Then and now in English and French: Parallel patterns?
Résumé
English 'now' and 'then' and French 'maintenant' and 'alors' all exemplify the crosslinguistic tendency for temporal adverbs to grammaticalize into markers of rhetorical relations. This paper analyses the polysemy of these adverbs in a comparable corpus of written-to-be-spoken speeches and unscripted spoken interviews. For 'now' and 'maintenant', while the discourse patterns and the direction of change are remarkably similar, French and English seem to be at different points in the grammaticalization cycle, with 'maintenant' being less grammaticalized than 'now'. In the case of 'alors' and 'then', it is the French lexeme that appears to be more bleached, occurring in a wider range of rhetorical contexts and in different discourse patterns from English 'then'.
Domaines
Linguistique
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