Particles at the Semantics Pragmatics in

MaJ-Britt Mosegaard Hansen

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface: Synchronic and Diachronic Issues A Study with Special Reference to the French Phasal Adverbs

Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface Series Editors: K.M. Jaszczolt, University of Cambridge, UK K. Turner, University of Brighton, UK

Other titles in this series: TURNER (ed.) JASZCZOLT GEURTS JASZCZOLT (ed.) PEETERS (ed.) PAPAFRAGOU LEEZENBERG NÉMETH & BIBOK (eds.) BRAS & VIEU (eds.) GUTIÉRREZ-REXACH (ed.) KAMP & PARTEE (eds.) PEREGRIN (ed.) DOBROVOL’SKIJ & PIIRAINEN WEDGWOOD BULTINCK VON HEUSINGER & TURNER (eds.) ALONI et al. (eds.) PIETARINEN (ed.)

The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface from Different Points of View Discourse, Beliefs and Intentions: Semantic Defaults and Propositional Attitude Ascription Presuppositions and Pronouns The Pragmatics of Propositional Attitude Reports The Lexicon-Encyclopedia Interface Modality: Issues in the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface Contexts of Metaphor Pragmatics and the Flexibility of Word Meaning Semantic and Pragmatic Issues in Discourse and Dialogue From Words to Discourse: Trends in Spanish Semantics and Pragmatics Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning Meaning: The Dynamic Turn Figurative Language: Cross-cultural and Cross-linguistic Perspectives Shifting the Focus: From Static Structures to the Dynamics of Interpretation Numerous Meanings: The Meaning of English Cardinals and the Legacy of Paul Grice Where Semantics Meets Pragmatics Questions in Dynamic Semantics Game Theory and Linguistic Meaning

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Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface: Synchronic and Diachronic Issues A Study with Special Reference to the French Phasal Adverbs

Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen The University of Manchester, UK

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface (CRiSPI)

Series Editors: K.M. Jaszczolt, University of Cambridge, UK and K. Turner, University of Brighton, UK Editorial Advisory Board: N. Asher, USA B. Birner, USA C. Casadio, Italy M. Dascal, Israel B. Fraser, USA T. Fretheim, Norway B. Gillon, Canada P. Gochet, Belgium J. Groenendijk, The Netherlands Y. Gu, PRC A. Kasher, Israel M. Krifka, Germany S. Kubo, Japan C. Lee, Korea S. Levinson, The Netherlands T. McEnery, UK F. Nemo, France P. Pelyvas, Hungary J. Peregrin, Czech Republic A. Ramsay, UK R. Stalnaker, USA M. Stokhof, The Netherlands J. van der Auwera, Belgium R. van der Sandt, The Netherlands K. von Heusinger, Germany G. Ward, USA H. Zeevat, The Netherlands The aim of this series is to focus upon the relationship between semantic and pragmatic theories for a variety of natural language constructions. The boundary between semantics and pragmatics can be drawn in many various ways; the relative benefits of each gave rise to a vivid theoretical dispute in the literature in the last two decades. As a side effect, this variety has given rise to a certain amount of confusion and lack of purpose in the extant publications on the topic. This series provides a forum where the confusion within existing literature can be removed and the issues raised by different positions can be discussed with a renewed sense of purpose. The editors intend the contributions to this series to take further strides towards clarity and cautious consensus.

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CONTENTS Preface

xi

1

1 1 2 4 7 8

Introduction 1 Preamble 2 What are phasal adverbs? 3 Why are phasal adverbs of interest to linguistics? 4 A note on particles 5 Structure of this book

2 Particles at the Lexical-Semantics / Pragmatics Interface: A Conceptual Framework 1 Frame semantics 1.1 Summary 2 Semantics vs pragmatics 2.1 Content-level uses vs context-level uses of phasal adverbs 2.2 Instructional semantics 2.3 Summary 3 Types of (allegedly) pragmatic meaning 3.1 Conversational implicature 3.2 Conventional implicature 3.3 Presupposition 3.4 Summary 4 The problem of polyfunctionality in semantic / pragmatic description 4.1 Homonymy, monosemy, polysemy 4.2 Constraints on polysemy 4.3 The notion of “basic sense” 4.4 Summary 5 The problem of paradigmaticity in lexical semantics 5.1 Semantic fields and paradigmatic relations between lexical items 5.2 Summary 6 A Peircean approach to meaning 6.1 Summary 7 General summary

9 9 12 12 14 17 26 26 27 29 32 33 33 34 36 39 40 40 41 46 46 51 51

3 A Framework for Describing the Diachronic Evolution of Phasal Adverbs 1 Introduction 2 Diachronic prototype semantics 3 The evolution of phasal adverbs: grammaticalization or not? 3.1 Parameters of grammaticalization 3.2 Pragmaticalization 3.3 The role of reinterpretation / reanalysis 3.4 Summary

53 53 53 54 55 58 60 64

viii Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface 4 Tracing semasiological changes 4.1 Transition 4.2 Actuation 4.3 Motivation 4.4 Summary 5 The notion of “persistence” in semasiological change 6 A Peircean approach to meaning change 6.1 Summary 7 General summary

64 65 69 72 77 77 79 82 82

4 General Properties of Phasal Adverbs Across Languages 1 Introduction 2 The aspectuality of phasal adverbs 2.1 The linguistic expression of time: tense, aspect, Aktionsart 2.2 The linguistic expression of time: adverbials 2.3 Interaction of phasal adverbs with aspect and Aktionsart 2.4 Perspectivity 2.5 Summary 3 The paradigmaticity of phasal adverbs 3.1 Two competing hypotheses about the interrelations of phasal adverbs 3.1.1 The duality hypothesis 3.1.2 The three-scenarios hypothesis 3.2 Summary 4 The presuppositionality of phasal adverbs 4.1 Presuppositions concerning preceding phases of the SoA 4.2 “Presuppositions” concerning subsequent phases of the SoA 4.3 “Presuppositions” concerning earliness or lateness of the change of state 4.4 Summary 5 General summary

85 85 85 86 89 91 94 99 100 100 100 109 112 113 113 116 119 121 122

5 Data and Methodology 1 Empirical basis of the investigation 2 Corpora used 2.1 Problems with the data 3 Tests 3.1 Tests for content-level vs context-level function 3.2 Problems with the use of tests in semantic / pragmatic description 4 Summary

123 123 125 126 128 129 130 131

6 Content-Level Uses of the French Phasal Adverbs 1 Introduction 2 Etymology of the French phasal adverbs 3 Temporal and closely related uses of déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin 3.1 Déjà 3.2 Toujours 3.2.1 Distributive use 3.3 Enfin 3.4 Summary 4 Phasal uses of the four adverbs 4.1 Déjà

133 133 134 135 135 136 137 139 142 142 142

Contents ix 4.2 Encore 4.3 Toujours 4.4 Enfin 4.5 Summary 5 Iterative and related uses of déjà and encore 5.1 Déjà 5.2 Encore 5.2.1 Additive encore 5.3 Habitual toujours 5.4 Summary 6 Déjà, encore, and toujours as phrasal adjuncts 6.1 Focus-particle uses of déjà and encore 6.1.1 Déjà and encore as temporal focus particles 6.1.2 Encore as an additive focus particle 6.2 Encore and toujours as degree adverbs 6.3 Summary 7 General summary

144 148 150 151 152 152 155 156 158 159 160 160 161 162 164 168 168

7 Context-Level Uses of the French Phasal Adverbs 1 Introduction 2 “Modal” uses 2.1 “Scalar” use 2.1.1 Déjà 2.1.2 Encore 2.1.3 Toujours 2.2 “Categorizing” use 2.3 Non-temporal focus-particle use 2.4 A note on enfin / finalement 2.5 Summary 3 Connective uses 3.1 Déjà 3.2 Encore 3.3 Toujours 3.4 Enfin 3.4.1 Collocations with enfin 3.5 Summary 4 Interactional uses 4.1 Summary 5 General summary

171 171 171 172 173 175 178 179 183 185 186 187 187 192 199 203 209 212 213 216 217

8 Conclusion 1 Introduction 2 Summary of results 3 Retrospects and prospects

221 221 221 224

References Data sources

229 241

Index

243

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PREFACE This book has rather a long history. Following publication of my 1998 monograph The function of discourse particles. A study with special reference to spoken standard French (Amsterdam: John Benjamins), I had planned to give the category of particles a well-deserved rest, and go to work on other linguistic phenomena. While I did, indeed, do so (and continue to do so on a regular basis), it ultimately proved impossible for me to leave particles alone, the study of these small items having continued to be a “growth industry” within linguistics, and especially within the field of semantics and pragmatics. Indeed, in as much as the field of particle studies is still a relatively recent one, it continues not only to raise new issues of interest to general linguistics, but also to throw new light on a variety of existing issues. For me, the most interesting topic of all within the field of linguistics as a whole is the question of how meaning is created by the use of language, and particles have proved to be very fertile ground for thinking about precisely that. Consequently, although this monograph has as its object to describe the uses of a small group of particles in one specific language, namely French, it also has the more far-reaching aim of contributing to current theorizing about the nature of linguistic meaning and how it changes over time. The book would not have come into existence without the help and support of a number of people and institutions: First, I must thank the Danish Research Council for Culture and Communication (Forskningsrådet for Kultur og Kommunikation) for granting me the year’s research leave I needed to complete this book (grant no. 273-05-0189), and the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, where I was employed from 1993 to the spring of 2007, for providing not only financial sustenance, but also an infrastructure conducive to research. Secondly, I would like to thank (in alphabetical order) Peter Harder (Copenhagen) Henning Nølke (Aarhus), Povl Skårup (Aarhus), Elizabeth Closs Traugott (Stanford), Johan van der Auwera (Antwerp), Co Vet (Groningen), and Richard Waltereit (Newcastle-upon-Tyne) for having taken the time to read and comment on parts of this book, and Ken Turner (Brighton), co-editor with Kasia Jaszczolt of this series, for handling my book proposal (and not least for judging it favorably). The following people have been less directly involved in the genesis of the present volume, but, over the years, they have nonetheless helped me in various ways, either with practical matters related to the completion of the study, or by helping me to sharpen my thinking on the relevant issues, for which I am very grateful: Henning Andersen (Los Angeles), Carla Bazzanella (Turin), Daron Burrows (Manchester), Frans Gregersen (Copenhagen), Hans Lauge Hansen (Aarhus), Andreas Jucker (Zurich), Jonna Kjær (Copenhagen), Christiane MarchelloNizia (ENS Lyon), Salvador Pons Bordería (Valéncia), Scott A. Schwenter (Columbus, OH),

xii Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface Lene Schøsler (Copenhagen), Erling Strudsholm (Copenhagen), Jacqueline Visconti (Genoa), and a number of anonymous referees for various international journals, in which the preliminary results of my research on phasal adverbs in French, or on other issues of relevance to this monograph, have been published. It goes without saying that none of the above-mentioned colleagues can or should be held responsible in any way for whatever errors and misinterpretations I may have made in this study. My husband, Steen Lisby, and our son, Victor Thomas Lisby, have been an inexhaustible source of both joy and moral support. This book is dedicated to them. Manchester, UK, August 2007

1 INTRODUCTION

1 PREAMBLE As Morgan (1978: 264) puts it, “[a] central question for the study of language is this: How do people understand what’s said to them?”. That question will be very much at the forefront of attention in the present study, which has both a general theoretical aim, and a specific descriptive aim. The theoretical problems I will be concerned with are two-fold: first, I seek to develop a synchronic model of the interface between lexical semantics and pragmatic interpretation. Subsequently, I complement the synchronic model by a diachronic model capable of giving an account of how the pragmatic interpretation of utterances may influence language users’ representations of the coded meanings of individual lexemes, leading to extensions and/or shifts in lexical meanings. On the descriptive side, the present work will propose a syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and diachronic analysis of four particles that are highly frequent in modern French, viz. the socalled “phasal adverbs” déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin (for my use of the notions of “particle” vs “adverb”, see sect. 4 infra). These adverbs are quite unusually polyfunctional, and their description therefore raises the question of the interface between lexical semantics and pragmatics to a particularly conspicuous degree. First, it raises the question of the extent to which their different contemporary uses can and should be attributed to the existence of so many different coded meanings, or, conversely, of the extent to which at least some of these uses are, instead, attributable to more or less

2

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface

straightforward pragmatic inferencing. In other words, are these adverbs not merely polyfunctional, but actually polysemous, and if yes, how polysemous are they really? Secondly, it seems that, as a rule, phasal adverbs in their various uses convey certain elements of meaning that are clearly of a non-truth-conditional nature. Thus, their description compels the linguist to take a stand on the precise nature of such elements, and on the level of description (semantics or pragmatics?) at which they belong, and why. Thirdly, given that not all the current uses of the French phasal adverbs appear to have existed from the birth of the French language, but that the range of uses rather seems to have developed gradually over a period of many centuries, the polyfunctionality of these items raises the question of how exactly new uses of words become entrenched in a language. In as much as extensions in the use and / or meaning of words are usually assumed to originate in pragmatic inferences from existing meanings, the question of the entrenchment of new uses involves investigating how and why pragmatic elements of utterance interpretation may become semanticized, that is, it involves a diachronic view on the semantics / pragmatics interface. All of these issues will be dealt with in some detail in subsequent chapters of this book.

