adverbial clause it introduces may take either the subjunctive (as in (65)) or the indicative (as in (66)), the choice between the two moods appearing to have to do with the presumed givenness vs newness to the hearer of the information given in the adverbial clause: thus, while the contents of the indicative concessive clause in (66) seem to be presented as an assertion for which the speaker takes full responsibility, the truth of the subjunctive concessive clause in (65) is rather presented as something which can be taken for granted (cf. Morel 1996: 46).7 The judgments in question are subtle, however: (65)

(66)

Cette mise en pièces de la famille aura fait résurgir l’archétype du secret de famille: l’inceste. Un secret protégé, par peur du scandale, par peur de la justice. Encore que l’on ait vu récemment des filles témoigner contre leur père. (Nouvel Observateur, no. 1828: 4) ‘This taking apart of the family seems to have unearthed the archetypal family secret, incest. A well-protected secret, due to the fear of scandal, and to the fear of justice. Still, some girls have recently been known to testify against their fathers.’ NO: Cette solidarité, est-ce une tendance montante ou déjà une survivance en crise? XG: Difficile de le savoir. Encore que l’exemple américain [...] doit nous inciter à la prudence sur les bons sentiments. (Nouvel Observateur, no. 1798: 10) ‘NO. Is this show of solidarity a growing trend or already an unstable relic from the past? XG: Difficult to say. Still, the example of the United States should encourage us to be skeptical about finer feelings.’

The conjunction encore que is capable of an “absolute” use, in which it is not followed by an explicitly expressed proposition, as in (67): (67)

7

La fébrilité qui régnait en fin de semaine dernière rue des Italiens pourrait laisser croire à un proche dénouement de l’affaire. Encore que! Car depuis l’origine règne dans ce dossier un climat de manipulation et de désinformation. (Nouvel Observateur, no. 1794: 30)

This would be in accordance with either of the alternative accounts of the general distribution of the two French moods offered in Nølke (1985) and in Herslund & Korzen (1999).


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‘The feverishness reigning at the end of last week at the court house in rue des Italiens might lead one to expect that a solution to the matter was imminent. Not necessarily! For this case has from the very beginning been characterized by a climate of manipulation and misinformation.’ In the second type of construction, encore combines with the coordinating conjunction et (“and”) to form a conjunctional adverb, as in (68). Like the conjunction encore que, this adverbial locution is not infrequently found in an absolute use, exemplified in (69): (68)

(69)

...[L]es responsables de la stratégie des grands opérateurs nous annoncent 19 à 20 millions d’abonnés pour décembre de cette année. Et 60% des Français, en comptant les nourrissons, équipés en 2002. Et encore, assure Yves Goblet, responsable de la stratégie et du développement chez Bouygues Télécom, notre rythme de croissance, certes soutenu, reste modeste par rapport à d’autres pays européens, comme l’Italie ou l’Espagne. (Nouvel Observateur, no. 1806: 4) ‘...The marketing directors of the large telecommunications services tell us they are expecting 19 to 20 million subscribers by December of this year. And that 60% of the inhabitants of France, including infants, will be equipped by 2002. Even so, Yves Goblet, head of marketing and development at Bouygues Télécom, assures us, our growth rate, while certainly stable, is modest in comparison to that of other European countries, such as Italy or Spain.’ Lui: Le bush, le désert australien, tu aimes? Moi: Connais pas. Lui: Alors, documente-toi très vite. Seul le bush australien est assez profond pour fuir une femme qui veut un enfant de toi. Et encore... (from Pennac 1996: 36) ‘He: The bush, the Australian desert, you like it? I: Don’t know it. He: Well, find out about it as fast as you can. Only the Australian bush is a deep enough hiding-place from a woman who wants a child by you. And even so...’

In its third and final type of connective use, exemplified in (70), encore is placed in clauseinitial position and is obligatorily followed by so-called “complex” subject clitic inversion (i.e. a form of subject clitic inversion where a co-referential subject NP may be placed in normal subject position, along with the inverted clitic, if the verb is in the third person, cf. Pedersen et al. 1980: §28, Jones 1996: 465). Syntactically, encore again functions as a conjunctional adverbial in this construction. The inverted word order is presumably a relic from older stages of the language, Old French being a verb-second language (Togeby 1974: §49). In contemporary French, the verb tends, with overwhelming frequency, to be the impersonal deontic modal falloir (“to be necessary”). Although – as evidenced by (71) – other verbs are not excluded, the locution encore faut-il (“nonetheless it is necessary”), followed by either an infinitive or a complement clause, is undubitably very close to being a frozen expression. (70)

“Une enquête menée par une psychologue auprès de ces familles montre que les enfants ont tout à y gagner”, précise-t-il. Mais encore faut-il pouvoir

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(71)

s’entendre entre parents, sans craindre que l’autre ne mette fin, sans crier gare, à l’accord officieux. (Marie-Claire, June 1999: 171f) ‘”Research carried out by a female psychologist on these families shows that the children have everything to gain from it”, he specifies. Still, the parents do have to be able to get along, without being afraid that the other will suddenly put an unexpected stop to their unofficial agreement.’ ...[I]l n’est pas un seul pays important pour les intérêts américains où la CIA – ou l’une des douze autres agences de renseignements [...] n’ait mené récemment une opération d’envergure. Encore ne connaît-on que celles, fiascos ou succès, que les officiels ont bien voulu divulguer à la presse américaine. (Nouvel Observateur, no. 1804: 13) ‘...There is not a single country of importance to American interests where the CIA – or one of the twelve other intelligence agencies [...] hasn’t recently carried out a large-scale operation. And even then we only know of those, failures or successes, which officials have been willing to divulge to the American press.’

The three different forms of concession expressed by these three markers can be accounted for by appealing to three of Grice’s (1989a[1975]) maxims of conversation. Thus, encore que appears to be linked to Grice’s maxim of Quality, in as much as the adverbial clause it introduces modifies the scope and validity of a previous assertion, which might, if interpreted in isolation, infringe said maxim. This conjunction introduces what we may call a “direct” concession, where the truth of the proposition q (expressed in the adverbial clause) would normally lead one to expect the falsity of the proposition p (expressed in the main clause). Direct concession may also be expressed in contemporary French by the conjunction bien que (obligatorily followed by a clause in the subjunctive mood), the difference between the two conjunctions being that bien que typically expresses concession at the content level, or what Morel (1996: 6ff) calls “logical” concession. By using bien que, the speaker therefore suggests that, given the truth of q, one would normally expect p to be false, whereas, in actual fact, both happen to be simultaneously true of the same SoA (see also de Vogüé 1992). A speaker of (72) or (73) infra will thus be convinced that Max will get a good grade. In this case, the adverbial clause may either precede or follow the main clause, and the entire complex sentence may be uttered with a single, overarching intonation contour: (72)

(73)

Max aura une très bonne note, bien que son prof ne l’aime guère. ‘Max will get a very good grade, although his teacher doesn’t like him very much.’ Bien que son prof ne l’aime guère, Max aura une très bonne note. ‘Although his teacher doesn’t like him very much, Max will get a very good grade.’

Encore que, on the other hand, expresses a context-level, or “rectificatory” (cf. Morel 1996: 10ff), form of concession, which operates on the main clause as a speech act, as opposed to its propositional content alone. Thus, a speaker who introduces a concessive adverbial clause with encore que indicates that, given the truth of q, she may, after all, not have been justified in stating p, the reason being that p might in the end turn out not to be true, given q. (74) will therefore be understood to mean that the fact that Max’s teacher dislikes him may actually lead


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to his giving Max a bad grade, after all. Note that, here, the adverbial clause will normally follow the main clause8, and will have its own independent intonation contour9: (74)

Max aura une très bonne note, encore que son prof ne l’aime guére. ‘Max will get a very good grade, albeit his teacher doesn’t like him very much.’

The conjunctional adverb et encore instead encodes an “indirect” form of concession, signaling that one or more inferences that might have been drawn on the basis of the preceding discourse are invalidated by the contents of the proposition q introduced by the marker. In other words, p might on its own infringe the Gricean maxim of Relation. Thus, in (75), the hearer might be tempted to infer that Max’s teacher must like him, given that teachers typically appreciate good students, but this potential inference is canceled by q. (75)

Max aura une très bonne note. Et encore son prof ne l’aime guère. ‘Max will get a very good grade. Even so, his teacher doesn’t like him very much.’

If this analysis is correct, and et encore [clause] does indeed operate on some conclusion inferrable from p, rather than on p itself, we can explain the fact that this construction almost systematically appears in writing following a full stop, as opposed to a comma, by appealing to the role of iconicity in discourse processing. On the assumption argued for in Hansen (1998a) that discourse connectives function as instructions to the hearer on how to process the contents of the host unit against the backdrop of the surrounding co(n)text, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the processing of an et encore-clause will be optimized if there is a small pause between the discourse unit p, from which a faulty inference may be drawn, and q, the discourse unit that corrects this potential inference. Latching the latter unit directly onto the former would be misleading, as considerations of least effort might make the hearer assume that the et encore-marked clause was directly relevant to the expressed contents of the preceding clause. If the above descriptions of the meanings of the two connectives are correct, there should be a number of contexts in which either will be appropriate, such that one may substitute for the other, with only a slight change of meaning. This is, indeed, the case, although on the whole, it seems easier to replace encore que by et encore than vice versa. This is to be expected, for from any given proposition, one can always (trivially) infer that proposition itself, and frequently also a number of very similar propositions, which may then play the role of potential inferences. The negation of an inference that is not (quasi-)identical to the original proposition, on the other hand, will far less frequently imply the negation of the original proposition from which the inference was, or might have been, drawn.

8

Strictly speaking, it is possible for an encore que-clause to precede its main clause, and to express logical concession, but as noted by Morel (1996: 25), such a configuration has an archaic feel, and is quite rare in contemporary French. Thus, the Frantext data base yields only about a dozen examples from 1980 onwards, all but a single one of which originate from a historical novel by Françoise Chandernagor, L’allée du roi (1981), a first-person narrative taking place in the 17th century. 9 Indeed, the status of an encore que-clause as a kind of ”after-thought” is frequently reinforced in writing by its following a full stop rather than a comma, as in (i)(cf. also (67) above): (i) …il ne vient à personne l’idée de dire – ou d’écrire – ”ils se sont aimés à la première phrase”. Encore que moi, je le pourrais… (Françoise Dorin, Les vendanges tardives, 1997, p. 121 – from Frantext) ’…it doesn’t occur to anyone to say – or to write – ”they fell in love at the first sentence”. Although I might…’

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If et encore in (68) supra were replaced by encore que, as in (76), the passage would be understood as suggesting that the predictions made in the preceding paragraph might in the end turn out to be incorrect. The original text with et encore, on the other hand, rather instructs the reader not to draw from the preceding paragraph the possible, but incorrect, inference that the growth rate of the telecommunications operators is a rapid one: (76)

...[L]es responsables de la stratégie des grands opérateurs nous annoncent 19 à 20 millions d’abonnés pour décembre de cette année. Et 60% des Français, en comptant les nourrissons, équipés en 2002. Encore que, dit Yves Goblet, responsable de la stratégie et du développement chez Bouygues Télécom, notre rythme de croissance, certes soutenu, reste modeste par rapport à d’autres pays européens, comme l’Italie ou l’Espagne. ‘...The marketing directors of the large telecommunications services tell us they are expecting 19 to 20 million subscribers by December of this year. And that 60% of the inhabitants of France, including infants, will be equipped by 2002. Although, says Yves Goblet, head of marketing and development at Bouygues Télécom, our growth rate, while certainly stable, is modest in comparison to that of other European countries, such as Italy or Spain.’

Similarly, if the original et encore in (77) infra is replaced by encore que, what is conveyed is the (given the context, perhaps slightly odd) idea that the speaker’s parents may not, after all, feel such deep regret over having left school early. Et encore, on the other hand, tells the reader not to infer from the preceding text that the speaker’s parents are unemployed as a result of their lack of education: (77)

Ma mère a arrêté l’école à 13 ans. Mon père, il sait pas à quel âge, parce qu’il connaît pas sa date de naissance. Mais ils regrettent énormément. Et encore ils travaillent. [/ ?Encore qu’ils travaillent.] Ma mère, comme elle dit, elle a trouvé le ménage. Elle m’a dit que quand je serai grand, il faudra le bac pour faire le ménage. (Nouvel Observateur, no. 1795: 41) ‘My mother quit school at 13. My father doesn’t know how old he was because he doesn’t know when he was born. But they regret it enormously. Still, they’re employed. [/ Although they’re employed.] My mother found a cleaning job, as she says. She told me that when I grow up, you’ll have to be a high school graduate to get a cleaning job.’

Finally, the encore + subject-clitic inversion construction can be described as an essentially additive marker, which indicates that the preceding discourse has not exhausted the topic, and that there are thus still things to be said before the first sub-maxim of Quantity (“Say as much as is required”) can be considered to have been observed. In other words, the speaker is not so much questioning the contents of and / or inferences from the preceding discourse (which may or may not have been produced by herself) as she is concerned to point out that the matter under discussion is not as simple as it appears from the previous discourse, and that the information contained in the encore-marked utterance must be added. This potential insufficiency of the previous discourse is sometimes made explicit in the utterance hosting encore, cf. (78): (78)

Cette capacité d’aimer viendrait-elle, comme semblait le croire Goethe, de la certitude que nos mères nous ont aimés? Toujours la Mère au centre?


