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Article Dans Une Revue Journal of Pragmatics Année : 2018

French "à la rigueur"

Résumé

We examine in this paper the evolution of a French discourse marker, a la rigueur, from its original transparent meaning of "rigorously" in late Medieval and Pre-Classical French (15th-16th centuries) to its modern use as a hedge, equivalent to English "at a pinch". We present the results of a large corpus study, using data from various databases covering the diachrony of French, with a qualitative and quantitative analysis of several hundred occurrences. This enables us to show that a la rigueur can be analyzed as having three main use-types, and that its striking semantic evolution results from a very gradual process of semantic evolution via the phenomenon of invited inference (Traugott & Dasher, 2002; Heine, 2002).

Domaines

Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-03908029 , version 1 (27-01-2023)

Identifiants

Citer

Sophie Prévost, Benjamin Fagard. French "à la rigueur". Journal of Pragmatics, 2018, 129, pp.220-232. ⟨10.1016/j.pragma.2018.01.015⟩. ⟨hal-03908029⟩
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