2 WHAT ARE PHASAL ADVERBS? Many languages possess a set of lexical items largely equivalent to French déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin, e.g. English already, yet, still, and finally; German schon, (immer) noch, and endlich; Danish allerede, endnu, stadig(væk) and endelig; Italian già, ancora, and infine; etc... (cf. Välikangas 1982, van der Auwera 1998 and van Baar 1997 for further examples, including ones from more exotic languages). Irrespective of the specific language studied, it has been noted in a number of places in the literature that the meanings of these items are intuitively related, in that they involve taking a particular perspective on some state-of-affairs (henceforth abbreviated as “SoA”, and represented by the variable e). The perspective in question involves, on the one hand, the possibility that a transition between two phases – one positive and one negative – of that same SoA has taken place or might conceivably take place at the time of reference, or “topic time” (henceforth TT), a time interval that is prototypically indicated by the speaker’s1 choice of tense and by the presence of any adverbials of temporal location in the host clause.2 On the other hand, it involves the location of that transition with respect to TT. Thus, in (1) below, déjà indicates that at TT (which in this case is identical to the time of utterance) a transition between a prior negative SoA ~e and a current positive SoA e has occurred. The same is true of enfin in (2), although with the important difference that, while déjà seems to suggest that the transition between ~e and e has occurred prematurely with respect to what might have been expected by at least some virtual individual, enfin signifies rather that the transition has occurred later than might have been expected. Both particles may

1 As a matter of convention, I will, in the remainder of this study, refer to individual speakers as she and to individual hearers as he, except where authentic corpus examples are used, in which case the actual sex of the speaker will determine pronominal gender, or if the contents of a constructed example would make these arbitrary gender assignments appear odd. 2 This notion of topic time relies on Klein (1992), and will be defined in chapter 4 infra.

Introduction 3 thus be said to be essentially retrospective (cf. Vandeweghe 1992: 100), in as much as they are concerned with a transition that has occurred prior to TT. (1)

(2)

Benoît et Nadine se sont rencontrés il y a six mois, et ils attendent déjà un enfant.3 ‘Benoît and Nadine met six months ago, and they are already expecting a child.’ Ça fait trois ans qu’Alexis et Léa essayent d’avoir un bébé, et voilà enfin qu’elle est enceinte. ‘Alexis and Léa have been trying to have a baby for three years, and now she is finally pregnant.’

In (3)-(4), on the other hand, both encore and toujours indicate that the SoA e has reached a relatively advanced stage at TT, given that they both presuppose that e was also the case prior to TT. The difference between them will be argued in ch. 6 infra to lie in the fact that, while encore contains a further element of meaning to the effect that a future transition between e and a negative SoA ~e is at least conceivable within the current universe of discourse, toujours is entirely neutral with respect to the possibility of such a transition. As neither particle actually excludes a future transition to an SoA of the opposite polarity, we may then say that they are essentially prospective in nature (cf. Vandeweghe 1992: 100), although encore is more clearly so than toujours. (3) (4)

Max et Sylvie ont divorcé il y a dix ans, mais ils se détestent encore autant. Max et Sylvie ont divorcé il y a dix ans, mais ils se détestent toujours autant. ‘Max and Sylvie divorced ten years ago, but they still hate one another as much as ever.’

Some or all of these particles, and their equivalents in other languages, have been of interest to linguistics at least since the late 1960s (some of the earliest studies being Traugott & Waterhouse 1969 for English, Doherty 1973 for German, and Muller 1975 for French). In the existing literature, the group is frequently expanded to include (the equivalents of) negative or restrictive adverbs such not yet, no longer, not until, and certain uses of only (in French: ne…pas encore, ne…toujours pas, ne…plus, ne…(encore) que, and seul(ement) cf. (5)-(9)). The latter items will be touched upon in various places in this work, but they will not be treated individually and in depth: (5)

(6)

(7)

Ça fait trois ans qu’Alexis et Léa essayent d’avoir un bébé, mais elle n’est pas encore tombée enceinte. ‘Alexis and Léa have been trying to have a baby for three years, but she has not become pregnant yet.’ Ça fait trois ans qu’Alexis et Léa essayent d’avoir un bébé, mais elle n’est toujours pas tombée enceinte. ‘Alexis and Léa have been trying to have a baby for three years, but she still has not become pregnant.’ Max et Sylvie ont divorcé il y a dix ans, et maintenant ils ne se détestent plus. ‘Max and Sylvie divorced ten years ago, and now they don’t hate one another anymore.’

3 Examples that are not marked for source have been constructed by the author. See chapter 5 for a discussion of data and methodology.

4

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface (8)

(9)

Est-ce que Frédéric est déjà passé professeur ? − Non, il n’est encore que maître de conférences. ‘Has Frédéric already got tenure? − No, he’s still only an assistant professor.’ Est-ce que Frédéric est passé professeur à l’âge de 30 ans déjà ? − Non, à 40 ans seulement. ‘Did Frédéric get tenure at the age of 30 already? − No, only at 40.’

As a group, the above-mentioned particles have been variously referred to as “aspect markers” (Traugott & Waterhouse 1969), “presuppositional time adverbs” (Vet 1980), “phasal quantifiers” (Löbner 1989, 1999), “scalar focus particles” (König 1991), “perspectivity particles” (Vandeweghe 1992), “phasal polarity expressions” (van Baar 1997), “phasal adverbials” (van der Auwera 1998), and probably others things besides. The term chosen to designate the French items treated in this work will be “phasal adverbs”. This is intended as a neutral term, and does not as such imply a preference for any existing descriptive or explanatory model.

3 WHY ARE PHASAL ADVERBS OF INTEREST TO LINGUISTICS? Although there are many areas within linguistics which, with respect to sheer bulk, greatly surpass the study of phasal adverbs in importance, we are nevertheless far from dealing with a field that is entirely unexplored. Indeed, items of this kind in various languages have been the object not only of a fairly large number of papers and / or book chapters, but also of a few fulllength monographic treatments. Most studies largely confine themselves to one of the major European languages, although several analyses tend to at least suggest some cross-linguistic applicability, but larger-scale typological studies can also be found (e.g. Välikangas 1982, van Baar 1997, van der Auwera 1998). Generally speaking, it is the semantics and pragmatics of what I will call the “aspectual” uses of these adverbs (i.e. the uses exemplified in (1)-(4) above) that has claimed the greatest amount of scholarly interest. However, it appears to be a prominent characteristic of phasal adverbs across languages that they tend to develop a (sometimes very wide) range of different senses, some of which are largely similar from one language to the next, while others are language-specific. For instance, French déjà possesses at least ten different uses, only four of which appear idiomatically translatable by English already. A selection of such extended senses of déjà and other French phasal adverbs is seen in (10)-(16): (10) (11)

(12)

4

Donnez-lui encore une bière ! ‘Give him another beer!’ Entre Ventimille et Menton, je préfère passer mes vacances à Menton : c’est déjà / encore / toujours la France.4 ‘If I have to choose between Ventimiglia and Menton, I prefer to spend my vacation in Menton: then we’ll at least be in France / it’s still in France / if nothing else, it’s in France’ Max aura sûrement une mauvaise note à l’examen : déjà que son prof ne l’aime guère, mais en plus il n’a pas travaillé.

It almost goes without saying, but the English translations of my French examples are meant as approximations only, and will in at least some cases aim specifically at spelling out a contrast in meaning between two particles. Hence, any given translation will not necessarily represent the most “natural” choice in English, nor can it necessarily be generalized to all possible contexts.

Introduction 5

(13)

(14)

(15) (16)

‘Max will probably get a bad grade at the exam : not only does his teacher dislike him, but on top of that, he hasn’t studied for it’ Max aura sûrement une mauvaise note à l’examen, encore que son prof l’aime beaucoup. ‘Max will probably get a bad grade at the exam, although his teacher does like him a lot’ Max a eu une mauvaise note à l’examen. Toujours est-il que son prof l’aime beaucoup. ‘Max got a bad grade at the exam. Nevertheless, his teacher likes him a lot’ C’est Duschnok, son nom, déjà / encore ? ‘His name was Duschnok, now, wasn’t it?/So, WAS his name Duschnok?’ Mes amis sont tous venus à mon anniversaire. Enfin, pas littéralement tous, mais presque. ‘My friends all came to my birthday. Well, not literally all, but almost.’

In the bulk of the existing literature, these non-aspectual uses have for the most part the status of “poor relatives”, sometimes to the point of being explicitly excluded from the purview of the analyses. Thus, it is probably fair to say that the various non-aspectual senses that phasal adverbs seem to develop in a number of languages are still underexplored (which, of course, is not intended to imply that no work has been done in the area). As a consequence, the relations – if any – that obtain between the two types of senses, and between the different non-aspectual senses, likewise call for more in-depth consideration. Finally, studies of the diachronic development of these items in different languages appear to be next to non-existent. Describing the meaning of phasal adverbs poses a challenge in several ways: First, it has always been clear that a purely truth-conditional semantics could not adequately account for their use. Indeed, in many cases, speakers will have a choice between two or more of these particles when describing what is objectively the same SoA, the choice depending on the particular point to be made with respect to that SoA in the context, e.g. (17)-(19): (17) (18) (19)

A 40 ans, Max est déjà / enfin devenu titulaire. ‘At 40, Max has already / finally got tenure.’ Le feu est déjà / encore au rouge. ‘The light is already / still red.’ Mais, chéri, tu es encore / toujours beau mec ! ‘But darling, you are as yet / still a handsome guy!’

In other words, the contribution that phasal adverbs make to the interpretation of the utterances in which they occur involves an essential non-referential, contextualizing – some would say “pragmatic” – component. However, the exact nature of that contextualizing component is controversial: is it a presupposition, a conventional implicature, a conversational implicature, an argumentational feature, or something else again? And not only that, but once the researcher has decided on the terms in which to cast his or her description, there remains the problem of determining the precise content of this element of meaning. Furthermore, the contextualizing component of meaning becomes even more salient in more “modal” and/or discourse-oriented uses of the particles, such as those exemplified in (11)-(16) above. What this means is that phasal adverbs raise the question of the semantics / pragmatics interface as an essential part of their functional description. The present work places itself within a predominantly Continental tradition, in which semantics is conceived of as the abstract virtual content that is encoded in linguistic items (be

6

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface

they morphemes, lexemes, or constructions), such that semantic content cannot in the first instance be defined as denotative / referential, i.e. truth-conditional, in nature. Rather, in a great many cases, encoded semantic content will consist in instructions on how to appropriately contextualize the host utterance, for instance, as part of an (explicit or implicit) argumentational sequence, or of a process of interactional positioning. On this conception, pragmatic meaning consists in specific actualized meanings which are the result of the interaction between coded (i.e. semantic) content and the particular context of occurrence of the host utterance. Thus, pragmatic meanings are inferentially based and potentially cancelable. The question of truth conditions is orthogonal to that of the semantics / pragmatics distinction, in as much as semantic content may be non-truth-conditional, whereas pragmatically derived meanings may be truth-conditional. In the case of phasal adverbs, it implies that there is no qualitative leap from their temporal/aspectual uses to the discourseoriented ones. Secondly, as already mentioned, the different phasal adverbs intuitively seem to contrast with one another along a set of dimensions having to do with polarity, position of the potential transition with respect to TT, and contextually relevant expectations as to the exact moment of transition. This naturally raises the question of whether and to what extent they can be said to constitute a paradigm in the strict, structuralist sense, such that the meaning of each can usefully be defined in opposition to that of the others. I will argue in chs. 2 and 4 infra that, in spite of its elegance, such a view – which has been expounded in prominent parts of the existing literature (cf. Löbner 1989, 1999; Vandeweghe 1992) – is nevertheless misconceived. Indeed, there is in general reason to believe that the lexicon is not tightly structured in this way, but consists instead of a set of flexible resources which allow considerable creativity in the production of meaning. In that connection, I develop, in chs. 3, 6 and 7, the diachronic notion of “persistence”, i.e. the fact that linguistic items that have been subject to meaning change will, as a rule, retain central elements of their source meanings (cf. Hopper 1991). This fact calls into question not only the structuralist assumption of the independence of synchrony and diachrony, but also the tenability of a structuralist conception of the lexicon, for lexemes belonging to one and the same synchronic frame may nevertheless have very different diachronic sources, and persistence of central elements of meaning from these sources may place (from a synchronic point of view, apparently arbitrary) constraints on the syntactic, semantic, and micropragmatic contexts that the new meanings can enter into, thereby preventing the new meanings from forming a tight structuralist paradigm. Last, but not least, the multifunctionality of phasal adverbs raises interesting questions about the interrelations between the various notional domains in which they may function, and about the diachronic pathways and mechanisms regulating the variation and change we find in their uses. I take my point of departure in this book in the cognitively-oriented, frame-semantic tradition, with its concomitant view of polysemy as an essential feature of lexical semantics, and combine it with Peircean semiotics to arrive at a model which can account for both synchronic variations and for diachronic changes in lexical meanings.