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Pourtant, il ne suffit pas qu’elles nous aiment, encore faut-il que nous en ayons la certitude, et cela ne dépend pas que d’elles. (Julia Kristeva, Les Samouraïs, p. 262, 1990 – from Frantext) ‘Does this capacity for love stem, as Goethe seemed to believe, from the certainty that our mothers loved us? Always the Mother at the center? Yet, it is not enough that they loved us, we also have to feel certain that they did, and that does not depend only on them.’ Diachronically, the expression encore que as such is not found until the mid-16th century (cf. (79)), but the use of encore to express direct concession is far older, going back at least to the 12th century, as exemplified in (80), where clause-initial encore followed by a subjunctive clause (with subject inversion) is equivalent to a concessive conditional10: (79)

(80)

Toutefois il la faut ouir, à fin qu’elle ne se puisse pleindre. Car encore que je puisse savoir de moymesme la verité du fait, si ne veus je point mettre en avant cette coutume, qui pourroit tourner à conséquence, de condamner une personne sans l’ouir. (Louise Labé, Sonnets, Elégies, Débat de folie et d’amour, p. 60, 1555 – from Frantext) ‘Nevertheless, I must listen to her, so that she cannot complain. For although I may determine the truth of the matter for myself, yet I will not help establish the custom, which might have serious consequences, of condemning a person without listening to her.’ ...encore ait ele en son tresor // mil mars d’argent et mil mars d’or, // si est povre n’i a celi // por qu’ele ait avarisse en li,... (Gautier d’Arras, Eracle, vv. 2225-27, ca. 1176-84 – from BFM) ‘and even if she has a fortune // of a thousand marks of silver and a thousand marks of gold, // she is poor there is no-one [who isn’t] // provided she has avarice within her,...’

In Old French, (et) encore + subject inversion could also introduce indicative clauses, with an additive meaning (cf. (81)). This is probably the origin of present-day clause-initial encore and et encore, because, as shown by (82), a negative additive meaning (“not...either”) can easily be reinterpreted as a form of indirect concession. Here, the previous discourse establishes the impossibility of one man acting as both judge and counsel in one and the same trial. From this, one will be tempted to infer that if someone else is the judge, then the first man will be allowed to act as counsel. This inference is, however, invalidated under the special circumstances specified in the conditional clause: (81)

(82)

10

Sire, fet Girflet, comment pourroit ce estre que ge vos lessasse ici trestout seul et m’en iroie. Et encore me dites vos que ge ne vos verrai jamés. (La mort le roi Artu, p. 249, ca. 1230 – from BFM) ‘Sire, says Girflet, how could I leave you here all alone and go away. And, what’s more, you tell me that I’ll never see you again.’ Car nus ne doit estre en nule querele juges et avocas, et, se li ples n’estoit pas devant li mes devant autre seigneur, mes toutes voies li ples pourroit venir par devant li por reson de ressort, encore ne doit il pas estre avocas; (Philippe de Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, P34, 1283 – from BFM)

Note that this construction is no longer possible in modern French.

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Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface ‘For no man may be both judge and counsel in any dispute, and, if the case is not tried before him, but before some other lord, but might nevertheless come before him later in the event of an appeal, [he cannot act as counsel, either / he still cannot act as counsel];’

Concessive et encore is not unambiguously attested in my data base until the mid-15th century ((83)), while we have to wait until the mid-16th century for similarly unambiguous concessive uses of encore + subject inversion followed by an indicative clause ((84)): (83)

(84)

Guillemette: Mais la maniere de l’avoir / pour ung denier, et a quel jeu? Pathelin: Ce fut pour le denier a Dieu, / et encore, se j’eusse dit / “la main sur le pot!”, par ce dit / mon denier me fust demeuré. (La Farce de Maistre Pathelin, 1456-1469, vv. 392-397 – from BFM) ‘Guillemette: But how did you get it for a farthing, and at what game? Pathelin: It was for God’s farthing [a symbolic farthing offered at the beginning or end of a commercial transaction, M.-B.M.H.], and even so, had I said “hand on the kitty”, I’d have kept my farthing.’ Or quand ils se voyent desnuez de la parolle de Dieu et toute raison probable, ils prétendent ce qu’ils ont de coustume: que ceste observation est fort ancienne, et confermée par le consentement de plusieurs aages. Quand cela seroit vray, encore ne font-ils rien. (Jean Calvin, Institution de la religion chrestienne, book 4, p. 479, 1560 – from Frantext) ‘Now, when they find themselves deprived of the word of God and of all probable reason, they make the usual claim: that this observation is very old and has been confirmed by several ages. Even if that were true, they still don’t accomplish anything.’

The directly concessive use of encore (que) plausibly arises out of the basic continuative use of the adverb. As shown by König (1988), there is a strong cross-linguistic tendency for continuative or durative adverbs to acquire concessive uses with increasing subjectification. Indeed, if a speaker asserts the existence of a given SoA and at the same time insists on the continued existence of a different SoA, the hearer will regularly have reason to infer that the two SoAs might have been expected to be incompatible, which is, of course, the essence of a concessive relationship. Such a relationship, however, has no objective existence in the world, but only in speakers’ heads; it is therefore a relationship between propositions, and not between SoAs as such – hence the idea of increasing subjectification in the meaning of encore (cf. König 1988: 160). Besides subjectification, the evolution of encore (que) from continuative phasal adverb to concessive adverb / conjunction also illustrates another tendency of semantic / pragmatic change identified by Traugott & Dasher (2002: 281) (cf. ch. 3, sect. 4.1 supra), namely the tendency for meanings that originally made reference to the described event to progressively come to refer to the speech act. With respect to present-day et encore and encore + subject clitic inversion, the diachronic data suggest that the additive use of encore, attested since the late 11th century (cf. ch. 6, sect. 5.2.1), was a source of these extensions, alongside the continuative phasal use. Once again, this is in line with König’s cross-linguistic observations, in as much as one of his five types of diachronic sources of concessive markers comprises precisely additive particles (König 1988: 153). We may assume that the motivation for an extension of this kind is much the same as that which was argued to underlie the extension from continuative to concessive, only it is now


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the simultaneous existence of SoA 1 and SoA 2 that is asserted, rather than the continued existence of SoA 1 alongside SoA 2.

3.3

Toujours

There are two constructions in modern French, in which toujours functions as a discourse connective. One is that exemplified in (85), where the particle forms part of the fixed expression toujours est-il que; the other is that in (86), where toujours occurs at the end of an utterance, following an intonation break (or, in writing, a comma): (85)

(86)

A. Ton ami Fernand ne me plaît pas du tout: il est trop arrogant. B. Comme tu veux. Toujours est-il qu’il est beau mec. ‘A. I don’t care for your friend Fernand at all: he’s too arrogant. B. Fine. He’s good-looking, though.’ Je ne sais absolument pas où Sabine peut bien être... Pas ici, toujours. ‘I have absolutely no idea where Sabine may be... Not around here, in any case.’

Formally and historically, toujours est-il que consists of a matrix clause toujours est-il and a complementizer que. However, in contemporary French, the expression is frozen: thus, the “matrix” verb must be in the present indicative (cf. (87)), and cannot fall under the scope of negation or interrogation (cf. (88)-(89)). In other words, toujours est-il que as a whole must be considered as a lexicalized connective (on a par with déjà que or encore que), the “complement” clause having been reanalyzed as an independent clause: (87) (88) (89)

*Toujours étaitimperf.past-il qu’il était beau mec. *Toujours n’est-il pas qu’il est beau mec. *Est-il toujours qu’il est beau mec?

There is, however, very clear diachronic evidence that the expression used to be fully compositional. In the earliest examples in my data base, from mid-to-late 18th-century French, not only could a predicative adjective be added to what was still a matrix clause at the time, toujours est-il, before the complementizer que (cf. (90)), but the matrix verb être was, in fact, variable in form (cf. (91)): (90)

(91)

Ainsi non-seulement j’existe, mais il existe d’autres êtres, savoir les objets de mes sensations, et quand ces objets ne seroient que des idées, toujours est-il vrai que ces idées ne sont pas de moi. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile ou De l’éducation, book 4, p. 571, 1762 – from Frantext) ‘Thus, not only do I exist, but other beings exist, namely the objects of my sensations, and even if these objects might only be ideas, it is still true that those ideas do not originate with me.’ Toujours est-il et sera-t-il que cette dame était une scrupuleuse personne. (Count Honoré de Mirabeau, Lettres originales écrites du donjon de Vincennes, p. 331, 1780 – from Frantext) ‘Nevertheless, it is and always will be the case that this lady was a scrupulous person.’

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By using the connective toujours est-il que, the speaker is indicating that she abstains from taking a stand on what has been expressed in, or what may be inferred from, the immediately preceding discourse (which may be monologal or dialogal). Instead, she limits herself to observing facts that she knows to be true independently of what has just been said. It is noteworthy that the preceding discourse frequently contains epistemic hedges such as je ne sais pas (“I don’t know”), peut-être (“perhaps”) etc. (cf. (92)), or, alternatively, takes an interrogative or hypothetical form (cf. (93)): (92)

(93)

Nul ne savait d’où il arrivait, ni par quel hasard il s’arrêta en pays toumat. Toujours est-il que notre roi subit son influence et décréta un jour qu’il était la réincarnation de David, roi des Hébreux. (Jacques Lanzmann, La horde d’or, p. 370, 1994 – from Frantext) ‘Nobody knew where he came from, nor by what stroke of fortune he ended up settling in the land of the Toumats. In any case, our king fell under his influence and one day declared that he was the reincarnation of David, King of the Hebrews.’ Pourquoi, dans leurs longs hivers, avaient-ils choisi l’étude du français? à cause de sa clarté, de sa transparence, bon remède à leurs nuits perpétuelles? Toujours est-il que ces Scandinaves nous ouvraient le chemin. (Erik Orsenna, Grand amour, p. 21, 1993 – from Frantext) ‘Why did they choose to study the French language during their long winters? because of its clarity, its transparency, a good antidote to their perpetual nights? Whatever the case may be, these Scandinavians paved the way for us.’

The connective toujours est-il que has two – mutually compatible – discourse functions: it may mark a weak form of concession, as in (94), or it may have a discourse-structuring function, by marking its host as a return to the main theme of the discourse following a digression, as in (95): (94)

(95)

Il est possible que Jean réusisse brillamment à son examen. Toujours est-il que son prof ne l’aime guère. ‘It’s possible that Jean will pass his exam with flying colors. Be that as it may, his teacher doesn’t like him very much.’ ...le quartier était plutôt discrédité sur le marché des locations. Période de crise... on se demande d’ailleurs quelle période n’est pas de crise? Toujours est-il qu’aller se percher dans le XIIIe ça vous classait chez les loquedus. (Alphonse Boudard, Mourir d’enfance, p. 101, 1995 – from Frantext) ‘...the neighborhood had fallen more or less into disrepute on the rentals market. A period of crisis... anyway, one may well ask if there’s any period that isn’t a period of crisis? Be that as it may, to go live in the 13th arrondissement would single you out as destitute.’

In both cases, the coded meaning of the markers appears to be the same, namely to instruct the hearer to understand the contents of the host utterance as making no difference to the status of the previous discourse, and vice versa (cf. Némo 2000: 503). In other words, by using this connective, speakers explicitly refrain from taking a stand on prior discourse, and instead choose to point out what they know to be true independently of what has been said before. This is compatible with Nguyen’s (1986: 192) observation that in dialogal contexts where the


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preceding discourse represents a view endorsed by the hearer, no reaction is expected from the latter following a concession marked by toujours est-il que. The essential difference between the weakly concessive interpretation of this connective and its discourse-structuring interpretation appears to lie in the nature of what may be inferred from the preceding context: if the latter seems to evoke certain expectations, which are subsequently contradicted by the utterance hosting the marker, as in (94) (where one might have expected Jean’s teacher to at least not dislike him, given that teachers more often than not appreciate students who may be capable of producing brilliant results), then the indication that the contents of the host clause will remain in force no matter what the status of the previous discourse will result in a concessive interpretation. If, on the other hand, the host clause does not appear to contradict any contextual expectations, then we get the digression-closing interpretation exemplified in (95). This account of the two different interpretations of toujours est-il que as “side-effects” of different types of context, rather than as different coded meanings of the marker, is further supported by the fact that the border between the two interpretations may be quite fuzzy in many cases, such as that in (96): (96)

...la crise est finie, et je rebondis comme si elle n’avait pas eu lieu, (− ceci sur tous les plans, sauf sur l’infortuné plan physique qu’impitoyablement je malmène). Toujours est-il que ce soir – et l’alacrité avec laquelle je dicte ce journal m’en est la meilleure preuve – j’ai repris le départ; ... (Charles Du Bos, Journal, t.3, p. 263, 1927 – from Frantext) ‘...the crisis is over, and I bounce back as though it hadn’t taken place, (− at every level, except at the unfortunate physical level which I’m giving a mercilessly rough time). In any case, tonight – and the alacrity with which I dictate this diary is the best proof I could have of it – I’m getting off to a fresh start; ...’

As the reader will have noticed, this description of the semantic content of toujours est-il que is very similar to that proposed for modal toujours. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that the sense of toujours found in the earliest, compositional, uses of the construction toujours estil (vrai) que (as in (90)-(91) above) was precisely the modal, categorizing sense of the adverb. In this new use, the entity that was being categorized as true (or simply as being the case) was a whole clause, as opposed to a nominal. The main reasons for distinguishing the two markers in contemporary French are, on the one hand, the present lexicalized character of toujours est-il que, and, on the other hand, the clearly connective nature of this marker, which requires a left-hand discourse co-text in order to be felicitously used, whereas modal toujours may comment on an aspect of the situational context at large, with no preceding linguistic utterance it can connect to, as when (21) above is uttered in a context where the speaker knows that the hearer is waiting anxiously for some particular piece of news, and comes home to find him pacing restlessly back and forth next to the phone. The final, prosodically or graphically right-detached, use of toujours (cf. (86) above) is strongly reminiscent in meaning and function of both modal toujours and toujours est-il que, as also noted by Nguyen (1988). It first appears in my data base slightly earlier than the latter, namely in the early 18th century: (97)

Le Magister. ...et comme j’ai queuque doutance que vous allez vous remarier, j’aurons soin de faire votre épitra... votre épita...

