This paper presents an in-depth study of the semantics of the French discourse marker alors ‘at that time, then, so’. Its evolution from temporal adverbial with local anaphoric meaning to polysemous marker including conversation management uses in spoken French is traced through a systematic diachronic corpus analysis. Of particular interest in this perspective is the relationship between the different meanings of alors and the position it occupies in the sentence. Our main hypothesis is that the semantic evolution of alors goes hand in hand with grammatical and functional changes leading to new discourse functions, viz. from sentence adverbial to discourse structuring marker. We show that semantic meaning is driven by syntactic position changes which gradually evolve over time.
2023. Corpus Pragmatics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context, ► pp. 289 ff.
Shan, Yi
2023. A Domain-Function Analysis of ni zhidao (你知道, “You Know”) in Chinese Simultaneous Speech. SAGE Open 13:4
Walters, Gina Scarpete
2023. The Evolution of Temporal Adverbs into Discourse Markers: Grammaticalization or Pragmaticalization? The Case of Romanian atunci “then” and apoi “afterwards”. In Internal and External Causes of Language Change, ► pp. 189 ff.
2021. Managing interpersonal discourse expectations: a comparative analysis of contrastive discourse particles in Dutch. Linguistics 59:2 ► pp. 333 ff.
2021. (Inter)subjectivisation et chaines sémantiques dans les adverbes français en–ment: analyse du passage de l'adverbe intégré à la proposition au marqueur discursif. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 66:3 ► pp. 346 ff.
2020. Corpus Findings II: J’allais dire and I Was Going to Say. In A Contrastive View of Discourse Markers, ► pp. 175 ff.
Didirková, Ivana, Ludivine Crible & Anne Catherine Simon
2019. Impact of Prosody on the Perception and Interpretation of Discourse Relations: Studies on “Et” and “Alors” in Spoken French. Discourse Processes 56:8 ► pp. 619 ff.
Heim, Johannes M.
2019. Turn-peripheral management of Common Ground: A study of Swabian gell. Journal of Pragmatics 141 ► pp. 130 ff.
Mohammadi, Ariana N.
2019. Meaning potentials and discourse markers: The case of focus management markers in Persian. Lingua 229 ► pp. 102706 ff.
Chen, Jiajun
2018. (Inter)subjectification at the left and right periphery: Deriving Chinese pragmatic marker bushi from the negative copula. Language Sciences 66 ► pp. 83 ff.
Degand, Liesbeth & Geertje van Bergen
2018. Discourse Markers as Turn-Transition Devices: Evidence From Speech and Instant Messaging. Discourse Processes 55:1 ► pp. 47 ff.
Enghels, Renata
2018. Towards a constructional approach to discourse-level phenomena: The case of the Spanish interpersonal epistemic stance construction. Folia Linguistica 52:1 ► pp. 107 ff.
2017. On establishing I think as a final particle in interactions: Some comparisons with sentence-final particles in Japanese. Journal of Pragmatics 110 ► pp. 83 ff.
Wang, Wei
2017. From a conditional marker to a discourse marker: The uses of dehua 的话 in natural Mandarin conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 117 ► pp. 119 ff.
2016. The role of prosody in the grammaticization of Hebrew naxon (‘right/true’): Synchronic and diachronic aspects. Journal of Pragmatics 92 ► pp. 43 ff.
Onodera, Noriko O. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott
2016. Periphery. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 17:2 ► pp. 163 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.