Introduction 7

4 A NOTE ON PARTICLES In this book, déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin will be variously referred to as “adverbs” and as “particles”, irrespective of the specific use of them that is at issue at any time.5 They are “adverbs” in so far as – in the vast majority of their uses – they fulfil adverbial functions within their host clauses, that is to say functions that are syntactically optional, and in which they modify some aspect of the information that is conveyed by the host clause, be it information about the state-of-affairs denoted by the clause, or explicit or implicit information about the communicative status of the clause. They also, in contemporary French, have the status of particles in the traditional morphological sense, that is, they are invariable simplex morphemes, which are not subject to inflection or derivation. In the Continental European, principally the Germanist, tradition, a different distinction is frequently drawn between adverbs and particles. According to that tradition, the two categories overlap only to a minimal degree, and the distinction between them is not primarily based on the morphological features of the items classified, but on their semantic and syntactic characteristics. Thus, semantically, particles are defined as synsemantic items (Vandeweghe 1992: 8; van Baar 1997: 247; Hentschel & Weydt 2002: 646), i.e. their precise meaning can only be determined in context, by their interaction with other expressions used in the host clause. The principal syntactic criterion, viz. that particles do not, in the normal case, occur in isolation, follows from this central semantic property of particles (cf. Vandeweghe 1992: 16, van Baar 1997: 243). This is no doubt a relevant distinction to make in the case of the Continental Germanic languages, which all possess a set of so-called “modal particles”, i.e. items like German ja, doch, eben,…, Danish jo, da, vist,…, or Dutch toch, maar, even,…. Modal particles – although syntactically optional, and functioning as modifiers – nevertheless possess quite particular syntactic and semantic properties, chief among which is their obligatory occurrence in the socalled “middle field” of the clause, their fixed propositional scope, and their very abstract meaning, all of which set them apart from sentence adverbs like (the equivalents of) fortunately, briefly, etc. (e.g. Abraham 1991, Foolen 1993; Waltereit fc). It may even be the case, as argued by Waltereit (fc) that modal particles arise diachronically as a result of processes that are distinct from those that give rise to other types of functional items in language. However, French, and the Romance languages in general, do not possess a significant and clearly delimitable class of such modal particles, and drawing a distinction between adverbs and particles along the lines just mentioned would appear to be arbitrary and unjustified in the case of Romance. Thus, the precise meaning and function of a great many French adverbs is context-dependent, as (20)-(22) show, and while some items that are particles in the morphological sense may appear in isolation, other items, which quite clearly are not particles, cannot (cf. (23)-(24) vs (25)-(26)): (20)

Céline m’a parlé franchement. ‘Céline spoke to me frankly.’

5 For purposes of stylistic variation, the words ”marker” and ”morpheme” will also be used. Nothing whatsoever hinges on the precise choice between these terms in any single instance.

8

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface (21) (22) (23) (24) (25) (26)

Franchement, Céline est une imbécile. ‘Frankly, Céline is an idiot.’ (= I say to you frankly) Franchement, est-ce que Céline trompe son mari ? ‘Frankly, does Céline cheat on her husband?’ (= Tell me frankly) Marc est déjà arrivé. ‘Marc has already arrived.’ A. Marc est arrivé. B. Déjà ? ‘A. Marc has arrived. B. Already?’ Très brièvement, Benjamin a été licencié. ‘Very briefly, Benjamin has been fired.’ A. Benjamin a été licencié. B. #Très brièvement ? ‘A. Benjamin has been fired. B. Very briefly?’

In the remainder of this book, I will therefore adhere to the “classical”, morphological definition of “particles”, whereby the phasal adverbs indeed happen also to be particles, even if they do not fulfil the criteria for “particle-hood” as defined in Germanic linguistics.

5 STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK The book is roughly divided into two parts: a theoretical/methodological part, spanning chs. 15, and a descriptive part, spanning chs. 6-7, although with some overlap between them, particularly in ch. 4. Ch. 2 presents the synchronic approach to meaning and the semantics/pragmatics distinction that I will be assuming in the remainder of the study, while ch. 3 presents a complementary diachronic approach. Ch. 4 is a critical review of the literature on phasal adverbs across languages. Ch. 5 describes the data and the methodology in the descriptive part II of the book. Ch. 6 describes in some detail what I call the content-level uses of the four French phasal adverbs, their interrelations, and their diachronic evolution. Ch. 7 does the same for what I call their context-level uses. (For the distinction between content-level and context-level uses, see ch. 2, sect. 2.1.) Ch. 8 is a conclusion.

2

PARTICLES AT THE LEXICAL-SEMANTICS / PRAGMATICS INTERFACE: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

1 FRAME SEMANTICS The general approach to semantics adopted in this work is that of frame semantics (e.g. Fillmore 1982, 1985; Croft & Cruse 2004: ch. 2). Frame semantics is an experientially-based approach to linguistic meaning, specifically lexical meaning, and it stands in opposition to structural and feature-based approaches to the lexicon. (This aspect of frame semantics will be treated more fully in sect. 5.1 below.) The essential feature is that our understanding of words must be relativized to wider conceptual and / or experiential frames, which are evoked by the use of words, and which are thus part of their meaning. Outside the domain of lexical semantics proper, frames of understanding may also be actively invoked by hearers / readers in order to impose coherence on a given discourse (Fillmore 1982: 124, 1985: 232). Fillmore (1985: 232) offers the example in (1), where a Western addressee is likely to spontaneously invoke a Christmas frame, even if no mention is made of Christmas in the discourse itself. Such invokings are, of course, firmly situated within the domain of pragmatics: (1)

We never open our presents until the morning.

A semantic, or evoked, frame is defined as “a script-like conceptual structure that describes a particular type of situation, object, or event and the participants and props involved in it” (Ruppenhofer et al. 2005: 5). Words are taken to denote, or focus attention on, specific elements of such frames, and what is objectively one and the same real-world situation may thus be framed differently by the use of different words.

10

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface

Hence, frame semantics stands in opposition also to semantic theories that see truth conditions as the primary (or, indeed, the only) determinant of linguistic meaning. Because of this explicit orientation towards understandings, rather than objective truth conditions, frame semantics is particularly well suited to account for the meanings of items like phasal adverbs, our understanding of which is – at best – only very partially explained by a statement of their truth conditions. To take a simple, and by now classic, example of how a different choice of words can frame the same event differently, the verbs buy and sell can both be considered to belong to a superordinate commercial transaction frame containing elements like BUYER, SELLER, GOODS, and PRICE. Indeed, (2) and (3) should have the exact same truth conditions: (2) (3)

Sylvester bought a used guitar from Francesca for 30 dollars. Francesca sold a used guitar to Sylvester for 30 dollars.

The two converse verbs, however, correspond to individual subframes of this superordinate frame. The difference between them is that buy perspectivizes the transaction from the point of view of the BUYER role, on which attention is therefore focused, while sell perspectivizes it from the point of view of the SELLER role. The English words buyer and seller, respectively, of course directly denote these two elements of the commercial transaction frame. In the case of polysemous words, each individual sense is assumed to evoke a different frame, or a different aspect of the same frame (the latter possibility will be argued in ch. 3 below to be an important explanatory factor in semantic change). As an example of the first type of polysemy, the polysemy of the word mouth can be explained as the profiling of the opening of a container against different kinds of bases, i.e. different kinds of containers (heads, caves, rivers, etc.) (cf. Croft & Cruse 2004: 19). An example of the second type would be words for “to rent”, which in several languages are polysemous between an etymological “renting-out” sense and a newer “obtain-by-rental” sense, cf. the alternative translations of (4). As argued by Waltereit (1998: 75ff), this polysemy most probably arose because the two senses represent different profilings of one and the same event-type, and because, in many contexts (such as that in (5)), either sense may be understood without creating problems for communication. (4) (5)

Fernand a loué une chambre à Delphine. ‘Fernand rented a room to / from Delphine.’ [Sign in an apartment window] Chambre à louer. ‘Room to let / for rent.’

Frames are linked to one another in virtue of a variety of relations, some of the more important of which are (cf. Ruppenhofer et al. 2005: 7f): • Inheritance, which is defined as a taxonomic relation. The example given by Ruppenhofer et al. is the Revenge frame, which is a subtype of the Rewards-andpunishments frame. • Using, defined in terms of presupposition or backgrounding. For instance, the Speed frame “uses” the Motion frame. • Subframe (already mentioned above), defined in terms of subevents of more complex events. Thus, the Criminal-process frame has a number of subframes, such as Arrest, Arraignment, Trial, and Sentencing.

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface: A Conceptual Framework

11

Words belonging to the same or neighboring frames are conceptually linked in the minds of language users. This, I take it, can be explained by considerations of cognitive economy, concepts being presumably more easily remembered if they can be integrated with other neighboring concepts. Moreover, in some cases, a word evoking one frame may be used with words that evoke a different, but related frame, thus giving rise to particular nuances of meaning. For instance, the German verbs essen and fressen both denote the activity of eating, but while essen evokes a frame where the agent is human, fressen evokes one where the agent is an animal. Hence, if used with a human subject, as in (6), fressen will convey the idea that the subject referent eats in an animal-like way: (6)

Wolfgang hat die Pizza gefrisst. ‘Wolfgang has eaten the pizza (in a gluttonous and / or less than savory way).’

Clauses and sentences will typically evoke several different frames simultaneously, some of which may be highly abstract. Thus, in an example like (7) (from Ruppenhofer et al. 2005: 23, their (9)) evokes at least three frames: a telephone-calling frame due to the presence of the verb call, an office-frame evoked by the direct object the office, and an iteration-frame evoked by the adverb again: (7)

Lee called the office again.

Elements like again are of particular interest in the context of the present work: they constitute so-called “extra-thematic” frame elements, and belong, not to the “host frame” as such (in casu, the telephone-calling frame), but to very abstract frames that “take them as well as the targets that they modify as arguments” (Ruppenhofer et al. 2005: 23). It is clear that the French phasal adverbs in all of their various uses must be included among such extra-thematic elements. In ch. 4 infra, we will see how their basic phasal meanings can be described in frame-based terms. In the case of complex clauses and discourse, extra-thematic elements such as connectives will signal specific ways of unifying the frames evoked by the component clauses, thereby providing a natural explanation of certain non-truth-conditional inferences that will typically be made. Thus, for instance, the connective so evokes a cause-result frame, where the roles of cause and result must be filled by abstract entities such as facts, events, or propositions. The frame moreover specifies that the result role is filled by the fact, event, or proposition denoted or implied by whatever linguistic or paralinguistic material follows, or is overlaid on, the connective.1 Hence, one will probably, upon hearing (8) (inspired by Némo 2006: 378), infer both that an alternative means of transportation has (or might have) been envisaged by the speaker, and that the means in question was walking, as opposed to going by car. The 1 This somewhat convoluted phrasing is meant to take into account the fact that neither the cause nor the result connected by so need be expressed by linguistic means, cf. (i) (due to Blakemore 1987: 106), where so connects the speaker’s observation of an extralinguistic fact with a proposition that she has inferred as a result of that observation, and (ii), where the marker connects a linguistically expressed event with an implied conclusion that may be inferred as a result of that event: (i) [Upon seeing the addressee loaded with parcels] So, you’ve spent all your money. (ii) A. Do you think Jonathan and Gina are going to go on dating much longer? The last couple of times I’ve seen them, they’ve been arguing non-stop. B. Well, I saw her at a restaurant the other night having dinner with Max, so… Note also that, in all the examples cited, the cause-result relationship is situated at what Sweetser (1990) calls the ”epistemic” level, that is, the use of so indicates that the speaker is drawing an inference as a result of observing some fact.

12

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface

addressee of an utterance like (9), on the other hand, is likely to infer that the alternative means of transportation envisaged was going by car, as opposed to walking: (8) (9)

1.1

It was far, so I took my bike. It wasn’t far, so I took my bike.

Summary

In this section, I have outlined the general approach to semantics that I will be assuming in this work, namely frame semantics. Frame semantics is crucially a “semantics of understanding”, which, unlike more traditional approaches, sees neither truth conditions, feature decomposition, nor purely intra-linguistic structural relationships as central to an account of meaning. Since frame semantics is not, in the first instance, truth-conditional, and given that many frames are experiential in nature, i.e. based on encyclopedic knowledge of objects, event-types etc., it may seem unclear how the contribution made by semantics to the interpretation of utterances is to be distinguished from that made by pragmatics, or if there is, indeed, any meaningful distinction to be made between the two levels of description. Although he states (1985: 222) that the theory of frame semantics “does not begin with a body of assumptions about [such a distinction]” (his emphasis), Fillmore (1985: 233) takes pains to emphasize that a distinction is made. However, some aspects of utterance interpretation that are traditionally seen as belonging to pragmatics are seen rather as belonging to the “conventional (or ‘literal’ or ‘properly linguistic’) meaning” of sentences, i.e. to their semantics. One of the central purposes of the present study is, as already stated, to elucidate the extraordinary synchronic polyfunctionality of the four French phasal adverbs déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin, and in order not to have to postulate a potentially infinite number of different meanings of these particles, it is therefore crucial that some attempt be made to answer the question of what aspects of the meaning and function of a given item should be seen as determined by the language itself, i.e. by the semantics of the item in question in combination with that of the syntactic constructions in which it can occur, and what aspects are better seen as occasioned by more or less fortuitous aspects of its contexts of occurrence in a wider sense, i.e. by pragmatics. Accordingly, the following sections will attempt to clarify a number of salient issues relating to the study of synchronically polyfunctional lexemes within a frame semantic approach.