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Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface La greffière. Mon épitaphe? Le Magister. Hé, morgué, nenni, c’est tout le contraire, votre épitralame je pense, je ne sais pas bien comment ça s’appelle, mais ce seront des vars à votre louange, toujours. (Florent Carton Dancourt, La Fête de village, II.i, p. 57, 1711 – from Frantext) ‘The Schoolmaster. ...and as I ‘ave some suspicion that you’re goin’ to remarry, I’ll make a point of writin’ your epitra... your epita... The clerk’s wife. My epitaph? The Schoolmaster. Oh, goodness, no, it’s quite the opposite, your epitralamion I think, I’m not quite sure what it’s called, but they’ll be varses in your praise, in any case.’

The principal distinguishing characteristic of right-detached toujours appears to be that it scopes the speech act, rather than the proposition. Moreover, unlike modal toujours and toujours est-il que, it is compatible with all types of speech acts, not just assertive ones, as shown by (98)-(99): (98)

(99)

Le clerc: ...me voilà prêt à recevoir votre plainte... Où est votre argent? Janot: Le v’là, monsieur. Il lui montre son écu. Le clerc: Six francs! Ah! voilà de quoi faire une belle plainte, bien nourrie même. Janot: Je le crains ben. Ah ça! rendez-moi de bonnes pièces, toujours. (Dorvigny, Les Battus paient l’amende, scene IX, p. 985, 1779 – from Frantext) ‘The clerk: ...I’m ready to receive your complaint... Where’s your money? Janot: Here, Sir. He shows him his crown. The clerk: Six francs! Well, well, with that we can make a nice complaint, a fat one, even. Janot: I’m afraid so. Dear me! Give me back some genuine coins, at least.’ Raboliot reconnut Sarcelotte à son parler; il fut heureux d’entendre, après longtemps, son nasillement cordial et gai. – Il y a une pièce que je t’attends, dit Sarcelotte. On peut causer? Rien qu’à l’accent du camarade, Raboliot devina tout de suite. Un tressaillement le parcourut, le chauffa de la nuque aux talons. Il demanda, un peu anxieux: - Tu n’es pas allé chez moi, toujours ? (Maurice Genevoix, Raboliot, p. 237, 1925 – from Frantext) ‘Raboliot recognized Sarcelotte by the way he talked; he was happy to hear his hearty and cheerful nasal twang after so long. “I’ve been waiting for you for quite a while”, said Sarcelotte. “Can we talk?” Just by the tone of his friend’s voice, Raboliot guessed it immediately. He shuddered, became hot from head to toe. A bit anxiously, he asked, “You didn’t go to my house, now, did you?”

This use of toujours probably arose as a type of afterthought, whereby the speaker could comment on the status of her own speech act as valid independently of the contents of previous discourse. In contemporary French, the rhematic position of the marker and the fact that it focalizes the speech act endow it with a more emphatic value as compared to the other two markers. Right-detached toujours seems to underscore the discourse relevance of its host utterance, resulting in a stronger appeal to a reaction from the addressee when it marks


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assertive utterances (cf. Nguyen 1988: 42). As such, it can be considered as an intersubjectification of the already subjectified meaning of modal toujours, in keeping with Traugott & Dasher’s (2002: 281) first tendency of semantic / pragmatic change (cf. ch. 3, sect. 4.1). Because of its more emphatic quality, right-detached toujours never seems to have the simple digression-closing function that we observed with toujours est-il que, but only an argumentational, weakly concessive, function. Thus, it instructs the addressee to reflect on the contents of its host utterance as conveying at least a potential counter to something expressed in, or suggested by, the discourse context (cf. Nguyen 1988). This counter-argumentational force is underscored by the very frequent occurrence of right-detached toujours in negated utterances (as in (86)).

3.4

Enfin

The marker enfin has the largest number of connective context-level uses of any of the four phasal adverbs. These include a “listing” use, as in (100), a “synthesizing” use, as in (101), a reformulative use, as in (102), a “self-interruptive” use, as in (103), and a dialogal, “indignant”, use, as in (104): (100) Je n’irai pas voir Casino Royale avec toi: tout d’abord, je n’aime pas James

(101) (102)

(103)

(104)

Bond, ensuite, je n’ai pas d’argent, et enfin, j’ai autre chose de prévu ce soir. ‘I won’t go to see Casino Royale with you: first of all, I don’t care for James Bond, secondly, I have no money, and finally, I have other plans tonight.’ Cédric est grand, beau, intelligent, spirituel – enfin, parfait, quoi! ‘Cédric is tall, handsome, intelligent, witty – in a word, perfect!’ Tout le monde est venu à la soirée. Enfin, tous ceux qui n’étaient pas partis en vacances. ‘Everyone came to the party. Well, everyone who wasn’t away on vacation.’ j’espère rester dans la marionnette et je crois que je enfin dans la marionnette (Corpus Elicop, File=tours/gra19as6.txt) ‘I hope to stay in the puppet show business and I think that I well in the puppet show business’ A. On devrait peut-être préciser que la conférence de Duschnock aura lieu dans le grand amphithéâtre. B. Enfin, tous le monde le sait, ça! ‘A. Perhaps we should specify that Duschnock’s lecture will take place in the large auditorium. B. Come on, everybody knows that!’

The listing use is the oldest, going back to late Middle French, and may be assumed to be a direct extension of the basic temporal sense of the adverb. It is clearly metadiscursive in nature, listing enfin marking its host (which may be a whole clause or sentence, or merely a part of one) as the last element in a particular discourse sequence. Thus, in the early example (105), enfin marks the last of a series of rhetorical questions. Note that the “last-ness” of the enfin-marked utterance is only relative to the discourse itself: there is nothing to indicate that the SoA denoted by the host sentence is real-world-chronologically posterior to those denoted by the two preceding sentences: (105) Commandoit-elle pas à ses gardes? Pouvoit elle pas les punir de ce que trop

librement ils la laissoient conferer avec ceux dont elle se servoit pour

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Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface instrument de ses desseins? Et enfin n’estoit il pas en elle de la resserrer tellement et si estroictement qu’elle ne peust venir à bout de ce qu’elle pretendoit ? (Pierre de l’Estoile, Registre-journal du règne de Henri III, vol. 5, p. 285, 1587 – from Frantext) ‘Was she not in command of her guards? Could she not punish them for letting her confer too freely with those whom she used as a means for her ends? And, lastly, did she not have it in her to rein herself in in this way and so tightly that she could not attain what she desired?’

The mechanism of extension is fairly obvious in this case: all things being equal, in the narration of a series of related events, the event to occur last in the real world will tend to be presented last in the discourse (cf. Grice’s 1989a[1975] fourth sub-maxim of the maxim of Manner), and from there, it is but a small step to the listing use. Quite possibly, uses such as that in (106), where enfin does mark the last element in an extralinguistic temporal sequence, but where the exact chronological order of at least some of the previously mentioned events is nevertheless irrelevant, and where the syntactic parallelism between the constructions can hardly fail to lend the adverb a metadiscursive flavor, constitute an intermediate step, i.e. a plausible type of bridging context: (106) Les Ligueurs demandent Tout, // Le Roy leur accorde Tout, // Le Guisard lui

vole Tout, // Le Soldat ravage Tout, // Le pauvre Peuple porte Tout, // La Roine Mere conduit Tout, // Le Chancelier selle Tout, // Le Parlement passe Tout, // Le duc Desparnon gaste Tout, // La Religion couvre Tout, // Le Pape pardonne Tout, // Le Diable enfin emportera Tout. (Pierre de l’Estoile, Registre-journal du règne de Henri III, [1587], vol. 5, p. 237, 1586 – from Frantext) ‘The members of La Ligue demand everything, / The King gives them everything, / The follower of Guise steals everything from him, / The soldier lays everything waste, / The poor people put up with everything, / The Queen Mother runs everything, / The Chancellor puts his seal on everything, / The Parliament passes everything, / The Duke of Desparnon spoils everything, / Religion covers everything up, / The Pope pardons everything, / The Devil at last will take everything.’ The development from temporal to listing use follows Traugott & Dasher’s (2002: 281) third, fourth, and fifth tendencies, in as much as enfin widens its scope here, to comprise the speech act level rather than the propositional level of the utterance (cf. Sweetser 1990), and in the process loses its ability to contribute to the truth conditions of the expressed proposition (cf. ch. 3, sect. 4.1). Synthesizing enfin is again metadiscursive in nature and marks (a part of) an utterance which sums up the previous discourse, formulates it more pithily, or draws a conclusion from it. In some sense, it therefore marks a particular kind of reformulation of the preceding text. It ought, however, to be distinguished from the reformulative use exemplified in (102), in which the contents and / or the form of the preceding discourse are disavowed, and which – as we will see below – is a significantly later extension of enfin. The synthesizing use is contemporaneous with the listing use (cf. (107) infra), and can be explained as the result of an inference of structural parallelism between narrative discourse, where temporal enfin is prototypically found, and expository discourse, where the synthesizing use is more likely to occur. That is, given that saving the most important part of one’s story for last is a common


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floor-holding technique in spoken narrative (cf. Sacks 1995: 222ff), and given the fact that a synthesis or conclusion is the most important element of an expository text, hearers will tend to infer that a statement occurring at the end of some stretch of expository discourse may represent a synthesis of, or conclusion from, the preceding elements. Moreover, as (108)-(109) show, temporal enfin often introduces an action or event of central importance to the discourse – something which follows from, or may even constitute the intended goal of, previously mentioned actions and events. Such central events are in a sense the real-world counterparts of syntheses or conclusions, which subjectively sum up a stretch of discourse, and there may thus be argued to be a partially metonymical process at work in the extension from the temporal to the synthesizing sense of enfin: (107) Et comme ils avoyent esté premierement traictez avec des gelinottes, poissons

et viandes rostyes – enfin ils avoyent esté traytés passablement bien – le Docteur Fauste les consoloyt en cete façon: ... (Pierre-Victor Palma-Cayet, L’Histoire prodigieuse du Docteur Fauste, pt. 3, p. 162, 1598 – from Frantext) ‘And once they had been treated to grouse, fish, and roasted meat – in a word, they had been treated pretty well – Doctor Faustus consoled them thus: ...’ (108) Celuy qui prend plaisir à folie et outrage, // Et de là son désir, prend son plus d’avantage // Et delectation, suyvant le Diable en tout, // Untel se faict sur soy la verge qui d’un bout // à l’autre vient enfin à occuper son ame // Et son corps et ses biens, le laissant en diffame. (Pierre-Victor Palma-Cayet, L’Histoire prodigieuse du Docteur Fauste, pt. 1, p. 70, 1598 – from Frantext) ‘He who takes pleasure in madness and outrage, / And from thence his desire, takes his surplus of advantage / And delight, following the Devil in everything, / Such a one makes of himself the rod which from one end / to the other ends up occupying his soul / And his body and his property, leaving him dishonored.’ (109) Deschassez-le par main gladiatoire, // Car le vouloir de ces communaultez // Est de submectre empires, royaultez // Pour estre enfin seigneurs de tout le monde. (Jean Marot, Le voyage de Venise, p. 42, 1532 – from Frantext) ‘Chase it away with a gladiator’s hand, / For the will of these communities / Is to subjugate empires, kingdoms / In order to be masters of the whole world in the end.’ The synthesizing use of enfin lends support to Traugott & Dasher’s (2002: 281) first and second tendencies: the meaning of the marker becomes increasingly subjective, for, beyond indicating the position of its host utterance in a chronological sequence of speech acts, synthesizing enfin also indicates the speaker’s attitude to the relation between the discourse that precedes the marker and that which follows it. It also becomes less conceptual, and instead increasingly procedural, in nature, as the concept of (real-world or discourse) lastness recedes into the background in favor of the instruction to process the contents of the host unit as a synthesis of the preceding discourse, or, more radically in some instances, as distilling the speaker’s reaction to salient aspects of the context, which must be identified by the hearer. Indeed, not long after its first attestations, synthesizing enfin can be found discourse-initially, where the utterance marked cannot reasonably be said to synthesize the contents of the immediately preceding discourse. Rather, the use of enfin points to entirely implicit memories of earlier interactions or even non-linguistic events. Thus, in (110), for instance, the very first

