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.
2014. (Inter)subjectification in a functional theory of grammaticalization. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 46:1 ► pp. 7 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.
Crible, Ludivine & Liesbeth Degand
2021. Co-occurrence and ordering of discourse markers in sequences: A multifactorial study in spoken French. Journal of Pragmatics 177 ► pp. 18 ff.
Cuenca, Maria Josep
2020. Defective Connective Constructions: Some Cases in Catalan and Spanish. Corpus Pragmatics 4:4 ► pp. 423 ff.
D. M. Smith, Andrew, Graeme Trousdale & Richard Waltereit
2018. Discourse Markers as Turn-Transition Devices: Evidence From Speech and Instant Messaging. Discourse Processes 55:1 ► pp. 47 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.
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.
Evers-Vermeul, Jacqueline, Liesbeth Degand, Benjamin Fagard & Liesbeth Mortier
2011. Historical and comparative perspectives on subjectification: A corpus-based analysis of Dutch and French causal connectives. Linguistics 49:2
2016. The role of prosody in the grammaticization of Hebrew naxon (‘right/true’): Synchronic and diachronic aspects. Journal of Pragmatics 92 ► pp. 43 ff.
Maschler, Yael & Deborah Schiffrin
2015.
Discourse Markers
Language, Meaning, and Context
. In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ► pp. 189 ff.
Mohammadi, Ariana N.
2019. Meaning potentials and discourse markers: The case of focus management markers in Persian. Lingua 229 ► pp. 102706 ff.
Onodera, Noriko O. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott
2016. Periphery. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 17:2 ► pp. 163 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.
Shan, Yi
2023. A Domain-Function Analysis of ni zhidao (你知道, “You Know”) in Chinese Simultaneous Speech. SAGE Open 13:4
van Bergen, Geertje & Lotte Hogeweg
2021. Managing interpersonal discourse expectations: a comparative analysis of contrastive discourse particles in Dutch. Linguistics 59:2 ► pp. 333 ff.
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.
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.
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.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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