2 SEMANTICS VS PRAGMATICS I will follow a tradition that has been well-established in French linguistics at least since Ducrot (1980), and which is clearly also assumed in frame semantics (cf. Fillmore 1985: 233), whereby the distinction between semantics and pragmatics is not in the first instance a distinction between elements of meaning that are truth-conditional and elements of meaning that are not.2 Rather, semantic meaning is that which is – or appears to be – coded in linguistic 2 Hence, the theory of meaning elaborated by Ducrot and his collaborators, a theory which prominently includes, on the one hand, the theory of language-inherent argumentation, and on the other hand, the theory of polyphony (cf. Anscombre & Ducrot 1983, Ducrot et al. 1980, Ducrot 1984, Nølke et al. 2004), is sometimes (misleadingly to scholars grounded in the Anglo-American tradition) referred to as ”Integrated Pragmatics”, despite the fact that it is actually a theory of linguistically coded meaning, i.e. of semantics.

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface: A Conceptual Framework

13

expressions3, while pragmatic meaning is the interpretative “surplus” that remains when we subtract semantic (or coded) meaning from that which is taken to be the object of a given speaker’s communicative intentions in a given context. Pragmatic meaning arises as a result of the interaction between coded meanings and the linguistic co-text and situational context in which they appear. Hearers may be assumed to arrive at an interpretation of the pragmatic meaning of a given utterance by attempting to unify the coded meanings of the words and constructions that make up that utterance with what they know (or have reason to believe is the case) about its co- and context. Although this study does not otherwise position itself within Relevance Theory, I will follow Sperber & Wilson (1986: 15) in defining context, not as an external, objectively (and exhaustively?) specifiable phenomenon (as is done by Hymes 1972: 58ff, for instance), but as a cognitive phenomenon, namely a subset of the assumptions that participants in a speech event have about the world. The relevant assumptions may change from one utterance to the next, partly as a result of being updated or changed by previous discourse, and partly by changes in what is perceived to be most salient about the situation in which the speech event takes place. Thus, in (10) (borrowed from Brown & Yule 1983: 202), the underlined it of the fourth clause, though anaphoric, should obviously not be identified with the “active, plump chicken” of the first clause, but must have its reference updated by the information provided by the intervening text. In (11) (borrowed from Blakemore 1988: 236), on the other hand, the potential for interpreting B’s utterance as a change of topic, rather than as a direct quote of what Susan said, will depend, among other things, on the location in which the speech event takes place, and on the paraphernalia – if any – that have been brought along by the participants: (10) (11)

Kill an active, plump chicken. Prepare it for the oven, cut it into four pieces and roast it with thyme for 1 hour. A. What did Susan say? B. You’ve dropped your purse.

On the picture argued for here, pragmatic meaning arises via inferential processes. Contra Sperber & Wilson (1986: 94), I will, however, assume that the type of process in question is of a non-demonstrative nature. 4 Thus, it is a defining feature of pragmatic meaning that it is defeasible. A consequence of this view is that certain types of meaning which, because they are non-truth-conditional, have traditionally been regarded as pragmatic in nature (e.g. Grice’s 1989a[1975] “conventional” implicatures), are redefined here as being semantic meanings due their non-inferential, coded nature. This will be discussed in greater depth in sect. 3 infra.

3

This is also the accepted view in Relevance Theory (cf. Blakemore 1987). It appears, at least at first blush, that pragmatic meanings may sometimes arise as the result of a deductive process. In (i) (borrowed from Carston 2002: 140), the intended interpretation ”B has invited a man to the function” is arrived at deductively via the implicit major premiss ”All fathers are men”, with B’s utterance constituting the minor premiss: (i) A. Have you invited any men to the function? B. I’ve invited my father. The question is, however, whether this interpretation is truly pragmatic in nature, in spite of its perceived indirectness. It is true that it can be explained as the result of applying Grice’s Quantity 1 and Relation maxims, and hence, as a conversational implicature. However, it differs sharply from ”normal” implicatures in not being defeasible. Even in the (pretty unlikely) event that B’s father is a transsexual or a hermaphrodite, the assumption that the fact of being a father does not semantically entail that s/he is, at some level, a man would make B’s utterance simply meaningless as a response to A’s question. 4

14 2.1

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface Content-level uses vs context-level uses of phasal adverbs

A closely related consequence of drawing the semantics / pragmatics distinction in terms of coding vs inference, rather than in terms of truth-conditionality vs non-truth-conditionality, is that a certain use (due to van Dijk 1979) of the adjectives “semantic” and “pragmatic”, which is common in the literature on adverbials and connectives, becomes infelicitous due to its potential for sowing confusion. I am referring to the usage whereby the use of the conjunction because is frequently called “semantic” in contexts like (12), and “pragmatic” in contexts like (15): (12) (13) (14) (15) (16)

(17)

Jo is applying for a job at Cambridge because she’s unhappy at the Sorbonne. Jo is not applying for a job at Cambridge because she’s unhappy at the Sorbonne, but because her husband lives in England. Is Jo applying for at job at Cambridge because she’s unhappy at the Sorbonne? Jo is in love with Max, because she prepared camera-ready copy of his 500page monograph as a favor to him. #Jo is not in love with Max because she prepared camera-ready copy of his 500-page monograph as a favor to him, but because she bought him flowers for Valentine’s Day. #Is Jo in love with Max because she prepared camera-ready copy of his 500page monograph as a favor to him?

The justification for this terminology is, of course, that the causal connection between the main clause and the adverbial clause is truth-conditional in (12), as evidenced, for instance, by the fact that it can fall under the scope of negation or interrogation, as in (13)-(14). In (15), on the other hand, the connection is non-truth-conditional (more specifically, epistemic, cf. Sweetser 1990), given that the speaker is not presenting the fact that Jo prepared camera-ready copy of Max’s manuscript as the reason for her being in love with him, but rather as an argument for the conclusion (i.e. as a reason for believing) that she is in love with him. If anything, a realworld causal connection between these two states-of-affairs would most likely go in the opposite direction (i.e. Jo’s being in love with Max might be a reason for her being willing to prepare CRC for him). Hence, as the infelicity of (16)-(17) shows, an epistemic / argumentational connection like that in (15) cannot meaningfully become the focus of negation or interrogation. However, as far as I am concerned, there is no reason to consider the epistemic use of because in (15) as any less coded, i.e. any less “semantic”, than the truth-conditional use in (12). The epistemic meaning is not inferred on the basis of the truth-conditional meaning on every occasion where it is relevant, but is better seen as an established polysemy of connectives like because in several languages. For one thing, the epistemic interpretation is not defeasible in an utterance like (15), on pain of rendering the assertion meaningless, or at least quite bizarre (based on what experience teaches us about causes and effects in the realm of affection in general). Secondly, sentences containing truth-conditional and epistemic because-equivalents, respectively, have different syntactic and prosodic properties in a number of languages. Thus, in English (as in several other languages, including French), we normally find an intonational break between the main clause and the adverbial clause when because is epistemic. This is marked by the use of a comma in (15), as opposed to (12), which may perfectly naturally feature a single, unbroken

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface: A Conceptual Framework

15

intonation contour. Moreover, in languages like Danish or German (cf. Günthner 1996), where main and subordinate clauses have different word orders, the use of the equivalents of truthconditional because will result in subordinate-clause word order, whereas the use of epistemic because requires main-clause word order, cf. the Danish examples in (18)-(19): (18)

(19)

Vi kunne ingenting se fordi lyset ikke var tændt. ‘We couldn’t see anything because the lights weren’t on.’ → subordinate clause Neg-V word order in because-clause Anne var ikke kommet hjem endnu, fordi lyset var ikke tændt. ‘Anne hadn’t come home yet, because the lights weren’t on.’ → main clause V-Neg word order in because-clause

For these reasons, although many people would – by analogy – be happy to refer to the uses of the French phasal adverbs toujours and enfin in (21)-(20), for instance, as “semantic”, and to their uses in (23)-(22) as “pragmatic”, I will refer instead to the former type of uses as “content-level” uses, and to the latter type as “context-level” uses: (20)

(21) (22) (23)

Hier soir, Florence a dîné, elle a regardé un peu la télé, et enfin elle s’est couché. ‘Last night, Florence had dinner, watched a bit of TV, and finally went to bed.’ Paul habite toujours à Lille. ‘Paul still lives in Lille.’ Le film était bien – enfin, pas mal. ‘The movie was good – well, not bad, anyway.’ Téléphone-lui, toujours ! ‘Give him/her a call, anyway!’

An additional reason for this choice of terminology is that, while enfin in the content-level, properly phasal, use exemplified in (20) is truth-conditional in the strict sense of rendering the assertion untruthful if Florence went to bed before she started to watch TV, the phasal use of toujours exemplified in (21) affects the truth conditions of its host utterance only to the extent of weakly5 presupposing that Paul has lived in Lille for some time prior to the time of reference (or “topic time”, as I prefer to call it, cf. ch. 4 infra). This means that the utterance will not be false, but only misleading, if Paul is taking up residence in Lille on the very day the utterance is produced. As for the phasal use of déjà in (24) infra, it carries only a weak presupposition to the effect that the opposite state-of-affairs was actively seen by some relevant individual as at least possible (although not necessarily actual) prior to topic time, whereas other essential elements of its contribution to the meaning of the utterance as a whole have no truthconditional effects at all. Yet, intuitively, one feels that enfin, toujours, and déjà in (20), (21), and (24) have something in common semantically, and, moreover, that the difference between the two déjà’s in (24) and in (25) closely parallels that between the two uses of toujours exemplified in (21) and (23), for instance. (24) 5

Pierre a déjà déménagé à Lille.

A “weak” presupposition is defined, following Nølke (1983: 33) as one that is not necessarily shared by the interlocutor before the utterance is produced, but which the speaker has reason to assume will be accommodated (cf. Lewis 1979) by the hearer without further ado. A “strong” presupposition, on the other hand, is one that must already be shared by both speaker and hearer in order for the utterance to be felicitous. It is an empirical question whether natural-language items ever encode strong presuppositions.

16

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface

(25)

‘Pierre has already moved to Lille.’ Téléphone-lui, déjà ! ‘Just give him a call to start with (then we’ll see what happens after that)!’

What the content-level uses of enfin, toujours, and déjà seem to have in common, is that they bear saliently either on a state-of-affairs in some real or imagined world that is referred to in their host clause or on the relation between that state-of-affairs and other (real or imagined) states-of-affairs. Their context-level uses, on the other hand, primarily express speakers’ comments on the relations between described state-of-affairs and the discourse itself (including, but not limited to, the way it is represented linguistically) or the wider speech situation (including, but not limited to, the subjective attitudes to the state-of-affairs in question that may be entertained by either the speaker, the hearer or some relevant third party). The distinction between content-level and context-level uses of a given lexeme largely corresponds to the distinction drawn by Dik et al. (1990) (see Figure 2.1 infra, borrowed from Ramat & Ricca 1998: 192, who refine Dik et al.’s model), between adverbials that belong at the “representational” level of the clause and those that belong at the “interpersonal” level. There are two reasons, however, for preferring the terms content-level vs context-level: First, Dik et al.’s model is a syntactic one which is meant to account for the structure of clauses. As Figure 2.1 shows, connective adverbials, whose role is to link syntactically independent clauses at the text level, thus fall outside the model, i.e. they belong neither at the representational nor at the interpersonal level. They are, however, very naturally conceived of as context-level items. Secondly, context-level items that function below the level of the clause, like enfin in the metalinguistic corrective use exemplified in (26), may not be very obviously “interpersonal” in nature, at least not in any interesting sense of the word: (26)

Seulement trois, enfin, quatre personnes sont venus à la reunion. ‘Only three, well actually, four people came to the meeting.’

Dik et al. (1990) moreover formulate a set of heuristic tests for determining the content-level vs context-level status of any given item. These tests will be discussed in ch. 5 infra.

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface: A Conceptual Framework 17 [Figure 2.1: Classification of adverbs, according to Ramat & Ricca 1998: 192]

2.2

Instructional semantics

It was argued above that the semantics / pragmatics distinction is orthogonal to the distinction between elements of meaning that are truth-conditional vs elements of meaning that are nontruth-conditional. Thus, to the extent that it cannot be calculated by a hearer who is ignorant of the precise meaning of the connective, the notion of adversativity expressed by the use of but in (27) is a coded element of meaning, hence, on the present view, semantic. At the same time,

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however, most people would agree that it is not truth-conditional, given that (27) appears to have the same truth-value as (28) in all contexts:6 (27) (28)

Phil is ugly, but rich. Phil is ugly, and rich.