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line of a scene in a play, enfin introduces a rhetorical question that sums up the speaker’s reaction to a series of preceding events: (110) Reine. Enfin, jusques à quand mon ame desolée // D’effroyables sursauts

doit-elle estre esbranlée? (Antoine de Montchrestien, Tragédie de la reine d’Escosse, Act I, p. 73, 1604 – from Frantext) ‘Queen. Oh, for how long must my devastated soul / Be shaken by dreadful fits and starts?’ The subjectification of the meaning of the marker is complete here. In this type of context, the idea that enfin marks a particular position within an actual temporal sequence of real-world events or utterances has receded quite far into the background. It does, however, persist to at least some extent, as evidenced by the fact that (110) would be infelicitous in a context where the question clearly expressed the Queen’s initial reaction to a single unfortunate event. Related to the synthesizing use is an “epistemic” use already briefly discussed in ch. 6, sect. 3.3 supra, which appears sporadically in the 16th and 17th century data, but which has not survived in modern French, except in more or less frozen collocations with a small handful of coordinating conjunctions (see sect. 3.4.1 infra). Instead, this particular function seems to have been largely taken over by the related adverb finalement. The earliest example is that adduced as (26) in ch. 6, sect. 3.3, and repeated here for convenience: (111) Helas, ilz pensent avoir tout; // Mais ce tout là, qu’ilz disent leur, // Ce n’est

enfin que tout malheur: // Nostre Tout n’est pas de la sorte. (Marguerite de Navarre, Trop, prou, peu, moins, Sc. III, p. 165, 1544 – from Frantext) ‘Alas, they think they have it all; / But this all, which they call theirs, / Is in the end no more than all unhappiness: / Our All is not of that kind.’ Like the synthesizing use, this epistemic use has wider scope than the temporal sense of enfin. It is also more subjective, indicating the speaker’s subjective stance towards the truth of a certain state of affairs. Constructions of the type in (112) (although itself slightly more recent than (111)), where temporal enfin modifies an explicit propositional attitude verb in a superordinate matrix clause, and where the parenthetical temporal clause clearly indicates that the speaker has been mulling over the question for some time prior to the utterance, would seem to be a likely kind of bridging context for this epistemic use. In both that example and in (111), the speaker can be understood to have spent some time mentally going over a number of known facts and arguments with respect to a particular problem, with the enfin-marked utterance expressing a final conclusion drawn from these considerations. In other words, the notion of being last in a temporal sequence clearly persists in this reading of the adverb. Note, moreover, that in the epistemic, as in the synthesizing use, the enfin-marked utterance expresses an idea which is central to the discourse: (112) Symeon. Enfin, quand j’y ai bien pensé, je trouve qu’Amour est un grand

seigneur. (Pierre de Larivey, Le lacquais, I.i, p. 67, 1579 – from Frantext) ‘Symeon. In the end, when I’ve thought about it for a while, I find Love to be a great master.’ The properly reformulative use seems to make a first appearance at the very end of the 17th century (cf. (113)), but is not attested again in the data I have looked at until the 19th century (cf. (114)):


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(113) Je crois être dans un autre climat, un pays bas et couvert comme la Bretagne,

enfin sombre forêt où le soleil ne luit que rarement. (Madame de Sévigné, Correspondance, [1696], vol. 3, p. 317, 1687 – from Frantext) ‘I believe myself to be in a different climate, a low country with overcast skies like Brittany, anyway, a dark forest where the sun only rarely shines.’ (114) Et si quelqu’un de vous enviait ma puissance, // Qu’il regarde avant tout et talents et naissance! // Daignez vous rappeler d’où j’ai su vous tirer, // Enfin quels vous étiez; ... (Honoré de Balzac, Cromwell, I.v, p. 934, 1820 – from Frantext) ‘And if one of you should envy my power, / Let him first and foremost consider both talent and birth! / Be so good as to remember what I took you away from, / That is, who and what you were; ...’ In contemporary French, reformulation may comprise corrections that directly contradict the speaker’s previous discourse: (115) Bartholoméus. Enfin, votre pièce est-elle écrite, ou non?

Ionesco, cherchant sur la table parmi ses papiers. Oui... enfin, non... n’est-ce pas... pas tout à fait. (Eugène Ionesco, L’impromptu de l’Alma, p. 96, 1958 – from Frantext) ‘Bartholoméus. Well, is your play written or not? Ionesco, searching on the table among his documents. Yes... well, no... you know... not quite.’ Reformulation can be linked metonymically to the synthesizing use, in as much as a synthesis of previous discourse will normally constitute a restatement of what has already been said. A plausible motivation for speakers to use enfin in this way is to save face by masking a reformulation of an unclear and possibly even incorrect statement as a synthesis. Once entrenched as such, the reformulative use essentially amounts to a hedging use of the adverb, thus conforming to Traugott & Dasher’s (2002: 281) seventh tendency of semantic / pragmatic change (cf. ch. 3, sect. 4.1). A major function of hedges is, of course, as face-saving devices (cf. Brown & Levinson 1987: 145f) designed to forestall objections to less than truthful and / or felicitous formulations, and the development from a synthesizing to a reformulative use of enfin can therefore also be seen as an instance of intersubjectification, i.e. Traugott & Dasher’s first tendency. The basic temporal sense of enfin can be argued to persist in this use, in as much as the host utterance (or utterance part) constitutes the final formulation of the idea in question. In the twentieth century, there arises a use of enfin in the context of mere hesitation, as opposed to actual reformulation, where the presence of the adverb suggests that the host is the formulation finally chosen: (116) Et puis nous avons un directeur, un directeur qui... que... enfin qui n’est pas

bien avec moi. (Georges Bernanos, Lettres inédites, [1906], p. 1725, 1904 – from Frantext) ‘And then we have a director, a director who... whom... well who is not on good terms with me.’

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The use of enfin in such contexts tends to suggest that the speaker was actually about to say something slightly different from what s/he ends up producing, such that the utterance as finally produced represents a more polite and / or downtoned version of what might have been said. In view of this, it is probably reasonable to consider this hedging use a subtype of the reformulative use, although it may also have elements of the self-interruptive use to be discussed below (cf. (103) supra). The interjective use seen in (117) may be a contextual modulation on either the reformulative sense or the synthesizing sense of enfin (or of both): in this type of example, enfin is used for face-saving reasons, and the projected reformulation or synthesis remains entirely implicit, something for the hearer to work out, while the speaker him- / herself abstains from belaboring the point: (117) Je voudrais que Gombauld, L’Estoille et Colletet, // En prose comme en vers

eussent un peu mieux fait, // Que des Amis rivaux Boisrobert ayant honte, // Revînt à son talent de faire bien un conte. // Enfin... (Saint-Evremond, Les Académiciens, I.i, p. 224, 1703 – from Frantext) ‘I wish that Gombauld, L’Estoille and Colletet / Had done a little better in both prose and verse, / That ashamed of his friendly rivals Boisrobert / Had regained his talent for well-made tales. Anyway, ...’ Whatever the case may be, it forms a bridge to the self-interruptive use, which makes its appearance in the late 18th century: (118) M. le duc D’Aiguillon a reçu hier, par M. De La Vrillière, ordre du roi

d’aller et de rester à Aiguillon. Je ne connais pas M. D’Aiguillon, mais son exil m’afflige et me fait peur pour les conséquences que cela peut avoir. M. de Maurepas est d’une philosophie stoïcienne, il est à Pont-Chartrain; il doit y recevoir M. D’Aiguillon qui y est allé ce soir et qui part de là pour son exil. Vous remarquerez qu’Aiguillon est à deux cents lieues, qu’il n’est pas bâti et que sa femme ne peut y aller. L’exil de Chanteloup était plus doux. M. le duc de Choiseul est au sacre; ses amis ne possèdent pas de joie de cet exil; ils espèrent sans doute... enfin, nous verrons; mais ce qu’il y a de vrai, c’est que M. de Maurepas n’est pas curieux. (Julie de Lespinasse, Lettres à Condorcet, [1776], p. 162, 1775 – from Frantext) ‘Yesterday, the Duke of Aiguillon received from M. De La Vrillíère, the King’s order to go stay at Aiguillon. I don’t know M. D’Aiguillon, but his exile pains me and makes me fear the possible consequences. M. De Maurepas is of a stoic disposition, he is at Pont-Chartrain; he is to receive M. D’Aiguillon, who has gone there tonight and who will leave from there to go into exile. You will notice that Aiguillon is 500 miles away, that he is not sturdy and that his wife cannot go. Chanteloup’s exile was sweeter. The Duke of Choiseul is attending the consecration; his friends take no joy in this exile; no doubt they’re hoping... anyway, we’ll see; but one thing is certain, and that is that M. De Maurepas is not curious.’ Like the reformulative hedging use, the self-interruptive use hedges the speaker’s own virtual discourse and marks its replacement by something more circumspect, the difference between them being that in the self-interruptive use, the grammatical construction projected prior to the insertion of the marker is left incomplete.


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Finally, we come to the “indignant” use of enfin, in which the particle marks an impatient and/or dismissive reaction to the interlocutor’s discourse. This use is attested slightly prior to, but essentially at roughly the same time as, the self-interruptive use, and is, in all probability, not an independent sense, but a dialogal variant of the monologal self-interruptive use. In other words, there is probably a single interruptive sense of enfin, which may be instantiated in either monologue or dialogue, with slightly different pragmatic effects resulting therefrom: (119) Gilles. Oui, elle est belle; mais un homme qui a une belle femme, tout le

monde est son cousin. Cassandre. Hé bien tant mieux, on me fera plus d’honneur. Gilles. Mais pardienne, ne savez-vous donc pas qu’une bonne chèvre, une bonne mule, et une bonne femme sont trois mauvaises bêtes? Cassandre. Enfin, je te demande conseil, mais ce n’est pas pour me contredire. (Thomas Simon de Gueullette, Léandre fiacre, Sc. II, p. 1311, 1756 – from Frantext) ‘Gilles. Yes, she’s beautiful, but a man who has a beautiful wife is friends with the whole world. Cassandre. Well, so much the better, I’ll be honored all the more. Gilles. But damnit, don’t you know that a good goat, a good mule, and a good woman are three bad beasts? Cassandre. Look, I ask your advice, but it’s not so you can contradict me.’ A plausible source is again the synthesizing sense, as used in response to someone else’s discourse (cf. (120) infra). When synthesizing enfin is used interactionally, a frequent pragmatic side-effect will be a suggestion that the speaker is impatient for the interlocutor to get to the point. At the same time, the functional extension seen in (119) can be related to discourse-initial uses of the synthesizing sense (cf. (110) supra), in as much as the utterance marked by enfin can be interpreted as summarizing the speaker’s emotional reaction to the preceding exchange. (120) Matamore. L’un et l’autre, parbleu! Cette Ambroisie est fade; / J’en eus au

bout d’un jour l’estomac tout malade. C’est un mets délicat et de peu de soustien: / A moins que d’estre un Dieu, l’on n’en vivroit pas bien. / Il cause mille maux, et des l’heure qu’il entre, / Il allonge les dents et restressit le ventre. Lise. Enfin, c’est un ragoust qui ne vous plaisoit pas? (Pierre Corneille, L’Illusion comique, IV.iv, p. 84, 1639 – from Frantext) ‘Matamore. One and the other, by Jove! This Ambrosia is bland; / After one day my stomach was all upset by it. / It’s a delicate dish that provides little sustenance: / Unless one was a God, one would not live well on it. / It causes a thousand ills, and from the moment it enters, / It makes you very hungry and makes the stomach contract. Lise. In a word, it’s a stew that you didn’t like?’ 3.4.1 Collocations with enfin The 17th century sees the rise of several collocational connectives, in which epistemic enfin combines with a coordinating conjunction. Most prominently, we find the collocations mais enfin (as in (121)) and car enfin (as in (122)):

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Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface (121) ...Teombre, pour continuer sa feinte, quand ce fut à luy à chanter, prit son

subjet sur cette Dorinde, et en dit quelques vers, dont je ne me sçaurois souvenir. Mais enfin le sujet estoit, qu’à son despart elle avoit fait serment d’avoir tousjours memoire de luy; (Honoré d’Urfé, L’Astrée, vol. 2, pt. 2, book 4, p. 137, 1610 – from Frantext) ‘...to continue his sham, Teombre, when it became his turn to sing, chose this Dorinde as his subject, and recited a few verses about her, which I cannot remember. But in any case the subject was that at the time of her departure, she had sworn to always remember him;’ (122) Elle écrivoit avec tant de délicatesse; son stile étoit enjoüé, ses pensées fines, ses applications justes: adieu la délicatesse, adieu la justesse; car enfin pour une femme qui compose, un mari est une distraction continuelle. (Charles Dufresny, Amusemens sérieux et comiques, p. 190, 1699 – from Frantext) ‘She wrote with such delicacy; her style was cheerful, her thoughts subtle, her practice accurate: goodbye delicacy, goodbye accuracy; for when all is said and done, for a woman who writes, a husband is a continuing distraction.’ Both collocations operate at either the epistemic level, or more frequently, the speech act level, as opposed to the propositional level. That, however, also appears to be true of both mais (cf. Sweetser 1990: 102f on English but) and car (cf. Groupe λ-l 1975) alone. The fact that mais enfin is adversative / concessive in meaning, and that car enfin marks a justification of a conclusion or speech act expressed in the preceding discourse can likewise be attributed to the meanings of mais and car alone. We must assume, therefore, that these collocations with enfin are justified by some additional element of meaning. That element seems to be identical to the epistemic reading of the adverb, exemplified in (111) above. That is, enfin adds the idea that its host utterance represents the speaker’s final stance on the matter. Again, this development represents a subjectification of the original meaning of enfin, as well as a change from more conceptual to more purely procedural meaning. In other words, in (121), the speaker concedes that he cannot remember the exact contents of the verses recited by Teombre, but goes on to assert that this is of no consequence, as he does remember the gist of them, which is all that matters in the end. In (122), likewise, the speaker can be seen to justify the previous speech act by pointing out that, no matter how long the question was discussed, the end result would be the conclusion expressed in the clause introduced by car enfin. As a natural consequence, utterances marked by mais / car enfin typically express ideas that are central to the discourse at the point of their appearance, and which round off the preceding argument, thereby strongly suggesting that the ideas expressed in the host clause should become part of the common ground for subsequent discourse. Clearly, this is not far removed from both the epistemic and the synthesizing uses of enfin discussed above. Examples like (123), where the hearer is meant to imagine how all conceivable means of knowing the truth are being tested one by one in vain, leading to the ultimate realization that the truth cannot be known, can plausibly be hypothesized to have served as a bridge between the simple juxtaposition of adversative mais and temporal enfin, on the one hand, and the more or less frozen concessive collocation, on the other:


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(123) Il n’est desir plus naturel que le desir de cognoistre la verité. Nous essayons

tous les moyens que nous pensons y pouvoir servir: mais enfin tous nos efforts sont courts; car la vérité n’est pas un acquest, ny chose qui se laisse prendre et manier, et encore moins posseder à l’esprit humain. (Pierre Charron, De la sagesse: trois livres, book 1, p. 115, 1601 – from Frantext) ‘There is no desire more natural than the desire to know the truth. We try all the means we can think of that might serve that goal: but in the end, all our efforts are in vain; for the truth is not a given thing, nor a thing which may be seized and handled, and still less possessed by the human mind.’ A third collocation, puisqu’enfin, is more or less identical in function to car enfin operating at the speech act level, except that – besides justifying a preceding speech act – puisque communicates that the contents of the host clause are being taken for granted (cf. Ducrot 1983: 182): (124) Qu’il meure, puisqu’enfin il a dû le prévoir, // Et puisqu’il m’a forcée enfin à

le vouloir. (Jean Racine, Andromaque, V.i, p. 116, 1697 – from Frantext) ‘Let him die, since after all he must have foreseen it, / And since he has forced me to want it at last.’ The present analysis of the three collocations is thus essentially compositional, i.e. it assumes that each individual item contributes one of the senses it may have in isolation. As such, my analysis is opposed to a “holistic” analysis, i.e. one which would assume that each of the clusters in question had been grammaticalized as a whole, and that, consequently, the meaning of the whole must be more than the sum of its parts. The debate over compositional vs holistic analyses of particle clusters is a long-standing one in particle research, and the present data provide further support for the compositional view already argued for in Hansen (1998a: 233). Additional support is provided by examples like (125), in which epistemic enfin appears on its own, but with a largely similar meaning to that of car enfin / puisqu’enfin, except that it should probably be analyzed as operating at the metalinguistic level (cf. Sweetser 1990: 140f), as a comment on the choice of the word maris, rather than as a justification of the preceding speech act as such: (125) Et si nous esperons // De rompre ces liens // Avec le mariage, // Que nous

sommes deceuës, // Puisque d’autres liens // Mille fois plus serrez // Mettent en servitude // Encore nos volontez: // car les maris (enfin ce sont les hommes // Qui firent ceste loy) // Les maris, dis-je, avecque tyrannie // Vont s’usurpant toute l’authorité // Sur nostre volonté. (Honoré d’Urfé, La Sylvanire ou la Morte-vive: fable bocagère, II.ii, p. 88, 1627 – from Frantext) ‘And if we hope to break these ties by marrying, how disappointed we are, since other ties, a thousand times tighter, still enslave our wills: for the husbands (after all, it is the men who made this law) the husbands, I say, will tyrannically go usurping all authority over our will.’

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3.5

Summary

It is fairly clear that, when we get to the various types of connective uses discussed in this section, it becomes more and more difficult (if not impossible) to conceive of the four phasal adverbs as forming a lexical paradigm in the strict sense. This does not mean, however, that certain relations of contrast cannot be perceived among them. Consider (126)-(128): (126) Il est possible que Jean réussisse brillamment à l’examen. Encore que son

prof ne l’aime guère. ‘It’s possible that Jean will pass his exam with flying colors. Albeit his teacher doesn’t like him very much.’ (127) Jean va sûrement rater son examen. Déjà que son prof ne l’aime guère, si en plus il n’a pratiquement pas travillé, je ne vois vraiment pas comment il fera pour se débrouiller. ‘Jean will surely fail his exam. For one thing, his teacher doesn’t like him very much, if on top of that he’s hardly done any work at all, I really don’t see how he’ll get by.’ (128) Il est possible que Jean réussisse brillamment à l’examen. Toujours est-il que son prof ne l’aime guère. ‘It’s possible that Jean will pass his exam with flying colors. Nevertheless, his teacher doesn’t like him very much.’ We might say that, with “encore que p”, the speaker retrospectively casts doubt upon the truth of the preceding main clause, and that, in so doing, she is suggesting that she is not sure that the border between a negative conclusion ~r (which would be the expected consequence of the argument p expressed in the concessive clause) and the positive conclusion r asserted in the main clause has actually been crossed after all. With déjà que, in contrast, the conclusion r asserted in the preceding utterance is marked as solidly supported by available evidence, for this connective signals that the argument p which it marks is merely a peripheral, weak argument in favor of r, such that at least one further, more central, and hence stronger, argument q supporting r will be added in a following clause. Metaphorically speaking, therefore, with the utterance of “déjà que p”, the border separating arguments for ~r and arguments for r has only just been crossed. Finally, by using “toujours est-il que p”, the speaker signals that whichever way one chooses to look at it, that is to say, whether or not the contents of the preceding utterance has crossed the border between truth and falsity, between the desirable and the undesirable, the contents of p remain in force. More generally, the connective uses of encore all mark arguments against some conclusion, but whose rhetorical force is not strong enough to completely invalidate either that conclusion or some argument in its favor which is present in the context. This, incidentally, is in line with the notion of marginality attached to the modal uses of encore, and also with the latter’s orientation towards the negative. Connective uses of déjà, on the other hand, can – again very roughly – be described as marking arguments for some conclusion, but whose rhetorical force is often not quite as strong as that of one or more other arguments expressed in or invoked by the context. Again, this is in line with


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the notion of marginality that attaches to the modal uses of the adverb, and with the latter’s orientation towards the positive. Connective uses of toujours, finally, could be said to mark their host utterances as potential, but at best rhetorically weak, counters to some argument or conclusion expressed in or invoked by the preceding context. Like the modal uses of the adverb, connective toujours has no inherent orientation, either negative or positive. These relations of semantic / functional contrast between the markers are very loose, however. The uses in question have, by all appearances, developed at very different points in the history of French, and they differ significantly, both with respect to their degree of grammaticalization and as concerns their affinities to informal vs formal registers. Nor will it have escaped the reader’s notice that enfin simply does not seem to enter into any very interesting relations of contrast with the other three particles.

4 INTERACTIONAL USES Finally, we come to the so-called interactional uses, possible with déjà, encore, and enfin. As briefly mentioned in sect. 1 supra, déjà and encore are found in directive speech acts, principally questions, as in (129)-(130), and, in the case of déjà, also in orders / requests, cf. (131), while enfin is found in exclamatives, cf. (132): (129) Quel est votre nom, déjà?

‘What’s your name, now?’ (130) Qu’est-ce qu’il y a, encore?

‘So, what is it this time?’ (131) Montre-moi déjà ce que tu sais faire!

‘Just show me what you can do!’ (132) Enfin! Ça va pas, non?!

‘What are you, nuts?!’ In interrogatives like (129), déjà is always right-detached with respect to the host utterance, and it scopes the speech act level. Thus, the utterance might be paraphrased as “I already have to ask what your name is”. As such, it suggests that the host speech act is in some sense premature when compared to what might have been expected. Typically, déjà will be used in this way in contexts where the addressee has already stated his name at some earlier point during the same speech event. In such a context, asking for the name a second time may appear impolite or face-threatening (Brown & Levinson 1987), and the use of déjà attenuates this potential face threat by implicating that the speaker knows she ought not to be asking this question so soon after the information was originally provided. As (133) shows, however, it is not necessarily the case that the requested information has been provided earlier by the addressee. Accordingly, in this example, the potential threat is not to the hearers’, but rather to the speaker’s face, for it is she who is in danger of appearing uneducated. By marking her question with déjà, she shows that the answer is, in fact, not unknown to her, but that she is merely momentarily uncertain of it. The addition of the NP la guerre de cent ans là reinforces her attempt to save face, by showing that she is not ignorant of historical events. Instead of having the status of brand-new information, which would imply an unequal distribution of knowledge among speaker and hearers, the requested information is

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transformed, in advance of its production, into a simple reminder, and the interactional equilibrium is thereby preserved: (133) A. mhm moi j’ai bien aimé ce film-là

C. mhm A. parce qu’il y a un cadre historique qui est très bien... B. rendu A. euh oui C. c’était quelle guerre déjà? // la guerre de cent ans là (2F + copine, 9-10) ‘A. mhm I liked that movie C. mhm A. because the historical setting is very well... B. portrayed A. er yes C. what war was that, now? // the one-hundred year war’ This use of déjà is first attested in my data in the early 19th century (cf. (134)). As already implied, it seems to be a straightforward extension of the basic phasal use from the propositional level to the speech act level, that is, as an instance of Traugott & Dasher’s (2002: 281) fifth tendency of semantic / pragmatic change (cf. ch. 3, sect. 4.1): (134) Comment donc s’appelle-t-il déjà?

(Victor Hugo, Le dernier jour d’un condamné, p. 423, 1829 – from Frantext) ‘So what’s his name, now?’

Interactional encore is likewise right-detached, and represents an extension of the iterative use of the adverb (cf. ch. 6, sect. 5.2) to the speech act level, the example being paraphrasable as “How many times do I have to ask this question?”. Like déjà, it suggests that the question ought to be unnecessary at the point in time at which it appears, but while interactional déjà focuses on the fact that the specific information is already known to the speaker, interactional encore focuses attention on the fact that a similar type of question has been asked at least once before by the same speaker, either of the same or of a different addressee. Further, with encore, the point is not so much that the speaker is already in possession of the requested information, but rather that she is suggesting that the circumstances giving rise to her asking the question ought not to obtain. This might be because she feels she ought already to have been given the information in question, or frequently because, in her opinion, her interlocutor(s) ought to stop inconveniencing her, this being the typical context for an utterance like that in (130). This use of encore therefore gives the host question a distinctly impatient ring, and is thus of a boosting rather than a hedging nature. (135) Sganarelle.

Seigneur Aristote, peut-on savoir ce qui vous met si fort en colère? Pancrace. Un sujet le plus juste au monde. Sganarelle. Et quoi, encore? (Molière, Le mariage forcé, Sc. IV, p. 34, 1668 – from Frantext) ‘Sganarelle. My Lord Aristote, may one know what makes you so angry? Pancrace. A subject that is as reasonable as can be. Sganarelle. And what IS that?’


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The imperative use of déjà is relatively rare, and apart from the 19th-century example in (136), the only attestations I have found of it come from internet chat fora. In all the latter, the meaning is invariably that the action requested is a prerequisite to the speaker’s carrying out some action in return. In (137), for instance, the speaker is implicating that he is prepared to produce textual support for his / her view that the Vatican is a state only if the hearer will first produce similar support for his / her view that it is not: (136) Tu l’as voulu, disait-il, tu l’as voulu! Tu as attaché ta vie à la mienne. Vois

déjà! (Gustave Flaubert, La première éducation sentimentale, p. 177, 1845 – from Frantext) ‘You wanted it, he said, you wanted it. You’ve tied your life to mine. Just see!’ (137) A. ...Le Vatican n’est un Etat que sur le papier. [...] B. C’est un des états les plus peuplés de l’Europe! [...] A. Ce n’est pas un peuple, sinon trouve moi [sic] la source qui parle de peuple vaticanais. [...] B. ...On ne parle pas de peuple pour un melting-pot! Ce qui n’empêche pas que ces gens soit [sic] citoyens d’un état souverain. A. J’attends la source. B. Attend [sic] un peu. Montre moi [sic] déjà un faisceau de sources qui disent que pour qu’un état soit un vrai état, il faut la phrase “peuple du machinchose” sur internet. ... (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_Utilisateur:Felipeh/Archive) ‘A. ...The Vatican is only a state on paper. [...] B. It’s one of the most populous states in Europe! [...] A. It’s not a people, or else show me the source that speaks of a Vatican people. [...] B. ...You don’t speak of a people in the case of a melting-pot! That doesn’t mean these people are not citizens of a sovereign state. A. I’m waiting for the source. B. Wait a minute. You go ahead and show me a bundle of sources saying that for a state to be a real state, you need the phrase “people of wherever” on the internet. ...’ This use of déjà in imperatives thus seems most closely related to the scalar use and, especially, the thematic use of the particle discussed in sects. 2.1.1 and 3.1 supra, in as much as it signals that the action requested is seen by the speaker as the first in a potential series of related actions to be carried out by either the hearer or the speaker. As already noted above, it strongly implicates, moreover, that the action marked is a prerequisite to some other action. As such, déjà in imperatives may be said to have a slightly boosting effect. Unlike déjà in interrogatives, however, the adverb does not scope the speech act when occurring in imperatives. Like its scalar and categorizing counterparts, it is a sentential adjunct. If I have chosen to discuss it under the heading of “interactional” uses, it is because of its clearly intersubjective character, which suggests that it represents a further extension of the subjective scalar and thematic uses (cf. Traugott & Dasher’s [2002: 281] first tendency of semantic / pragmatic change). Finally, we come to the exclamative use of enfin, as in (132) supra. In this use, the particle expresses impatience and / or dissatisfaction with some state of affairs, typically the behavior

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or the previous discourse of the addressee. The earliest attestation of this use in my data base is the example in (138), from the very beginning of the 20th century: (138) Le Commissaire. Quand ce moment sera venu, madame, nous aviserons. En

attendant, comme les asiles regorgent à la fois de pensionnaires et de demandes d’admission; que je ne puis procéder d’office, sur la première requête venue, à la séquestration d’un homme dont l’exaltation cérébrale n’existe vraisemblablement que dans l’imagination de sa femme; que je ne puis enfin, avec la meilleure volonté du monde, perdre une matinée tout entière à rabâcher les mêmes choses sans arriver à me faire comprendre, vous trouverez bon que nous en restions là. (Il se lève.) La dame. Enfin, monsieur le commissaire... (Georges Courteline, Le commissaire est bon enfant, Sc. III, p. 19, 1900 – from Frantext) ‘The lieutenant. When that moment will have come, ma’am, we’ll let you know. In the meantime, as our asylums have more than enough inmates, as well as demands for admission; as I cannot automatically, on the strength of just anyone’s request, put away a man whose mental disturbance probably exists only in his wife’s imagination; as I cannot, finally, much as I’d like to, lose an entire morning going over the same things again and again, without making myself understood, you’ll understand if we leave it at that. (He rises.) The lady. Really, lieutenant...’ This use of enfin is, I think, best analyzed as yet another contextual modulation on the interruptive use, particularly its dialogal, “indignant” variant, exemplified in (104) and (119) above, in which the particle is used to mark impatient dismissal of the interlocutor’s discourse, such an impatient dismissal of course implying dissatisfaction with what precedes. As compared to (104), (138) represents a further increase in intersubjectification of the meaning of enfin, because the marker is now capable of coding the speaker’s intersubjective stance all by itself, with or without the support of a clause that explicitly expresses the speaker’s dissatisfaction. Thus, enfin in this use has the status of an interjection, hence it does not so much scope another element of the discourse, as it expresses a complete (exclamative) message in and of itself.

