The adverb enfin (lit.: ‘at last’) is pragmatically highly polyfunctional in contemporary French, and previous studies disagree on its proper semantic representation. The present paper traces enfin’s diachronic development from the earliest French texts, where only the temporal, etymological sense of the adverb is found, to the present day, where non-temporal and discourse-oriented senses abound, arguing that the adverb should be seen as polysemous and that it can profitably be described within the framework presented in Geeraerts (1997). It is concluded that present-day enfin has three distinct “core” senses, and several peripheral uses derived from these core senses, and that, overall, its evolution provides support for the general tendencies of semantic change identified in Traugott and Dasher (2002).
2009. Particles at the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface: Synchronic and Diachronic Issues. A Study with Special Reference to the French Phasal Adverbs. Journal of Pragmatics 41:7 ► pp. 1468 ff.
Beeching, Kate
2007. La co-variation des marqueurs discursifs bon, c'est-à-dire, enfin, hein, quand même, quoi et si vous voulez : une question d'identité ?. Langue française n° 154:2 ► pp. 78 ff.
2007. Présentation. Les marqueurs discursifs. Sens et variation. Langue française n° 154:2 ► pp. 3 ff.
Guryev, Alexander
2021. Marqueurs reformulatifs en français et en russe: de quelques intéressants parallélismes entre les deux langues. Journal of French Language Studies 31:3 ► pp. 338 ff.
2006. Bibliographie. Langue française n° 149:1 ► pp. 8 ff.
Parussa, Gabriella
2020. Dea, dia, da : un marqueur discursif en diachronie dans un corpus de dialogues en français. Langages N° 217:1 ► pp. 87 ff.
Petit, Mélanie
2010. Discrimination prosodique et représentation du lexique : les connecteurs discursifs. Éla. Études de linguistique appliquée n° 157:1 ► pp. 75 ff.
Petit, Mélanie, François Nemo & Camille Létang
2016. Prosodic constraints on pragmatic interpretation: a new chapter in linguistic pragmatics. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 12:1
Rossari, Corinne
2006. Grammaticalization and persistence phenomena in two hybrid discourse markers — la preuve and regarde. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 38:1 ► pp. 161 ff.
STAHNKE, JOHANNA
2018. Lexical and prosodic routinization in conceptional orality: conversational self-reformulation in French. Journal of French Language Studies 28:3 ► pp. 301 ff.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
2018. Rethinking the Role of Invited Inferencing in Change from the Perspective of Interactional Texts. Open Linguistics 4:1 ► pp. 19 ff.
Waltereit, Richard
2007. À propos de la genèse diachronique des combinaisons de marqueurs. L'exemple de bon ben et enfin bref. Langue française n° 154:2 ► pp. 94 ff.
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