On the other hand, the default inference from the use of some to the meaning “some, but not all” is clearly defeasible in (29) (as shown by the complete naturalness of the alternative formulation in (30), as opposed to the infelicity of (31)). Hence, it must be classified as a pragmatic element of meaning. But note that this inferred meaning becomes truth-conditional if the discourse is continued as in (32)(cf. Levinson 2000: 219): (29) (30) (31) (32)

Some of my students understand GCI theory. Some of my students, indeed, most likely all of them, understand GCI theory. *Not all of my students, in fact, most likely all of them, understand GCI theory. Some of my students understand GCI theory. The rest will probably fail the course.

In an incremental model of utterance (and, a fortiori, discourse) processing, the basically defeasible nature of the “some, but not all” implicature at the time the first sentence of (32) is uttered, can, I think, be maintained nevertheless. What examples like (32) seem to suggest is that there is a limited window of opportunity (perhaps no more than one clause long in the default case) for both speakers and hearers to cancel or question unintended or unwarranted meanings in an interactionally neutral way, following which the context will be updated with the information thus conveyed. After this point, cancelation – although still possible – will be interactionally highly marked, because it will brand the preceding discourse as misleading, and it will therefore tend to be avoided for reasons of politeness (cf. Brown & Levinson 1987). The central point is then that there is no qualitative leap from (potentially) referential to nonreferential meanings when we move from the semantic to the pragmatic level. Indeed, the difference between (27) and (28) is non-referential in nature despite the fact that it relies on the coded meaning of the conjunctions. Conversely, the “not all” implicature conveyed by the use of some is referential in nature. Instead, the essential difference between semantic and pragmatic meanings lies in their respective degrees of “(un)avoidability” at the time the host clause is processed. Now, researchers within Relevance Theory, in particular, have argued that qualitative distinctions can, however, be drawn both among those meanings that are conceived of as semantic / coded in nature, and among those that are conceived of as pragmatic / inferential in nature. To start with the latter, Relevance Theorists, and other scholars of a radically contextualist persuasion, such as François Recanati (e.g. 2004), have argued that certain types of contextually inferred meanings are, in fact, part of “what is said” by speakers, and hence, effectively non-defeasible even when utterances are consider in isolation. I am referring to the kinds of inferred meanings that enter into what Relevance Theory calls the ”explicature” of an utterance, i.e. that uniquely and fully specified proposition which should, according to 6

See further discussion in sect. 3.2 infra.

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contextualists, be seen as the truth-conditionally relevant one expressed by the utterance in question in its specific context of occurrence (e.g. Carston 2002: ch. 2).7 Thus, for instance, it is argued that the “explicature” of an utterance like (33) does not simply consist in the proposition that is linguistically expressed, namely “It will – at some future point in time – take the speaker, the hearer(s) and / or one or more third persons an amount of time superior to zero to get to a certain, contextually specified location, which is different from the one they currently find themselves in at the time of utterance”. That proposition is, of course, trivially true and hence uninformative in and of itself, so the explicature will consist, rather, in the inferentially strengthened proposition ”It will – at some future point in time – take the speaker, the hearer(s) and / or one or more third persons longer to get to a certain, contextually specified location, which is different from the one they currently find themselves in at the time of utterance, than the hearer(s) may think”: (33)

It’ll take us some time to get there.

An attempt at complete deconstruction of the notion of explicature in this chapter would take us too far afield. Suffice it to say, first of all, that there is, in ordinary interaction, demonstrably no ban on utterances that cannot easily be expanded inferentially into fully and uniquely specified propositions. Thus, one would be hard pressed to precisely and exhaustively specify exactly what it is that boy scouts are supposed to be prepared for, according to (34), the famous motto of the boy scout movement:8 (34)

Be prepared!

Secondly, nor is there, as (35) shows, demonstrably any ban on uttering trivially true propositions that cannot easily be expanded into uniquely and fully specifiable, more informative ones: (35)

Boys will be boys.

And thirdly, Hansen (submitted) shows empirically that the types of inferential meanings that are claimed by Relevance Theory and by Recanati to be an unavoidable part of the interpretation of certain utterances, are, in fact, systematically defeasible in various types of contexts (forensic contexts being a salient example). Hence, they actually do fulfil the central criterion for being classified as pragmatic implicatures in terms of the definition offered in the present chapter. With respect to semantic / coded meanings, Relevance Theorists draw a distinction between “conceptual” and “procedural” meanings (cf. Blakemore 1987). As the name indicates, conceptual meanings are those that map onto concepts in hearers’ mental encyclopedias. Typical examples of such meanings would be the semantic content of concrete or abstract nouns like cat or virtue, of verbs like run or believe, or of adjectives like green or disagreeable.

7

As a matter of fact, it seems that it is mainly contextualists who (sometimes) insist that propositions must be uniquely and exhaustively specifiable in order to be used communicatively. Note that it will not do to say that boy scouts must be prepared for any conceivable event or phenomenon: on the contrary, upon a moment’s reflection, one has the very strong intuition that the motto could not be intended to comprise interpretations such as ”Be prepared for George Allen to concede the 2006 election to the Democrats”, to take just one example.

8

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Procedural meanings, on the other hand, provide instructions to hearers on how the conceptual meanings expressed in an utterance should be combined and processed. Typical examples of procedural meanings would be the semantic content of function words like auxiliaries, or of connectives such as but or after all, but also, for instance, the coded content of politeness markers such as the informal vs formal so-called “T / V-distinction” found in many languages in the subset of personal pronouns that may be used to refer to one’s addressee(s) (cf. Brown & Gilman 1972). A similar conception of linguistic meanings as processing instructions has been common in the French tradition deriving from both Ducrot (e.g. Ducrot et al. 1980: 12) and Culioli (e.g. 1990)9. The relevance-theoretical position in fact represents a retreat with respect to the French tradition, in as much as the latter sees not just some, but all, coded meanings as basically instructional. As will be seen in sect. 6 infra, such a conception of linguistic meaning can, in fact, be traced back at least to the end of the 19th century, in the work of the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce. It is, moreover, clearly compatible with the frame semantic approach, where the notion that at least some types of meaning can be viewed as instructions is mentioned in passing by Fillmore (1985: 234). The idea is that, seen from the angle of comprehension, word meanings and sentence meanings instruct hearers on how to build communicatively adequate mental representations of speakers’ meanings. Seen from the production angle, linguistic meanings can be viewed as ”traces” of the speaker’s cognitive activity in representing to herself mentally what she means to communicate (cf. Culioli 1990: 22). In some cases, it is fairly clear, even at an intuitive level, that an at least partially instructional view of linguistic meaning enables a better description than a purely conceptual view. Take the use of the quantifiers little and a little, as in the mini-exchanges in (36)-(37) (cf. Ducrot 1970): (36)

(37)

A. I’m not in the mood for cooking. Do you want to go to McDonald’s tonight? B. I have (a little / #little) money, so why not. A. I’m not in the mood for cooking. Do you want to go to McDonald’s tonight? B. I have (little / #a little) money, so I’d prefer not to.

We could choose to say that both these quantifiers, little and a little, map onto the concept of a small amount, the difference between them being that little is upwardly bounded, such that its truthful use in (37) is incompatible with a state-of-affairs in which the speaker is actually in possession of a large sum of money at the time of speaking. A little is not upwardly bounded in this way, but carries only a generalized conversational implicature to the effect that the total amount of money actually possessed by the speaker of (36) is not large. As shown by the contrast between (38) and (39), this appears to give us the truth conditions of the two quantifiers. (38) (39)

9

*I have little money – actually, if truth be told, quite a lot. I have a little money – actually, if truth be told, quite a lot.

Note that Culioli’s theory of enunciation was developed in a number of papers prior to the publication of the cited volume.

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21

The problem is that – assuming a context where it is part of the common ground that McDonald’s is a cheap restaurant – such a semantic description provides no explanation of why only one member of the pair is natural in each of the above exchanges. That fact, however, can be elegantly explained in an instructional framework. Backtracking a bit, processing instructions may have many different objectives. One (no doubt prominent) objective may be to make the hearer construct a mental representation allowing him to estimate the truth value of what is said, something that evidently includes a representation of objectively verifiable relations between states-of-affairs. A different, frequently additional (although, in many contexts, far from accessory), objective might be to instruct the hearer on how to represent the speaker’s understanding of the social relationship between the two. Had A formulated her question in (36)-(37) in French, for instance, she would have had to choose between two 2nd person pronouns, an informal tu and a formal vous, when referring to the addressee, and consequently, also between a singular and a plural form of the finite verb. Her choice might, but need not, also have consequences for the choice of other linguistic forms found in the same sentence, e.g. the choice between a full vs a colloquially abbreviated form of the name McDonald’s, cf. the different possible translations in (40)-(41) (40) (41)

T’as envie d’aller au McDo ce soir ? Vous avez envie d’aller au McDonald’s ce soir ?

Yet another type of instruction is that which is expressed in the choice between little and a little in (36)-(37), namely an instruction on how to process the host clause as part of a (possibly implicit) argumentational sequence. That is, linguistic meanings may instruct the addressee on how to reconstruct the intended rhetorical relations between different parts of the discourse, between an utterance and some element of the context, or between an utterance and some inference that the speaker invites him to make. In both (36) and (37), the clause containing little / a little is presented as an argument for some conclusion. In (36), where only a little is felicitous, the intended conclusion is that expressed in the second clause, i.e. that the speaker is willing to go to a restaurant tonight, as opposed to eating at home. Due to the use of little, the first clause of (37), on the other hand, instructs the hearer to envisage the opposite conclusion. In other words, little and a little code inverse argumentational directions, as it were. They therefore belong to and evoke very different frames. Informally speaking, the quantifier little semantically instructs the hearer to process the content of a clause containing the phrase little N as having the same argumentational direction as a clause containing a similar phrase no N, while being rhetorically weaker than the latter type.10 Thus, for argumentational purposes, <no, little> form a scale of the type <strong item, weak item>, a scale which must be reconstructed by the hearer as part of correctly interpreting the utterance. Clearly, this is not an entailment scale (cf. Horn 1989: 231), as (42) does not entail, nor is it entailed by, (43), no matter whether “entailment” is understood in the strict logical sense, or in a weaker, pragmatic, sense (cf. Fauconnier 1975). Indeed, while rhetorically co-oriented, the two are logically incompatible: (42) (43)

I have little money. I have no money.

10 Witness the naturalness (on several levels…) of the exchange in (i): (i) A. So do you expect that your new position as editor of Studies in Scalar Semantics will make you wealthy? B. Hardly. I’ll probably earn little money from it – perhaps even no money at all.

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Nor is it an ad hoc, purely contextually constructed, scale (cf. Hirschberg 1991), such as the one which, due to the presence of even, must be reconstructed by any hearer of (44) (i.e. a scale like <studying Sanskrit, studying Ancient Greek, studying Latin>), for, unlike what is the case with an utterance like He’s even studied Sanskrit, which, taken in isolation, could invoke any number of different scales constrained only by the stipulation (coded by even) that the notion of studying Sanskrit should appear at or near the top of them11, (42) appears to evoke the same scale on every occasion of its use. The existence of the postulated rhetorical scale thus appears to be an indispensable part of the coded meaning of the quantifier little. (44)

Max is quite the Indo-Europeanist. He’s even studied Sanskrit.