4.1

Summary

As readers will have noticed, there are few, if any, interesting relations of contrast to be perceived among the four interactional uses of déjà, encore, and enfin discussed in this section. Nor is it at all clear that these uses enter into any very salient relations of contrast with other interactional markers. In other words, these uses must be understood and explained principally on the basis of their contexts of occurrence and of the meanings that the three particles have in other uses, which may plausibly have served as sources of these “interactional” extensions. In all cases, we observe some degree of persistence of the presumed source meanings: the conventional implicature of prematurity conveyed by phasal déjà (cf. ch. 6, sect. 4.1) persists in its use in interrogatives, while déjà in imperatives retains the inchoative meaning of the phasal, scalar, and thematic uses of the adverb. Interrogative encore expresses the idea that the circumstances prompting the host question represent a continuation or iteration of a similar, anterior state of affairs, and is thereby linked to the basic aspectual uses of the adverb. Finally,


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exclamative enfin may be said to express the speaker’s desire to put an end to some less than satisfactory state of affairs, harkening back to the temporal use of the marker via one of its connective extensions, the interruptive, “indignant” use.

5 GENERAL SUMMARY As in the preceding chapter, the uses of the four particles are summarized in Table 7.1 infra, along with the approximate dates of their first attestations in my corpus. It will be noticed that there is an even more significant spread of functions among the four adverbs here at the context-level than we saw in the preceding chapter when we considered the content-level. In only two cases do we observe what looks like it might be a movement towards paradigmaticization, namely in the case of the scalar / categorizing uses of déjà, encore, and toujours, and again, in the uses of those same morphemes as complex conjunctions together with the all-purpose complementizer que. Upon closer inspection, only the former uses turn out to constitute a quasi-paradigm in any meaningful sense, as laid out in sect. 2 supra. And indeed, as Table 1 shows, these uses appear to have emerged at roughly the same time. As argued in sect. 2.5, however, the scalar / categorizing senses of these three adverbs are ultimately very closely related to their basic temporal / aspectual senses. As soon as encore developed a scalar / categorizing sense, the fact that the source meaning of the marker was known by language users to enter into partial contrast with déjà, toujours, and enfin could easily have made the latter available for extension, too, to the extent that their source properties were relevant to this particular type of extension. As argued in sect. 2 supra, this was not the case with enfin, whose emergent syntactic properties are likely to have precluded a scalar / categorizing extension, and it was the case only to some extent for toujours and for enfin’s close cousin finalement, neither of which lend themselves straightforwardly to a scalar interpretation.

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[Table 7.1: Context-level uses of the four phasal adverbs] Sentential adjunct function déjà Scalar √ late 17th c. Categorizing √ mid-18th c.

encore √ mid-17th c. √ mid-17th c.

toujours √ late 17th c. √ late 17th c.

enfin × ×

Phrasal adjunct function déjà Scalar FP √ mid-19th c.

encore ×

toujours ×

enfin ×

encore × √ mid-16th c.

toujours × √ mid-18th c.

enfin √ late 16th c. ×

√ mid-15th c.

×

×

√ mid-16th c.

×

×

× × × × × ×

√ early 18th c. × × × × ×

× √ late 16th c. √ mid-16th c. √ late 17th √ late 18th c. √ mid-18th c.

encore √ late 17th c. × ×

toujours × × ×

enfin × × √ early 19th c.

Discourse-marking function déjà Thematic/listing √ late 18th c. Conjunction with √ mid-20th c. que Collocation with × et Clause-initial × with inversion Right-dislocated × Synthesizing × Epistemic × Reformulative × Self-interruptive × Indignant × Interactional function déjà Interrogative √ early 19th c. Imperative √ mid-19th c. Exclamative ×

In the case of the complex conjunctions formed with a phasal adverb and que, the idea that they might form a paradigm is ultimately not very explanatory. For although one can certainly construct contexts, such as those in (126)-(128) (adduced in sect. 3.5 supra), in which déjà que, encore que, and toujours est-il que seem to contrast along a relevant argumentational dimension, it is far from obvious that alternative (quasi-paradigmatic) contrasts that these connectives may seem to enter into are not equally, or perhaps more, relevant to understanding the precise contribution that they make to the utterances hosting them. Thus, saliently, one might instead choose to compare and contrast encore que with bien que and quoique (“although”) (as is done by de Vogüé 1992, for instance), déjà que with non seulement...mais aussi (“not only...but also”), or toujours est-il que with quoi qu’il en soit (“whatever the case may be”). Indeed, the latter types of comparison would intuitively seem to hold a greater promise of yielding subtle and illuminating results than the relatively coarse-grained contrasts of meaning seen in (127)-(128). This does not mean that the observation of the contrasts between (127)-(128) is unenlightening, and should simply be abandoned in favor of the study of the alternative “quasi-paradigms”


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mentioned. What is means, as far as I can tell, is that what appears as a paradigm is likely to ultimately be an artefact of one’s particular angle of analysis, and of the specific examples chosen to support it. Note, for instance, that, in a café context, it is possible to say to a waiter, on behalf of a friend who is hesitating about what to order, (139)-(140): (139) Donnez-lui encore une bière!

‘Give him / her another beer!’ (140) Donnez-lui déjà une bière!

‘Give him / her a beer to start with!’ In the former case, use of the additive focus particle encore will indicate actual incrementation of the number of beers served to the third person in question, whereas in the latter, the use of imperative déjà will suggest a potential ulterior incrementation of the number of drinks served (which need not necessarily be beers). In other words, the two adverbs might be claimed to stand in paradigmatic contrast in this context. Clearly, however, this is an artefact of the chosen context, as shown by the differential acceptability of (141)-(142). The encore of (139) and (141) has constituent scope, whereas the déjà of (140) has clausal scope, and they cannot meaningfully be said to form a lexical paradigm. (141) On lui a donné encore une bière.

‘They’ve given him / her another beer.’ (142) *On lui a donné déjà une bière.

‘They’ve given him / her déjà a beer.’ Similarly, the reader may have noticed that several of the authentic examples adduced in this chapter feature a given use of déjà alongside a different use of encore in the same utterance or in adjacent ones. Thus, in (11), we find a modal use of déjà and an additive use of encore; in (12), a token of aspectual déjà and an instance of encore as a degree adverb; and in (38), a modal use of déjà with an additive focus-particle encore in the following sentence. In a model of lexical meaning such as the one argued for in this study, where polysemy holds a central place, and where new meanings are – as a matter of principle – taken to arise as implicatures of existing ones, there is nothing particularly surprising about this, given that the different senses in a polysemy network are precisely assumed to be related to one another, and may frequently overlap. Moreover, in so far as psycholinguistic research has shown that when one member of an associative relation is activated, others are likely to come to mind as well (cf. Levelt 1989: 218ff), it seems quite likely that, in textual examples like the one mentioned, the use of the first of the two markers is at least partially responsible for touching off the use of the other due to the metalinguistic knowledge that speakers have of their partial opposition in other types of contexts. One may perhaps hazard the guess that such co-occurrences may occasionally be instrumental in triggering parallel meaning extensions in items whose source meanings already contrast to some extent. The upshot of this discussion is that while the comparison of minimal pairs of utterances, differing only in their use of one or the other of a pair of putatively paradigmatically related items, is a highly useful tool in semantic analysis, it is – in all likelihood – no more than that. Like the use of corpus data, the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the context of occurrence of a form, acceptability judgements, tests of various kinds etc., the comparison between members of a minimal pair constitutes a heuristic which helps the linguist to zero in on the usage constraints to which a given item is subject, but which, in and of itself, is not indispensible. Its potential usefulness is not the result of some essential, definitional property

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of the lexicon, but is rather a consequence of the cognitive-pragmatic Principle of Contrast discussed in ch. 2, sect. 5 supra (cf. Clark 1993). This principle may be assumed to be active in both comprehension and production; at the former level, by encouraging hearers to make the default assumption that any two linguistic forms encountered will have at least partially different meanings, and at the latter level by discouraging speakers from coining new expressions for meanings that are already adequately expressed by existing forms. If a heuristic of this kind is, indeed, systematically exploited by “naïve” language users, then it is hardly surprising that it should also be of use to the semanticist. This does not entail that any “paradigmatic relations” so identified have any reality at the level of the linguistic system, be it as purely theoretical or, a fortiori, as psychological entities.

8 CONCLUSION

1 INTRODUCTION The broader theoretical aim of this monograph has been to contribute to knowledge of the nature of linguistic meaning and how it is created. Thus, my view being that there is a constant, and non-negligible, interplay between the synchronic and the diachronic dimension of language, the study presented here has had a double focus: it has attempted to deal, on the one hand, with the synchronic creation of meaning as a result of the interaction between the linguistic code and the communicative contexts in which it is used, and on the other hand, with the diachronic process of conventionalization (or coding) of meanings that originally had the status of mere inferences from the contexts of occurrence of certain linguistic expressions. At the descriptive level, I chose the set of phasal adverbs in French as my test case, aiming to account as precisely as possible for their synchronic range of uses and for the gradual diachronic rise of those uses.

2 SUMMARY OF RESULTS Following a short introduction to the problem complex posed by the French phasal adverbs in chapter 1, in particular their rather extraordinary range of uses and the controversial nature of the contributions made by semantics and pragmatics, respectively, to the interpretation of utterances containing phasal adverbs, chapter 2 presented the synchronic approach to meaning which forms the framework for my analyses. Central to this approach was the question of how to draw the line between semantics and pragmatics, both in general terms, and more

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specifically with respect to the lexical-functional description of manifestly polyfunctional linguistic items such as particles. Rather than taking my point of departure in traditional truthconditional and / or structuralist views, I chose to place the study of linguistic meaning within an overarching Peircean conception of signs as fundamentally triadic in nature. Against this background, important insights from both Anglo-American and Continental European approaches to meaning, such as frame semantics, instructional semantics, and (neo- and post-) Gricean pragmatics, could be integrated into a coherent framework, which moreover straightforwardly accommodates the polysemy that was argued to inhere in many (if not most) linguistic signs. Chapter 3 outlined a complementary approach to the study of semantic / pragmatic change in existing linguistic items, i.e. semasiological change. The issue of the semantics / pragmatics interface was again essential, in so far as the type of changes that I am interested in can be argued to consist in a large measure of the conventionalization, i.e. the semanticization, of common, but originally pragmatically determined, interpretations. Accordingly, special attention was paid not only to the role and nature of contextual inferencing, in particular in the form of metonymic reasoning, and to the kinds of contexts that are of particular relevance to the study of change, but also to the role of the inherent source meanings of items undergoing change, as well as to the interplay between the two, in constraining the directions that meaning extensions could take. In chapter 4, I returned to the issue of the semantics and pragmatics of phasal adverbs in particular, discussing a number of problems that are saliently posed by their description, not just with respect to French, but also more generally (at least as the description pertains to a variety of Western European languages). The first part of the chapter revolved around the definition of the notion of time that phasal adverbs express, namely a relational situationexternal kind of temporality called “phasal aspect”. I discussed the interaction of phasal aspect not only with traditionally recognized linguistic categories having to do with time (viz. tense, view-point aspect, Aktionsart, and time adverbials), as well as with temporal perspectives on states-of-affairs (defining individual phasal adverbs as either retrospective or prospective), but also with the notion of polarity. The second problem was the issue of the semantic relations that obtain among phasal adverbs in a given language. Here, I critically reviewed two competing models, namely the “duality” model due to Löbner (1989, 1999) and Vandeweghe (1992), and van der Auwera’s (1993, 1998) “three-scenarios” model, concluding that a modified version of the latter was to be preferred. In the final part of chapter 4, I analyzed a small range of non-truth-conditional elements of meaning that have often been held to be conveyed by the use of specific phasal adverbs, in an attempt to determine the precise status of these elements in terms of the distinctions drawn in chapter 2 between presuppositions, conventional implicatures and conversational implicatures. Chapter 5 presented the empirical basis for the synchronic description of the meanings and uses of the four French phasal adverbs and for the diachronic account of the evolution of those same meanings and uses. While corpus data are, of course, indispensible for diachronic analysis of the non-speculative kind1, I argued that the most solid basis for synchronic analysis was offered by a combination of attested and constructed examples, the latter of which lend themselves to the use of various kinds of acceptability tests designed not only to bring out differences between different classes of adverbials, but also to establish the limits of the 1 Traugott (1986) argues that, where written records are limited or non-existent, one may perform internal semantic reconstruction by taking one’s point of departure in cross-linguistic tendencies of semantic change such as those identified in her work (cf. ch. 3, sect. 4).

