Publications

Publication details [#64418]

Prevost, Sophie and Benjamin Fagard. 2018. French à la rigueur: A sharp turn. Journal of Pragmatics 129 : 220–232.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
Elsevier

Annotation

This paper explores the evolution of a French discourse marker, à la rigueur, from its pristine clear meaning of “strictly” in late Medieval and Pre-Classical French (15th-16th centuries) to its present use as a hedge, similar to English “at a pinch”. Detailed qualitative assay is based on a representative corpus. It supplies an empirical illustration for invited inferencing theory.