A clause containing a little N, on the other hand, will have the same overall direction as, but be rhetorically weaker than, one containing much N. Note, however, that as Ducrot (1970: 26) points out, a little N also differs crucially from little N in that the <W, S> scale it forms together with much N is a logical entailment scale: thus, I have a little money is both logically compatible with, and entailed by, I have much money, but, as already observed, use of the former, weaker, expression carries a generalized conversational implicature to the effect that the speaker does not vouch for the truth of the stronger expression. Hence, given an identical context, and identical continuations of the discourse, only one member of the minimal pair little / a little can be used felicitously. Exactly what conclusion is aimed at by one or the other on a given occasion of use is, however, entirely a matter of contextual inference, i.e. of pragmatics (cf. Hansen 1998a: 18ff).12 Returning to the notion of semantic instructions, it may, in the case of other types of expressions, particularly those belonging to the major parts of speech, be less obvious why a conceptual account of their meaning is inadequate. Consider, however, a pair of adjectives like economical and stingy, which, like little and a little can be used to describe what is objectively speaking the same state-of-affairs in the world, but which, much like the two quantifiers, differ

11

Thus, in a context like (i), the relevant ad hoc scale might, for instance, be something like : (i) Max is a real yoga-freak. He’s even studied Sanskrit. 12 This seems to supports the view advocated by Anscombre & Ducrot (1983: ch. 3) where the logical properties of scales are not theoretically central, whereas their rhetorical properties are. These authors (1989) even deny that truth conditions should have any status within a theory of natural-language semantics. But even if one adheres – as I will do in this book, and as is done also by Harder (1996) and Nølke et al. (2004: 36) – to a less radical version of the instructional view of meaning, in which truth conditions may be seen as an important, but nevertheless derived, feature of communicated meanings, we may assume that a great many linguistic items (including not only lexical items, but also grammatical morphemes and constructions, such as the superlative, cf. Fauconnier 1975) have the property of instructing the hearer to understand the concepts marked by them as occupying a given rung on some scale. The essential property of all such scales is that they serve rhetorical purposes, such that items higher on the scale are rhetorically stronger, i.e. constitute stronger arguments for a contextually given conclusion, than items lower on the scale. Certain items, like even, which are not themselves part of a scale, will do no more than indicate the position of the rung in question, leaving the hearer to identify the relevant scale for himself, with the aid of co(n)text (cf. Kay 1990). The scales evoked by such items are themselves purely pragmatic, ad hoc ones, but the idea that a scale should be reconstructed, and that the item marked (for instance, Sanskrit in (44)) should be construed as occupying a specific rung on it, is a matter of the semantics of the marker used. Other items, like little and a little explicitely code the nature of the scale to be reconstructed, on which they themselves occupy a rung. Among these “coded”, i.e. properly semantic, scales, some (like that coded by little) will be purely rhetorical, while others (like that coded by a little) will – in addition to their rhetorical properties – be endowed with (quasi) logical, i.e. entailment, properties.

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface: A Conceptual Framework

23

in their positive vs negative evaluation of that state-of-affairs, thus being oriented towards very different sets of possible conclusions, as (45)-(46) show: (45) (46)

Severus is economical: he’ll make an excellent husband. Severus is stingy: he’ll make a horrible husband.

Thus, the use of economical in (45) semantically instructs the addressee to interpret the utterance as evoking a frame in which the urge to limit spending is conceived of as a positive quality in a person, and to identify some set of consequences potentially accruing from this quality which may be beneficial to the spouse of such a person. The parallel use of stingy in (46), on the other hand, evokes a very different frame, in which generosity is an absolute virtue, and instructs the hearer to identify a set of undesirable consequences of its absence. Even the meaning of a noun like coffee, which in and of itself appears to be argumentationally neutral, but which can be used to refer to at least five different types of things, as in (47)-(51) (cf. Hansen 1998c: 248; also Harder & Togeby 1993: 478) can usefully be described in instructional terms: (47) (48) (49) (50) (51)

They grow coffee in Nicaragua. (= the fruit of a particular type of shrub) We’re out of coffee. Could you buy a can on your way home from work? (= ground coffee beans) Coffee would keep me awake. (= hot beverage made from ground coffee beans) I’d like a two-scoop cone, please. Coffee and butter pecan. (= a flavor resembling that of a hot beverage made from ground coffee beans) This blouse comes in a variety of colors: coffee, burgundy, ivory. (= a dark brown color resembling that of ground coffee beans)

If the linguistic meaning of coffee maps directly onto a concept, then we seem to be faced with the following descriptive choice: Either we can posit the existence of one single concept which simultaneously evokes all these five types of referents in every one of the examples above. This seems counter-intuitive, as a person who utters (50) is not necessarily even thinking of fresh coffee beans still on the shrub, much less intending that the hearer represent those fresh beans in his mental discourse model. Alternatively, we can postulate that hearers have, in their mental lexica, five different concepts to choose from when interpreting the word coffee in the context of a whole sentence. In that case, the claim is that the lexeme coffee is polysemous. While I will argue in sect. 4 infra that many lexemes are, indeed, polysemous, I will also argue that distinct senses of one and the same lexeme ought not to be “multiplied beyond necessity”. In the case of coffee, the five different concepts involved in (47)-(51) intuitively seem so closely related to one another that one would prefer to describe them as different facets of what is ultimately the same type of referent. This would make the interpretative variety in (47)-(51) a matter not of coded semantic meaning, but rather of what Cruse (1986: 52) calls “contextual modulation”, i.e. a matter of pragmatic inference aimed at unifying the interpretation of coffee with that of the rest of the sentence in which it occurs. To account for this, it is useful to think of the word coffee not as directly denoting a concept, but as instructing the hearer to actively construct a co(n)textually appropriate concept of “coffee” based on a choice between the experiential frames with which coffee is associated in

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his mental encyclopedia. It will further instruct the hearer to enter the referent so chosen into his mental discourse model. Since not only language, but also other expressive means can be used to encourage fellow interactants to access their knowledge stores and to take into account when interpreting the communicator’s intended meaning something which they find there, the instructional view is – as pointed out by Hansen (1998c: 245) – in principle able to integrate the study of linguistic meaning with that of, for instance, paralinguistic, gestural, and proxemic features of communication. This appears to be a distinct advantage of the approach, in as much as grammatically incomplete utterances may sometimes rely, for their interpretation, on being complemented by signals from substantially different semiological systems (cf. Hansen 2000: 310f), witness the perfectly common attestation of multimodal messages of the type in (52): (52)

That guy Adrienne set me up with last night was just so totally [speaker sticks her tongue way out of her mouth and makes a gagging noise]!

To summarize the main point of the discussion, in the framework argued for here, all of semantics is, in the first instance, conceived of as instructional, despite the fact that the use of an important subtype of lexemes ultimately aims at giving hearers access to conceptual information. So far, I have discussed the instructional view of semantics only at the level of individual lexemes. On the assumption made in different versions of Construction Grammar that grammatical items and syntactic constructions, too, have meanings (cf. Goldberg 1995, Croft & Cruse 2004: ch. 9), they may be thought of as conveying processing instructions, as well, namely instructions on the order in which the instructions conveyed by individual lexemes should be carried out, and how the results should be integrated in order to arrive at a coherent interpretation of the clause or sentence as a whole. For instance, hearers’ choice of the correct type of referent for a given noun phrase is surely to some extent constrained by the syntactic role played by that noun phrase vis-à-vis other elements in the clause. Thus, as Goldberg (1995: ch. 2) has convincingly argued, it is the ditransitive construction, not the semantics of the main verb, that is responsible for the fact that in (53), but not in (54) (her (49)-(50)), Chicago must be interpreted as referring metonymically to certain people in Chicago, rather than to the geographical location: (53) (54)

Joe sent Chicago a letter. Joe sent a letter to Chicago.

To take a very simple example of an instructional account of grammatical meaning, Harder (1996: 214) argues that (55) has the semantic structure in (56), the latter conveying instructions of the type spelt out in (57): 13,14 13

Without doubt, this latter kind of representation can – and should – be considerably refined. It seems possible to do so at least in part by integrating the results of work carried out in the recent dynamic semantics “tradition” inaugurated by Heim (1982) and Kamp & Reyle (1993), a framework which – although it is, of course, grounded in a truth-conditional conception of semantics – seems nevertheless to be, in principle, compatible with a view of semantics as basically instructional. Thus, Heim (1982: 276) proposes as an initial formulation of the semantic difference between definite and indefinite NPs, the following rule: ”For every definite, start a new card [in your mental discourse file]; for every definite, update a suitable old card.” As for the closely related theory of Kamp & Reyle, Klaus von Heusinger (p.c.) confirms that nothing prevents an interpretation of DRT representations in instructional terms. Other formal linguists, e.g. Chomsky (1995: 19, 23ff), quite explicitly describe linguistic

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface: A Conceptual Framework

(55) (56) (57)

25

Did John go? interr(past(go(John))) Identify John and construct a mental model of him. Make the model instantiate the property ‘go’. Understand this model as applying to a certain past situation. Consider whether the model is true of that situation.

Unlike what was argued in Hansen (1998c: 244), I no longer believe that the instructional approach entails the radical position that coded meanings are not specifiable.15 On the contrary, I now believe it is indispensable to attempt to state, in terms as precise as possible, what is the range of possible coded meanings of individual linguistic items (be they lexemes, morphemes, or larger constructions), in order to explicate, and put constraints on, not only the ways in which these meanings may be unified in the context of whole utterances, but also how meanings may change over time. At the same time, however, the concept of meanings as instructional affords them greater synchronic and diachronic flexibility than a directly representational account does, for – as anyone who has tried to instruct other people to carry out some specific task will have noticed – even the seemingly most precise of instructions leave room for personal creativity. In other words, to paraphrase Ducrot et al. (1980: 33), a given set of instructions can, in practice, be carried out in a number of different ways, with slightly (sometimes even widely) different results. Specifically in respect of linguistic meaning, not only will the way a given instruction is carried out be constrained by what other – perhaps more specific, perhaps partially conflicting – instructions are or have been given in the same utterance or discourse, it will also be constrained by the larger context, including general principles of utterance interpretation, such as those expressed in Grice’s maxims (Grice 1989a[1975]), and finally, by the fact that no two people have exactly identical mental grammars (where grammar includes coded meanings), or identical knowledge and experience on which to draw in constructing concepts and identifying relevant frames with their specific details. The result of carrying out the set of semantic instructions given by an utterance will be a mental representation of what the hearer takes the speaker’s intended meaning to be. Speaker’s meaning being a pragmatic notion, the form that such representations take can only be constrained, and not actually fully determined, by the instructions provided by semantics. This is both synchronically and diachronically an advantage of the instructional approach, because it explains how language – though finite in nature – provides a means for conceptualizing and communicating novel experiences, as well as potentially infinite variations on previous experiences. In sect. 6 infra, and further in ch. 3, sect. 5, I will outline a Peircean approach to meaning which elegantly accounts for how synchronic variation and diachronic change in meaning are grounded in the instructional properties of linguistic items.

semantics as providing instructions to the conceptual-intentional systems of language users, and deny that the primary goal of such instructions is to determine truth conditions. 14 As Goldberg (1995: 13ff) points out, the notion that syntactic constructions have meanings that may coerce the interpretation of individual lexemes does not threaten semantic compositionality, except in an unrealistically strict sense. Indeed, unlike componential grammars, construction grammars provide a natural account of the fact that the majority of idiomatic expressions do, in fact, appear to be partially compositional (Cf. Nunberg et al. 1994; Croft & Cruse 2004: 249ff) 15 This assumption ultimately seems to imply that language has no semantics at all, but only a syntax and a pragmatics, a possibility that is, indeed, suggested by Chomsky (1995: 26).

26 2.3

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface Summary

In this section, I have argued that the boundary between semantics and pragmatics should not be drawn according to whether or not a given element of meaning contributes to the truth conditions of its host utterance, but rather in terms of whether or not that element of meaning can reasonably be argued to be coded in some linguistic item (be it a morpheme, a lexeme, or a syntactic construction) that is present in the utterance. Specifically with respect to the French phasal adverbs, I proposed that we distinguish broadly between their various coded – hence, on the present view, semantic – senses in terms of whether these senses were primarily operative at what I called the “content-level” or at the “context-level”. I argued further that linguistically coded meanings may usefully be conceived of quite generally as processing instructions given by the speaker to the addressee. Hence, propositional meanings, which have traditionally been regarded as central to semantic theory, are secondary, derived entities. This view allows us to give a unitary description of the meanings of linguistic items which researchers in the past few decades have been increasingly tempted to keep apart, namely, on the one hand, the meanings of those items – prominently content words like nouns and verbs – which contribute to the truth conditions of their host utterances, and, on the other hand, the meanings of those items whose principal roles appear to be played at other levels of utterance and discourse interpretation, e.g. non-truth-functional connectives, politeness markers, or certain syntactic constructions. First, so-called content words vs function words / constructions do not fall neatly into a class of purely conceptual meanings, on one side, and a class of purely procedural meanings, on the other. Frequently, one and the same item may contribute to utterance interpretation at several different levels. Secondly, as a rule, even seemingly “pure” content words occur within a variety of experiential frames, and the proper assignment of reference to such words in the content of a specific utterance will frequently depend on the hearer’s accessing the appropriate frame. The present definition of semantics and pragmatics necessitates a critical review of the types of meaning that have traditionally been regarded as pragmatic in nature, namely conventional implicature, conversational implicature (of the generalized and particularized variety), and presupposition. That will be the topic of the next section.

3 TYPES OF (ALLEGEDLY) PRAGMATIC MEANING In this section, I will examine three types of contributions to the situated interpretation of utterances that are commonly (although not invariably) classified as “pragmatic” in the literature, and to which I will need to make reference in my descriptions of the various senses of the French phasal adverbs (chs. 4, 6-7 infra). I will argue that only one of these types of meaning contribution, namely conversational implicature, actually is pragmatic, i.e. principally inferential, in nature. Given the approach to meaning argued for in this work, there is, on the other hand, good reason to consider both conventional implicatures and presuppositions as belonging to semantics.

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface: A Conceptual Framework 3.1

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Conversational implicature

Based on his theory of conversational cooperation, Grice (1989a[1975]: 37) distinguishes two kinds of conversational implicatures, namely generalized conversational implicatures (henceforth GCI), as exemplified in (58), and particularized conversational implicatures (henceforth PCI), as exemplified in (59): (58) (59)

If you mow the lawn, I’ll give you $10. (>> If and only if you mow the lawn will I give you $10.) [In a café at 10am] A. Do you want a croissant with your coffee? B. I had breakfast just an hour ago. (>> I do not want a croissant with my coffee.)