Conclusion 223 various uses of a given item. It was recognized, however, that any one test will rarely – if ever – be decisive on its own, but that clusters of tests, judiciously used, could nevertheless possess significant heuristic value in semantic / pragmatic description. In chapter 6, I carried out a in-depth syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis of altogether 16 contemporary uses of the four phasal adverbs (three uses of déjà, six uses of encore, five uses of toujours, and two uses of enfin), all of which had been classified as belonging to the content-level of utterances. In twelve of these uses, the adverbs were shown to function as sentence-level adjuncts (two uses of both déjà and encore, four uses of toujours, and two of enfin), and in the remaining five uses, as phrasal adjuncts, encore possessing three such uses, déjà and toujours one each, and enfin none. I also traced the diachronic development of all 16 uses, in terms of their presumed first unambiguous attestations and the types of possible bridging contexts leading up to those unambiguous attestations. Along the way, I discussed the extent to which each individual use that was inventoried might be considered to be an independent, coded sense of the adverb in question, as opposed to a mere contextual variant of some more general sense. I concluded, based on a variety of syntactic, functional, and diachronic criteria, that 12 of the 16 uses in question were probably best seen as independently coded – albeit in all cases clearly related – senses, while the remaining four (viz. the distributive and habitual uses of toujours, and the uses of déjà and encore as temporal focus particles) might more plausibly constitute cases of delayed actualization of a usage potential already inherent in a previously identified sense. I would like to emphasize, however, that the precise number of coded vs pragmatically inferred meanings is not essential, neither to the analyses presented in this book, nor to the theoretical framework within which they are situated. Thus, provided that it could be done without prejudice to the empirically attestable constraints on each individual use, I would be happy to consider either a reduction of or an increase in the number of senses assumed to be listed in the mental lexicon of the average language user. It was shown further, in this chapter, that in only one case – namely that of their phasal uses – did all four adverbs possess a use whose semantic and pragmatic properties could to some extent be fruitfully accounted for in terms of relations of contrast to corresponding uses of the three other adverbs. In four further cases, two of the adverbs (in two cases, déjà and encore, in one case, toujours and enfin, and in the fourth, encore and toujours) had uses that appeared relatively similar in some respect, which might be of quite an abstract nature. In all these cases of functional similarity, the diachronic data clearly showed that the relevant uses had not developed in tandem, and that there might, in fact, be as much as five centuries between their first apperances in my data base. Four of the uses of individual adverbs analyzed had no counterpart at all among the uses of the other three adverbs. In other words, it transpired as far from obvious that the notion of a lexical paradigm would have any very significant value in explaining the precise functional context-level range of the French phasal adverbs. Conversely, the notion of persistence in semantic / pragmatic change was argued to have some explanatory power in accounting both for specific elements of meaning of certain extended uses, and for the non-existence of other elements of meaning which one might, in fact, expect to find on the basis of a structuralist conception of lexical semantics. Finally, in chapter 7, I analyzed a further 24 uses of the adverbs (seven uses of déjà, six uses of encore, four uses of toujours, and seven uses of enfin), this chapter being dedicated to those uses in which the four adverbs were seen to belong to the context-level of their host utterances. The context-level functions were subdivided into 1° sentential adjunct functions, relevant for

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two uses of each of the items déjà, encore, and toujours; 2° phrasal adjunct functions, relevant only for a single use of déjà; 3° discourse-marking functions, of which there were two for déjà, three for encore, two for toujours, and six in the case of enfin; and 4° interactional functions, of which déjà had two, and encore and enfin one each. As in ch. 6, I again traced the diachronic development of these various functions, and I discussed the degree to which they could be seen to enter into paradigmatic relations with one another, and whether or not they ought to be considered as independently coded senses of the morphemes in question. As for the former issue, there was little evidence of any significant paradigmaticity among the context-level uses inventoried in ch. 7. Only the scalar and categorizing uses presented a plausible case, given that they all appeared to have arisen at roughly the same time. This, however, was argued to be attributable to their similarity with the basic phasal or temporal uses of the adverbs, of whose partially contrasting meanings the innovating language users may be assumed to have possessed metalinguistic knowledge. With respect to the codedness of the different functions, I concluded that four uses, namely the “categorizing” uses of déjà, encore, and toujours, and the exclamative use of enfin, could be reduced to contextual modulations on some other use, in the former case, the “scalar” uses of the three particles, and in the case of exclamative enfin, the discourse-marking “indignant” use. I repeat, however, that the precise number of coded senses vs context-dependent modulations on those senses is in no way essential. Only if all the possible uses of each marker could be convincingly reduced to one single core sense, which could then be shown to interact with pragmatic principles of general scope to yield the full range of attested interpretations of the marker in question, would the idea that these particles are polysemous be falsified. Were that to be the case, it is highly likely that the “core” senses, or Gesamtbedeutungen, thus identified would be so different from one phasal adverb to the next that the idea of their forming a lexical paradigm among themselves would be effectively undermined.

3 RETROSPECTS AND PROSPECTS The study presented here has had an ambitious aim, at both the theoretical and the descriptive level. I hope that its scope has nevertheless been realistic enough for me to have actually succeeded in making a worthwhile contribution to current knowledge at either, and ideally both, of these levels. Still, there is no doubt that much work remains to be done. To start with, the theoretical proposals in the first part of the book call for further development. While I have tried my best to be as precise as I could given both the present state of my knowledge and insight and the constraints of time to which I have been subject, a number of details remain to be worked out, not least with respect to the overarching Peircean framework within which I have chosen to place myself. Here, one interesting problem is whether and to what extent the framework can account for different types of language change, such as the distinction between grammaticalization, lexicalization, and pragmaticalization, or the distinct processes by which Waltereit (fc) and Waltereit & Detges (fc) hypothesize that discourse markers and modal particles, respectively, arise. Other issues of interest to the semantics / pragmatics interface which would indubitably profit from additional reflexion include, for instance: 1° With respect to frame semantics, how to

Conclusion 225 distinguish (semantically) evoked frames from (pragmatically) invoked frames on a principled basis. 2° With respect to the instructional view of semantics, how precisely to formulate the hypothesized instructions, such that they are both falsifiable and do not overgenerate potential interpretations of the linguistic items conveying them. And, finally, 3° With respect to both the GCI / PCI distinction and the role of metonymic inferencing in meaning change, how to make the Gestalt-theoretic foreground / background distinction more precise and systematically testable. Moreover, given that my preferred research practice has always been to develop theory and description in tandem, confrontation between theory and data has led to continuous revision of the proposals over the years. It may therefore safely be assumed that confrontation of the theory resulting therefrom with new and different types of data will, in the future, prompt yet other modifications. At the empirical level, we may, based on the descriptions in chs. 6-7, graphically represent the relations between the various uses of déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin as in Figures 8.1-8.4 infra. Arrows indicate the presumed direction of diachronic extension, boxes surrounded by unbroken lines represent uses that were argued to be semanticized, i.e. coded in langue, while boxes surrounded by broken lines represent those uses that were hypothesized to be mere contextually determined variants: [Figure 8.1: A polysemy network for déjà]

Interrogative marker

Temporal FP

Déjà que

Phasal sense

Iterative sense

Thematic DM

Scalar sense

Non-temporal FP

Imperative marker

Categorizing use

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[Figure 8.2: A polysemy network for encore]

Encore + S-cl. inv.

Et encore

Additive FP

Additive sense

Interrogative marker

Iterative sense

Degree adverb

Phasal sense

Temporal FP use

Scalar sense

Encore que

Categorizing use

[Figure 8.3: A polysemy network for toujours]

Degree adverb

Distributive use

Habitual use

Phasal sense

Temporal sense

Scalar sense

Toujours est-iI que

Categorizing use

Right-detached DM

Conclusion 227 [Figure 8.4: A polysemy network for enfin]

Listing sense

Temporal sense

Phasal sense

Synthesizing sense (Self-)interruptive sense

“Indignant” use

Reformulative sense Exclamative use

Various things may be pointed out in respect of these diagrams: First, the phasal sense, which is at the center of the networks representing déjà and encore, is clearly more marginal for both toujours and enfin. In the case of the latter, the phasal sense appears, indeed, almost incidental, which no doubt goes some way towards explaining why enfin is, as we have noted, in many respects the “odd man out” among the French phasal adverbs. Secondly, several of the senses or uses identified may be extensions from more than one older use, as indicated by the presence of more than one arrow pointing to the senses / uses in question. Assuming that the diachronic prototype approach to semantics presented in ch. 3, sect. 2 is essentially correct, then such a multiplicity of sources is, in fact, to be expected, because if the internal semantic structure of a lexical category consists in clustered and overlapping readings, then meaning changes are likely to have the structure of a clustered set, i.e. new meanings are likely to originate in several older meanings simultaneously (cf. Geeraerts 1997: 11, 23). Thirdly, in principle, diagrams such as those in Figures 8.1-8.4 form a good basis for crosslinguistic comparison of markers, as is done, for instance, in Hansen & Strudsholm (2008), who study semantic / pragmatic commonalities and differences between French déjà and the cognate Italian particle già. This type of crosslinguistic comparison using diagrams of “family resemblances” among uses of a given form bears some resemblance to work that has been carried out within the so-called “semantic-map” approach developed by Haspelmath (2003), among others, for the analysis of grammatical meanings. Although the aims of this method are principally synchronic-typological, it is capable of integrating diachronic data as well. As far as I have been able to determine, it has, however, not so far been put to use within the domain of lexical semantics. If I have not chosen to make use of semantic-mapping methodology in the present book, it is, on the one hand, because this is essentially a monolingual study, and on the other hand, because semantic mapping is avowedly neutral with respect to the issue of the semantics / pragmatics borderline, an issue that has been at the center of my interest here.

228


One interesting property of semantic maps as conceived by Haspelmath (2003), however, is that they are intended to make predictions about possible uses of corresponding forms in various languages, the central claim being that uses that are contiguous on a semantic map are more similar, whereas uses that are further removed from one another are less so, and that the uses represented in any one language must occupy a coherent region on the map. Clearly, in so far as semantic maps integrate diachronic evidence, this stance is fully in line with the idea that the persistence of source meanings plays a significant role in semantic / pragmatic change, indeed, possibly a far more significant role than has generally been appreciated. The role of persistence in semantic / pragmatic change is certainly deserving of further investigation, and here, close crosslinguistic comparisons of the polysemies of semantically related items such as phasal adverbs (or other kinds of particles) should turn out to be highly relevant. As noted in various places in this study, some such studies already exist, but they are few in number, and restricted in their scope. Thus, restricting ourselves to the example of phasal adverbs, while van Baar (1997) and van der Auwera (1998) are both large-scale typological studies of phasal adverbs, but they deal exclusively with the temporal-aspectual uses of the relevant forms, and not at all with any extended uses they might possess. Hansen & Strudsholm (2008), on the other hand, present an integrative analysis of all uses of the forms singled out for study, but limit themselves to only two particles from two genetically and areally closely related languages. In this context, the study of language contact, including both the borrowing of items and semantic / pragmatic extensions of existing items based on or inspired by the ways in which similar items are used in a contact language, might throw a interesting light on the nature of polysemy and of meaning change. A final problem area that is evidently worthy of attention, but which I have explicitly excluded from the purview of the present study (cf. ch. 5, sect. 1), is the process of propagation of new meanings, and its interaction with both linguistic and extralinguistic factors. This, however, clearly requires very fine-grained tracking of uses, not only across time, but – significantly – also across text genres and categories of speakers, which would have represented a daunting undertaking for a study dealing with as many different meanings as this one has. If nothing else, I hope the book may help inspire other scholars to search for solutions to some of the problems raised here.

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INDEX A Abraham (W.), 7 Actualization, 62, 64, 139, 159, 162, 223 Adversativity, 17, 29 Aijmer (K.), 57 Aktionsart, 85-89, 91-93, 222 Allerton (D.J.) & Cruttenden (A.), 89 Ambiguity, 27, 37, 71 Andersen (H.), 48 Anscombre (J.C.), 71 Anscombre (J.-C.) & Ducrot (O.), 12 Argumentation, 5-6, 14, 21, 31, 33, 38, 95-96, 173, 176, 178, 203, 218 Aristotle, 37-38, 101 Aspect, 4, 7, 85-89, 91-95, 99, 222

B Bach (K.), 30 Background, 28-30, 32-33, 62-63, 67, 71, 80, 166, 168, 175, 190, 205-206, 222, 225 Barcelona (A.), 70 Basic sense, 39 Beeching (K.), 141 Benveniste (E.), 71 Biber (D.), 127 Blakemore (D.), 11, 13, 19, 30 Blank, (A.), 65-66, 69, 70-74 Bleaching 56, 58-59, 66 Bolinger (D.), 164 Bréal, 43, 45, 66 Bridging contexts, 62-63, 71, 77, 82, 125, 134, 175, 223 Brinton (L.J.) & Traugott (E.C.), 54, 55 Brown (R.) & Gilman (A.), 20

Brown (P.) & Levinson (S.C.), 18, 207, 213 Brown (G.) & Yule (G.), 13 Buchi (E.), 134, 153, 162 Bybee (J.L.), 35, 44, 54, 70, 71, 152

C Campbell (L.), 54-55, 59, 62, 64 Cappelen (H.) & Lepore (E.), 30 Carston (R.), 13, 19, 37 Chafe (W.), 39 Chomsky (N.), 24-25, 124 Clark (E.V.), 43, 97-98, 220 Coded meaning, 1, 12-13, 18, 22, 2829, 33, 46, 51, 64, 66, 77, 201, 223225 Cognitive Semantics, 70 Communicative cost-benefit, 74 Comrie (B.), 86-88, 91, 94 Conceptual meaning, 19, 184, 205, 210 Concession, 175, 178-179, 192, 194195, 197-198, 200-201, 203, 210, 212 Construction Grammar, 24 Content-level, 8, 16, 58, 128-132, 171, 187, 217, 223 Context-level, 8, 16, 58, 125, 127-133, 168, 170, 223-224 Contextual modulation, 23, 54, 58, 79, 121 Contiguity, 70 Continuative meaning, 137, 144, 148, 151-152, 165, 179, 198 Conventionalization, 46, 63, 65, 72-73, 79, 221-222 Cooperative Principle, see Implicature Corpus, 124-127, 131, 139, 217, 219, 222 Coseriu (E.), 62