Conversational implicatures of either type arise as a result of the interaction of a specific utterance, its context of occurrence, and the Cooperative Principle, with its four attendant maxims: Cooperative Principle: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. Maxim of Quantity: 1. Make your contribution as informative as is required. 2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. Maxim of Quality: 1. Do not say what you believe to be false. 2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Maxim of Relation: Be relevant. Maxim of Manner: 1. Avoid obscurity of expression. 2. Avoid ambiguity. 3. Be brief. 4. Be orderly. (Grice 1989a[1975]: 26f) Conversational implicatures are thus defined by the fact that they are: 1) inferential in nature, 2) calculable on the assumption that the Cooperative Principle is being observed, 3) defeasible (i.e. they can and will be canceled if incompatible with prior or subsequent co(n)text), and 4) non-detachable (i.e. they cannot be canceled by replacing the utterance on the basis of which they are calculated by a different type of expression conveying truth-conditionally identical content).16 In (58), the GCI can be argued to be conveyed thanks to the interaction of the maxim of relation with the second submaxim of quantity: if reasons other than the hearer’s mowing the lawn obtain which might, in fact, likewise prompt the speaker to give the hearer ten dollars, then uttering (58) appears at least somewhat misleading.17 Nevertheless, the inference from

16

Note that the fourth property clearly does not hold true of Manner implicatures. (58), of course, also conveys the GCI that the speaker will give the hearer no more than ten dollars for mowing the lawn. Since the example is adduced for illustrative purposes only, I will not explicate the rise of that implicature here. 17

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“if” to “if and only if” is defeasible, as shown by the possibility of inserting (58) - without contradiction – in a context like (60): (60)

OK son, you say you need $10. Very well, if you mow the lawn, I’ll give you $10. Alternatively, you could chop some fire wood. And if you pester me long enough, I might just give it to you even if you do neither…

In (59), we may assume that the suggested PCI goes through due to interaction between the same two maxims: as Conversation Analysts have shown, a question constitutes the first part of an adjacency pair (Heritage 1984: 246). As such, it specifically projects an answer from the addressee. B’s utterance takes the form of a so-called “preferred utterance type” (Heritage 1984: 265ff), i.e. it is delivered promptly, with no preface or accounts, and there is thus no reason to assume that it is not meant precisely as a relevant answer to A’s question. We know from experience that there are limits to the amount of food that most people are capable of ingesting within a limited period of time, and so if the speaker has eaten only an hour ago, we may plausibly infer that she is not currently hungry. However, this inference, too, is defeasible, as the perfect felicity of the continuation in (61) demonstrates: (61)

[In a café at 10am] A. Do you want a croissant with your coffee? B. I had breakfast just an hour ago… But they do look good, so what the heck!

Thus, GCI and PCI are alike in being calculable via use of the Cooperative Principle and the maxims, but there is an essential difference between them, which may make it appear as if GCI were actually part of the coded meaning of utterances: whereas PCI require very specific kinds of context in order to go through (hence the term “particularized”), GCI rather require very specific kinds of context (including contexts like (60), where the speaker actively takes pains to cancel the implicature) in order to be defeated (hence the term “generalized”). That is, GCI are default meanings, which can be expected to go through in the overwhelming majority of contexts in which the linguistic item or structure they are attached to is used. In other words, the assumption is that, on most occasions, use of the conjunction if will implicate precisely the meaning “if and only if”. That meaning is thus, in the words of Geis & Zwicky (1971), an “invited inference” attached to the lexeme if. Use of the sentence I had breakfast just an hour ago, on the other hand, could implicate any number of different things (or, indeed, fail to implicate anything at all), depending on the specific context in which it is uttered. As observed in Hansen & Waltereit (2006: 256), there is good reason to think that there is another salient difference between GCI and PCI, namely a difference in cognitive status, which has so far been insufficiently appreciated in the literature: Because PCI have to be actively intended by speakers, and will only arise in very specific contexts, they will tend to constitute communicatively central messages. GCI, on the other hand, do not have to be actively intended in this way, but are merely subject to the constraint that they not be actively unintended by speakers who do not take the trouble to cancel them. This makes GCI prototypically backgrounded elements of meaning. Consider (58)-(59) again: the main message that a speaker of (58) is likely to want to communicate is the idea that mowing the lawn is sufficient to earn the hearer ten dollars. This is the arguably “literal” (i.e. linguistically coded) meaning of the utterance. The inferred meaning, that mowing the lawn is also a necessary prerequisite for getting the ten dollars, is intuitively far less central. Thus, B’s reply in (62) strikes one as rather odd. Continuing the

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exchange in (59) as in (63), on the other hand, is perfectly natural. In both cases, of course, the imagined reply addresses itself directly to the implicature, as opposed to the “literal” meaning of the previous utterance: (62)

(63)

A. If you mow the lawn, I’ll give you $10. B. ??Oh mom, you’re so unreasonable! I was going to suggest I chop some fire wood. [In a café at 10am] A. Do you want a croissant with your coffee? B. I had breakfast just an hour ago. A. OK, I’ll just order one for myself, then.

This difference in cognitive status may explain why, in Levinson’s (1995, 2000) systematization of the notion of GCI, it is assumed that no GCI can be based on the maxim of quality: that maxim has to do with what is true and false about the world, and such matters will typically be part of the communicative foreground. The idea that GCI are backgrounded inferences may appear to be undermined by the fact that, according to Levinson (2000: 105), use of the reduplicative structure in (64) conveys a mannerbased GCI, for, according to the continuation test, this presumed GCI should be a foregrounded element of meaning: (64)

A. I had dinner with Algernon last night, and it was unbelievable. The man just ate and ate! (>> Algernon ate more than one normally would.) B. Some day he’ll explode.

However, Hansen & Waltereit (2006: 261ff) argue that many of Levinson’s examples of manner-based GCI are, in fact, problematic, and that the alleged implicatures are better seen as part of the coded meaning of certain lexemes and constructions. This seems to be the case in (64), as evidenced by the difficulty of canceling the idea that Algernon’s ingestion of food took place on a grander-than-usual scale, cf. (65): (65)

?*Algernon ate and ate, but very little.

Indeed, the category of manner-based GCI may be problematic in and of itself (as is also observed by Traugott 2004, although for different reasons): thus, Hansen & Waltereit (2006: 263) suggest that even those manner-based GCI that clearly are inferential in nature (and which can be classified as backgrounded by the use of the continuation test) may never actually be pure GCI, but seem to invariably involve the generation of a PCI in order to enable a full understanding of the speaker’s meaning.

3.2

Conventional implicature

Grice (1989a[1975]: 25f) also posits a third kind of implicature, which is not based on the Cooperative Principle, namely what he calls conventional implicatures. A classic example of a conventional implicature is the adversative notion that inheres in the English conjunction but. As I argued in sect. 2.2 supra, that notion of adversativity is part of the coded meaning of the conjunction, only it is not truth-conditional, but being truth-conditionally similar to and. In other words, because they are not based on the Cooperative Principle, but on speakers’

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knowledge of the language, conventional implicatures are non-calculable, non-defeasible, and detachable. As a consequence of the way in which semantics has been defined in the preceding section, it is fairly clear that the traditional view of Grice’s conventional implicatures as pragmatic in nature (due to their being non-truth-conditional) cannot be upheld. If linguistically coded meanings ipso facto belong to semantics, then conventionally implicated meanings are as semantic as they come. Not surprisingly, other researchers have come to the same conclusion. Thus, for instance, Blakemore (1987) argues that her “procedural meanings” (cf. sect. 2.2 supra), which seem to all intents and purposes to be identical to the class of conventional implicatures, are precisely “semantic” (not pragmatic) “constraints on relevance”. Coming from the opposite direction, as it were, Bach (1999) argues that conventional implicatures are semantic in nature because, in his view, they do, in fact, affect the truthconditions of what is said, only they express secondary assertions, i.e. ones which, informally speaking, are backgrounded with respect to the main point of the utterance.18 As evidence for this view, he adduces the fact that but can occur in indirect quotations like (66). According to Bach (1999: 339), if Marv believes that agility is directly proportional to size in the normal case, and if he actually uttered (67), then (66) is an inaccurate report of what he said. On the other hand, if Marv actually formulated his utterance as in (68), meaning to convey the idea that size and agility are typically inversely proportional, then (69) would be an incomplete report of what he said: (66) (67) (68) (69)

Marv said that Shaq is huge but that he is agile. Marv: “Shaq is huge and he is agile.” Marv: “Shaq is huge but he is agile.” Marv said that Shaq is huge and that he’s agile.

Additionally, he adduces the minimal pair in (70)-(71), arguing that “[o]bviously, the conditions under which the contrast indicated by but obtains are different from those under which the consequence indicated by so obtains. So the presence of but or so affects the truth conditions of something.” (Bach 1999: 332) (70) (71)

John is a philosopher but he is rich. John is a philosopher so he is rich.

Although I readily concur that the speaker who utters (70) is committed to a different view of the world from that of the speaker who utters (71), there are, nevertheless, several problems with Bach’s argument. The indirect-speech test seems undermined by the fact that, as Cappelen & Lepore (1997) observe, pragmatically acceptable indirect reports commonly differ widely in both form and semantic content from the reported utterance. Indeed, indirect reports may well reproduce, not the actual semantic content of the reported speaker’s utterance, but rather something that is clearly a conversational implicature of that utterance, cf. (73) as a potential indirect report of (72) (from Cappelen & Lepore 1997: 285). Thus, indirect reports do not constitute a reliable test for the precise content of the reported speaker’s explicit truthconditional commitment at the moment of utterance (cf. also Jayez & Rossari 2004). 18 To that extent Bach’s approach is, of course, in accordance with Grice’s view of conventional implicatures as a type of secondary speech act (cf Grice 1989b: 122).

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[Professor H has just been asked whether Alice has passed her exam] “I didn’t fail any students.” Professor H said that Alice passed her exam.

Further, in a context where the belief that size and agility are usually directly proportional is attributed to Marv, (66) strikes me as perfectly felicitous if the reporting speaker’s aim is to convince a current interlocutor who manifestly holds a belief to the contrary that Shaq is potentially eligible for some task that absolutely requires agility on the part of the performer. Contrariwise, if Marv actually uttered (68), but it is the current interlocutor who believes that size and agility are directly proportional, then (69) is likely to be a more appropriate report than (66), in that context. As for the difference in meaning between (70) and (71), it has, in my view, little to do with truth conditions, but is rather a question of the rhetorical relations that are part of the frames evoked by different argumentational connectives such as but and so. I follow Ducrot (1980: 17) in believing that the most appropriate account of the meaning contribution of but (and its equivalents in other languages) is the one given in (74), where  (fishhook) translates as “is an argument for the conclusion”: (74)

p  r, q  ~r, (p but q)  ~r, and ◊(q = ~r)

In other words, a speaker who utters (70) presents the content of the first conjunct p, viz. the fact that John is a philosopher, as an argument for some contextually determined conclusion (perhaps “John’s income is not high”). However, she also presents the second conjunct q as an argument for the opposite conclusion, and instructs the hearer to understand q as the argument she regards as decisive in the context. Analogously, we may assume that a speaker uttering (71) presents the first clause p as a strong argument for the conclusion expressed in the second clause q. Now, clearly, a given state of affairs may well be presented as an argument for some conclusion without there being necessarily any factual relation between the two. Arguments may be valid or invalid, strong or weak, but – rhetorically speaking – anything that is presented as such is ipso facto an argument. In other words, “argumenthood” is strictly speaking independent of truth conditions. In support of this, notice that what is objectively the same state-of-affairs can be presented, by quite subtle linguistic means, as an argument for two opposite conclusions, as the following examples (adapted from Anscombre & Ducrot 1983: 80) show (cf. also (36)-(37), discussed in sect. 2.2 above): (75) (76)

It’s (almost / #not yet quite) dark. You should turn on your headlights. It’s (not yet quite / #almost) dark. You needn’t turn on your headlights.

In the frame-semantic approach advocated here, conventional implicatures can be seen as a subtype of extrathematic elements, their function being to evoke very abstract frames that take other frames as arguments.