244 Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface Craig (C.), 60 Croft (W.), 62, 74 Croft (W.) & Cruse (D.A.), 9, 10, 2425 Cruse (D.A.), 23, 41, 121 Culioli (A.), 20

Foreground, 29, 33, 62-63, 67, 71, 80, 175, 225 Franckel (J.-J.), 148-149, 176, 178 Fraser (B.), 33 Fuchs (C.), 148, 156, 172

G D Darmesteter (A.), 66 De Swart (H.) , 86, 88, 93, 137-138 De Vogüé (S.), 194, 218 Decategorialization, 59, 64, 135 Deledalle (G.), 47 Delocutive change, 71 Detges (U.) & Waltereit (R.), 61-62, 76 Diewald (G.), 62 Dik (S.), 16, 129 Discourse rules, 65, 67 Doherty (M.), 3, 93, 113, 117, 119, 142 Dostie (G.), 58-60, 69 Duality, 100-102, 104-106, 108-109, 116, 222 Ducrot (O.), 12, 20, 22, 25, 31-32, 48, 107, 165, 211

Garfinkel (H.), 37, 74 Geeraerts (D.), 36-38, 53, 54, 74, 162, 164, 227 Geis (M.) & Zwicky (A.), 28, 66 Gesamtbedeutung, 34, 58, 224 Gestalt, 72, 77, 225 Goldberg (A.), 24-25 Grammaticalization, 54-56, 58-60, 6264, 66-67, 70, 78, 82, 124, 134, 168, 224 Greenbaum (S.), 124, 127, 140 Grevisse (M.), 89 Grice (H.P.), 13, 25, 27, 29-30, 63, 6667, 74-75, 98, 107, 112, 115, 119, 194, 204 Ground, 21, 23, 47, 49, 50, 79, 80-82 Groupe λ-l, 210 Grundbedeutung, 39-40 Guimier (Cl.), 187 Gundel (J.), 32 Günthner (S.), 15

E Eckardt (R.), 57, 61-62, 64, 125 Enfield (N.), 65 Erman (B.) and Kotsinas (U.-B.), 58 Explicature, 18-19 Expressiveness, 76-77

F Fasold (R.), 73 Fauconnier (G.), 21-22, 37, 71, 107 Figure-ground shift, 71, 79, 175 Fillmore (C.), 9, 12, 20, 32, 43, 46, 49, 118 Focus particles, 92-93, 106, 183-184, 186, 219 Foolen (A.), 7, 37

H Hansen (A.B.), 57 Hansen (M.-B.M.), 19, 22-25, 28-29, 33, 39, 43-44, 58-59, 63-64, 66-67, 72, 78, 80, 104, 131, 135, 141, 186187, 195, 211 Hansen (M.-B.M.) & Strudsholm (E.), 39, 63, 127, 227-228 Hansen (M.-B.M.) & Rossari (C.), 127 Hansen (M.-B.M.) & Waltereit (R.), 28-29, 64, 66, 80 Harder (P.), 22-24, 88 Harder (P.) & Togeby (O.), 23 Harmonic contexts, 76 Harris (R.), 44

Index 245 Harris (A.) & Campbell (L.), 55, 64, 139 Haspelmath (M.), 227-228 Heim (I.), 24 Heine (B.), 54-55, 62-63, 67, 70 Hentschel & Weydt, 7 Heritage (J.), 28, 46 Herslund (M.) & Korzen (H.), 192 Herweg (M.), 88, 93, 142 Hirschberg (J.), 22, 173 Hoepelman (J.) & Rohrer (C.), 87, 9193, 119 Holism, 42, 44-46 Homonymy, 79 Hopper (P.J.), 6, 34, 78, 124 Hopper (P.J.) & Thompson (S.A.) 131 Hopper (P.J.) & Traugott (E.C.), 54, 70 Horn (L.R.), 21, 74-75, 98, 102, 107108, 173 Hymes (D.), 13

I Implicature, 5, 13, 20, 22, 26-30, 63, 65-66, 72, 79-80, 98, 102, 105, 107, 119-120, 145, 147, 154, 173-174, 216, 219, 222 Inchoative meaning, 136, 143-144, 150-152, 170 Inherent meaning, 44, 46, 77, 82-83 Innovation, 62, 64-66, 70-71, 73, 7577, 125 Interpretant, 47-50, 80-82 Intersubjectification, 67-69, 215-216 Invisible hand, 73, 152 Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change, 63, 66

J Jacobs (A.) & Jucker (A.H.), 39, 127 Jakobson (R.), 34 Jayez (J.) & Rossari (C.), 30, 32 Jones, 193 Jucker (A.H) & Taavitsainen (I.), 127

K Kadmon (N.), 32-33 Kamp (H.) & Reyle (U.), 24, 86 Kay (P.), 22 Keller (R.), 73-74, 152 Kleiber (G.), 35-36, 88, 137, 158 Klein (W.), 2, 86, 88, 142 Koch (P.), 35-36, 61, 71, 76 Koch (P.) & Oesterreicher (W.), 127 Kortmann (B.), 88-89 Krifka (M.), 136 Kroon (C.) & Risselada (R.), 135 Kuryłowicz (J.), 54 König (E.), 4, 35, 91, 98-99, 112, 117, 119, 145, 160-161, 180, 184, 198 König (E.) & Traugott (E.C.), 144

L Labov (W.), 124, 131 Lakoff (G.), 35-37, 156 Lakoff (G.) & Johnson (M.), 70 Langacker (R.W.), 60, 69 Layering, 124 Lehmann (C.), 54-57 Lehrer (A.), 44 Levelt (W.M.J.), 131, 219 Levinson (S.C.), 18, 29, 32, 37, 63, 6667, 74-77, 97, 102, 107, 114, 173 Lewis (D.), 15, 116 Lexicalization, 224 Lyons (J.), 41, 43, 164 Löbner (S.), 4, 6, 94, 98-100, 102-106, 108-112, 118-119, 148-149, 152, 173, 222

M Marchello-Nizia (C.), 139 Martin (R.), 91-93, 114-115, 117, 119120, 140, 143, 174 Meaning extension, 1, 54, 59, 63, 65, 67, 69, 77-78, 124, 127, 134, 136137, 141, 159, 162, 164, 168-169, 175, 189, 198, 203-205, 209, 214215, 217, 222, 227-228

246 Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface Mechanisms of change, 65, 70-71, 77 Meillet (A.), 51, 54, 66 Metaphor, 35, 60, 67, 70-71, 77 Metonymy, 35, 60, 64, 66, 70-71, 77, 134, 175, 205, 222, 225 Michaelis (L.A.), 88-89, 91, 93, 110, 114, 117, 119, 142 Milroy (L.), 124 Mittwoch (A.), 114-116, 119-120 Modal particles, 59, 224 Moens (M.) & Steedman (M.), 87-88 Monosemy, 79, 99 Morel (M.-A.), 192, 194-195 Morgan (J.L.), 1 Motivations for change, 65, 73, 77 Muller (Cl.), 3, 94, 116-118, 145, 152153, 174 Murphy (M.L.), 42, 45-46, 73

N Némo (F.), 11, 179, 200 Nerlich (B.) & Clarke (D.D.), 65, 70, 76 Newmeyer (F.), 54-55, 59 Nguyen (T.-B.), 200-201, 203 Nunberg (G.), 25, 65 Nyrop (K.), 66 Nølke (H.), 12, 15, 22, 130-131, 140, 144, 148, 160, 162-163, 184, 192

O Object, 46-48, 80-82 Onomasiology, 35 Orientation, 87, 89, 94

Partee (B.H.), 93, 142 Paths of change, 55, 65, 67, 77 Pauphilet (A.), 139 Pedersen (J.), 193 Peirce (C.S.), 20, 47-48, 79 Persistence, 6, 63, 78, 134, 149, 160, 169-170, 185, 216, 223, 228 Perspectivity, 2-3, 87, 89, 94-99, 107108, 111, 143, 148, 150-152, 185, 187, 222 Polarity, 94-100, 105-106, 109-110, 114, 116, 143-144, 222 Politeness, 74-75 Polyfunctionality, 2, 12, 40, 134, 141, 222 Polygrammaticalization, 60 Polypragmaticalization, 60, 64, 69 Polysemy, 10, 14, 34-39, 46, 51, 54, 58, 66-67, 72, 79, 99, 135, 148, 219, 222, 225-228 Pons Bordería (S.), 125, 131 Pragmatic meaning, 13, 26 Pragmatic strengthening, 59, 64 Pragmaticalization, 34, 58, 134, 171, 224 Presupposition, 5, 10, 15, 26, 32-33, 66, 110, 113-114, 116, 119-121, 143-145, 147, 155, 163, 165-166, 173, 191, 222 Prévost (S.), 126 Principle of Contrast, 43, 97, 141, 220 Principle of Conventionality, 97 Procedural meaning, 20, 67-68, 205, 210 Propagation, 62, 65, 73, 76-77, 125, 228 Prospectivity, see Perspective Prototype, 35-36, 53-54, 60, 180, 227

Q P Paillard (D.), 134 Panther (K.-U.) & Thornburg (L.-L.), 71 Paradigm, 6, 40, 46, 56-57, 99, 100, 102-103, 105-108, 122, 134, 142, 152, 160, 187, 212, 217-219, 223224

Quine (W.V.O.), 37 Quirk (R.), 89, 129-130

R Radden (G.), 70

Index 247 Ramat (P.) & Ricca (D.), 16-17, 131 Reanalysis, 60-63, 81 Recanati (F.), 18-19, 37 Reichenbach (H.), 86 Reinterpretation, 60-64, 76-77, 82 Relation-by-Contrast Principle, 45 Representamen, 47-48, 80-82 Retrospectivity, see Perspective Rhetorical procedures, 31, 75-76, 173, 175, 181, 189, 203, 206, 212 Riemer (N.0, 38 Rosch (E.), 180 Rossari (C.), 187 Roulet (E.), 186 Ruppenhofer (J.), 9-11

S Sacks (H.), 205 Sandra (D.) & Rice (S.), 37 Saussure (F. de), 42, 47, 51 Scalarity, 21, 22, 29, 42, 55, 99, 106108, 118, 142, 153, 161, 164-167, 172-176, 178-179, 181, 184-185, 188-190, 194 Schelling (M.), 141, 186 Schütze (C.T.), 124, 131-132 Searle (J.R.), 74 Semantic field, 40, 42-43, 46, 100, 105, 110 Semantic frames, 9-10, 12, 32, 44-46, 71-72, 77-78, 110, 117-118, 134, 152, 154, 157-159, 222, 224 Semantic instructions, 6, 20-22, 24-26, 48, 51, 222, 225 Semantic maps, 227 Semanticization, 64-65, 67, 72, 76, 222 Semasiology, 34, 36, 53, 62, 64, 72, 222 Semeiosis, 48, 50, 79-80 Semiology, 47, 79 Semiotics, 47, 79 Skårup (P.), 139 Smith (C.S.), 87-88, 91-92, 94 Sperber (D.) & Wilson (D.), 13, 32, 37 Stern (G.), 66, 69 Subjectification, 66-69, 173, 198, 206, 210

Sweetser (E.E.), 11, 14, 35, 67, 70, 204, 210, 211 Switch contexts, 62

T Tabor (W.) & Traugott (E.C.), 57 Tense, 85-89, 91, 92, 99, 115, 222 Tests, 16, 37-38, 123, 128-131, 177, 179, 219 Three-scenarios hypothesis, 100, 109 Timberlake (A.), 60, 62, 64, 139 Tobler (A.) & Lommatzsch (E.), 135 Togeby (K.), 193 Topic time, 2, 86, 89, 93, 96, 107, 110, 113, 142, 144 Torres Cacoullos (R.) & Schwenter (S.A.), 68 Transition, 2-3, 6, 85, 88, 94-95, 99, 105, 143, 145-151, 155, 161, 167, 181, 184-185 Traugott (E.C.), 29, 40, 47, 55-59, 71, 222 Traugott (E.C.) & Dasher (R.B.), 34, 36, 39, 62-63, 65-70, 72, 76-77, 79, 127, 173, 198, 203-205, 207, 214215 Traugott (E.C.) & Heine (B.), 55 Traugott (E.C.) & Waterhouse (J.), 3-4, 91, 115 Trier (J.), 42-43, 45 Tugendhat (E.) & Wolf (U.), 101 Tuggy (D.), 37 Tyler (A.) & Evans (V.), 36

U Ullman (S.), 66, 69 Unidirectionality, 54, 66, 68-69, 77

V Vagueness, 37, 72 Valeur, 42, 46-47, 82 Van Baar (T.), 2, 4, 7, 90-91, 94-95, 100, 109, 228

248 Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface Van der Auwera (J.), 3-4, 6-7, 94, 100, 103-104, 109-113, 118-121, 144, 149, 222, 228 Van Dijk (T.), 14 Vandeloise (Cl.), 36 Vandeweghe (W.), 3-4, 6-7, 90, 94101, 103, 112, 119, 152, 222 Vendler (Z.), 87-88, 146 Vet (C.), 4, 88-89, 91-93, 96, 119-120, 154 Victorri (B.) & Fuchs (C.), 156 Visconti (J.), 63, 68-69, 78, 134 Välikangas (O.), 2, 4, 100, 119, 134136

W Waltereit (R.), 7, 57, 59, 67, 71-72, 74, 79, 224 Waltereit (R.) & Detges (U.), 224 Weinreich (U.), 62-63, 65 Weydt (H.), 59 “What is said”, 18 Whittaker (S.), 164 Widdowson (H.G.), 124, 132 Wittgenstein (L.), 35

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