32 3.3

Particles at the Semantics / Pragmatics Interface Presupposition

Finally, we come to presuppositions. Like GCI and conventional implicatures, presuppositions are tied to the use of specific lexicogrammatical means (for a list of the lexemes and constructions that are commonly accepted as presupposition triggers, see Levinson 1983: 181ff). For this reason, they, too, have been the object of a longstanding debate as to whether they are best classified as semantic or pragmatic in nature. For instance, recent work in formal semantics prefers to see presuppositions as a particular kind of entailment, and hence as semantic (e.g. Kadmon 2001: 136), while relevance theorists (e.g. Sperber & Wilson 1986: 202ff) have argued that presuppositions are not an independent phenomenon at all, but rather a type of backgrounded implicature, and that, as such, they belong to pragmatics. The crucial defining features of presuppositions, which render their status problematical, are well-known (e.g. Levinson 1983: ch. 4): On the one hand, they affect the ascription of a truth value to their host utterances, in as much as utterances whose presuppositions are not satisfied are usually taken either to be false or (perhaps more commonly) to have no truth-value at all. On the other hand, they are not ordinary entailments, given that they remain stable under negation and interrogation, cf. (78)-(79). Finally, presuppositions resemble conversational implicatures in being defeasible, that is, they are sensitive to co(n)textual features, cf. (80): (77)

(78) (79) (80)

[A fourth millennium historian writing a monograph about the 21st century] George W. Bush stepped down as President of the United States six weeks after World War III broke out. (>> World War III broke out.)19 George W. Bush did not step down as President of the United States six weeks after World War III broke out. (>> World War III broke out.) Did George W. Bush step down as President of the United States six weeks after World War III broke out? (>> World War III broke out.) George W. Bush did not step down as President of the United States six weeks after World War III broke out – there never was a World War III!

Frame semantics (cf. Fillmore 1985: 245ff) takes the view that presuppositions belong to semantics, since they require specific linguistic triggers in order to arise. Presuppositions are assumed to be backgrounded elements of meaning, as evidenced by the marked character of discourses in which the continuation of a presupposition-bearing utterance addresses itself to the presupposition rather than to the foregrounded message (cf. also Ducrot 1991[1972]: 81, Jayez & Rossari 2004). Thus, (81) is natural, but (82) is odd, as a continuation of (77). For a sentence with the war as subject to be felicitous in this context, it needs to take a form like that in (83), where the war is referred to by a full NP, marking it as a new topic (activated, but not yet in focus, cf. Gundel et al. 1993): (81) (82) (83)

He was killed a year later in an enemy air strike. ??It lasted three years. The war lasted three years.

In frame semantic terms, presuppositions are seen as obligatory elements of the frames evoked by certain lexicogrammatical triggers. The fact that they can be explicitly denied, as in (80) above, can be explained by assuming that speakers can choose to deny, not just items in a 19 All three examples, of course, also presuppose both that the proper name George W. Bush has a referent, and that George W. Bush had, for some period prior to topic time, been President of the United States. Those presuppositions are not at issue here.

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frame, but also the applicability of the frame itself. Other forms of presupposition cancelation, such as the fact that presuppositions of simplex clauses may not survive in certain types of complex clauses, can be explained in similar ways. For instance, the failure of (85) to “inherit” the presupposition of (84), is straightforwardly accounted for by the fact that the conjunction assuming is an extra-thematic element, which evokes a superordinate “hypothesis” frame; that is, use of assuming explicitly instructs the hearer to construct a hypothetical universe of discourse having the properties specified by the frames evoked by the rest of the conditional clause, and to process the contents of the main clause within that hypothetical frame. Hence, there is no reason why hearers would assume that the properties of the hypothetical universe necessarily also characterize the real world. (84) (85)

John’s children must be grown up by now. (>> John has children.) Assuming he does, in fact, have any children, John’s children must be grown up by now.

In other words, the intuition of formal semanticists like Kadmon (2001: 136), that presuppositions are not really defeasible in the same sense as conversational implicatures, is fundamentally correct: in the case of direct denial, as in (80), it is the frame as such that is deemed inappropriate. In cases like (85), the presupposition that John has children does hold – not in the real world, to be sure, but in the hypothetical discourse model set up by the antecedent clause.

3.4

Summary

In this section, I have discussed three types of meaning that are particularly relevant to the semantics / pragmatics interface. Indeed, the status of two of these types of meaning, namely conventional implicatures and presuppositions, has been controversial for some time. I defined conversational implicatures as the only ones of these elements of meaning which are truly pragmatic, and I further argued that they differ in cognitive status, GCI being backgrounded, while PCI are foregrounded. Conventional implicatures and presuppositions, on the other hand, were classified as semantic. Conventional implicatures can be equated with entire frames evoked by specific “extra-thematic” linguistic items, frames that are normally quite abstract and often of a rhetorical / argumentational type. As for presuppositions, they are best seen as obligatory, but backgrounded, elements of the frames evoked by certain lexemes and constructions. In chs. 6-7 infra, we will see that the various senses of phasal adverbs often differ precisely in the terms of the conversational and conventional implicatures and / or presuppositions they convey. It will also be argued, in those chapters, and in ch. 3, that the foreground / background distinction that has been made use of here is highly relevant to the rise of diachronic changes in the coded meaning of lexemes. This leads to the question of whether and how various coded “senses” of lexemes can be distinguished from contextually produced variations in interpretation.

4 THE PROBLEM OF POLYFUNCTIONALITY IN SEMANTIC / PRAGMATIC DESCRIPTION It is an oft-noted fact that lexemes and constructions which can function as what is commonly known as “pragmatic markers” (cf. Fraser 1996, Hansen 2006) prototypically have

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homophonous counterparts that are not so used, but which express meanings that might informally be described as more “literal”, in the sense that these meanings tend to concern aspects of the situation described by the host utterance, as opposed to aspects of the text itself or of the larger speech situation. The contrast between the uses of too in (86)-(87),20 or between the uses of well in (88)-(89), are cases in point: (86) (87) (88) (89)

Algernon went to Cecily’s party. Ernest went, too. A. Algernon didn’t go to Cecily’s party. – B. He did, too! I thought the meeting went well, didn’t you? A. How’d the meeting go? - B. Well, not badly…

As already noted, the four adverbs that are the focus of this study are highly polyfunctional in contemporary French. It will be shown in chs. 6-7 infra that, in all four cases, the various extant functions have developed gradually over periods of several hundred years, starting from a relatively “literal” source meaning, and following a path of increasing “pragmaticalization” (in a sense to be defined in chapter 3, sect. 2.2 infra). Such a state of affairs poses a challenge to descriptions not only of the synchronic meanings of the items in question, but also of the interaction between synchronic meanings and diachronic development.

4.1

Homonymy, monosemy, polysemy

When a given linguistic form acquires new content, its previously existing meaning may either disappear, or it may continue to exist alongside the new meaning. It would appear that the latter state of affairs, known as “layering” (Hopper 1991: 22f), is by far the most common (Traugott & Dasher 2002: 11f), and as such it raises the question of how the form-meaning association following an extension of meaning is represented in the lexicon. Essentially, there are three alternative ways of conceiving of the association of a single form with several different interpretations. The simplest is to assume that the apparent unicity of form is, in fact, deceptive, and that the different interpretations are associated with different lexemes that just happen to be homophonous / homographic. If, in a purely synchronic perspective, this option is frequently less than satisfying from an explanatory point of view, it is entirely unattractive in cases where meaning change is documented, because on the homonymy assumption, one would not be dealing with semasiological change at all, but rather with word formation, a possibility which is frequently ruled out by the contexts in which new meanings first appear. The second alternative, monosemy, is a different way of preserving the one-form-one-meaning hypothesis, namely by assuming that however many different readings tokens of a single linguistic form may have in context, these different readings can all be subsumed under a single content description, a Gesamtbedeutung (cf. Jakobson 1966[1936]). This is the option traditionally preferred by linguists of a more or less structuralist persuasion. Depending on the number and the nature of the available readings, such a monosemous content description may be highly abstract and schematic, and may rely very heavily on interaction with linguistic and/or situational context in order to yield a sufficiently specific interpretation.

20

For an analysis of this type of polysemy across several languages, see Schwenter & Waltereit (2005).

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In a purely synchronic account, the assumption of monosemy is an attractive option because of its elegant and descriptively parsimoneous nature. The main problem here is to ensure that the postulated meaning does not become so abstract and schematic that it ends up generating unacceptable readings of the form in question along with the attested ones (cf. König 1991: 175), and / or becomes unlikely to be learnable by immature language users. In a fully or partially diachronic account such as the present one, monosemy is, however, a good deal more problematic, in that it assumes, for every new reading attested, a qualitative change in the representation that language users have of the meaning of the linguistic item in question. Given that the conceptual reorganization needed to accommodate new readings into a unified semantic representation will often be fairly significant, it is unlikely that such reorganization should take place on a regular basis. Moreover, the monosemy approach completely obscures the step-by-step process by which meaning extension demonstrably takes place in diachrony. The third and final alternative, and the one which will be retained in this work, namely polysemy, is to assume that most linguistic forms actually do have more than one meaning, not only at the level of parole, but also at the level of langue, and that these meanings are related to one another in ways that can at least be motivated, if not fully predicted. Given that polysemy is to a large extent the result of diachronic sense extensions, we may assume that the range of possible synchronic relations between different senses of the same form overlaps with the range of mechanisms for semantic extension, such that senses in a synchronic meaning representation may be related by metonymy, metaphor, generalization, restriction, etc. (for a discussion of the principal mechanisms of semantic change, cf. ch. 3, sect. 3.2).21 The assumption of polysemy makes it possible to account for the diachronic process of meaning change as such, and it allows for generalizations about possible and likely paths of change. The approach to polysemy taken in this work is a cognitive-functional one, which can be situated within what Kleiber (1990: ch. IV) calls the “extended version” of prototype theory. This version is concerned with the explication, not just of referential categories, but also of linguistic ones (cf. Lakoff 1987: 57). The different senses of a given linguistic form are held to constitute a type of category which may be at least partially structured by family resemblances in the sense of Wittgenstein (1971[1958]: §66f), and not just by prototypical core-periphery relations in the strict sense. In this context, it is important to point out that the extended version of prototype theory has a significantly different focus as compared to the “standard” version (cf. Kleiber 1990; Koch 1996): in so far as it is of direct interest to lexical semantics (as opposed to cognitive psychology or anthropology), the standard approach is essentially onomasiological, i.e concerned with the elucidation of how cognitive categories are lexicalized, and of the principles that allow language users to refer to specific entities and notions as members of a 21

Note that this does not entail that if language users perceive two synchronic senses of a given item to be related by, say, metaphor, then metaphor must necessarily also have been the diachronic mechanism by which one sense gave rise to the other. Synchronic senses can often be construed as related in more than one way, as is evidenced, for instance, by scholarly debates over whether deontic and epistemic senses of modal verbs are related via metaphor or metonymy. Thus, according to Sweetser (1990: 60), the epistemic reading of Peter may go to the party, paraphrasable as “It is possible that Peter will go to the party”, would be related to the deontic reading, “Peter is allowed to go to the party”, by the transfer of a metaphor of absent barriers from the socio-physical domain to the cognitive domain. In the opinion of Bybee et al. (1994: 197f), however, the two readings are more likely to be related by metonymy, because hearers will commonly infer from the fact that someone is allowed to go to a party, that it is also possible that s/he will, indeed, go.

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given lexical category. Extended prototype semantics, on the other hand, reverses this direction of analysis, approaching matters from a semasiological angle. In other words, it is concerned with the principles that allow speakers to use a particular linguistic item to refer to cognitively different entities and notions. Moreover, as is strongly implied by both Kleiber (1990: 153ff) and Koch (1996: 232f), the term “prototype semantics” is actually inappropriate with respect to the extended, semasiological version, since it is frequently argued in analyses of linguistic items carried out within this framework, that linguistic categories are precisely not structured in terms of a single prototypical use, with which all other uses must have at least one trait in common, but rather – as mentioned above – in terms of family resemblances, where no one member of the category need in principle be more central than any other, and where two randomly chosen members need not have any common properties at all. Thus, despite its name, the extended version actually does not so much extend the standard version as it constitutes a substantial revision of it (Kleiber 1990: 149ff), one which in many ways represents a return to the central insights of pre-structuralist historical semantics (as also noted by Geeraerts 1997: 176ff, and by Traugott & Dasher 2002: ch. 2). However, given that the term “prototype semantics” is the established name for the approach, I will retain it in the remainder of this work, with the proviso that it be understood as referring to the extended version as laid out here. The extended prototype approach implies that, rather than adhering to the one-form-onemeaning principle, natural languages in fact have a tendency to enhance polysemy (Traugott & Dasher 2002: 123). This strikes me as an intuitively plausible assumption: the communicative needs of language users are continually evolving as those users adapt to new contexts and situations, and it seems far more economical for lexical items to be flexible enough to support gradual extension of their range of meaning than for users to be obliged to constantly innovate (and subsequently, remember) new expressions, which may differ only slightly in meaning from already existing ones.

4.2

Constraints on polysemy

However, one aspect of extended prototype theory which has frequently been criticized is precisely its tendency to multiply coded meanings of the linguistic items analyzed. In his study of the English preposition over, Lakoff (1987: 420ff) explicitly favors what he calls a “full specification interpretation” in the lexical representation of this preposition, with the result that two different senses of over are said to be in play in (90) and (91), because hill in (90) denotes an extended vertical landmark, whereas wall in (91) denotes a landmark, which – although likewise vertical – is not extended: (90) (91)

The plane flew over the hill. The bird flew over the wall.

While such a full-specification approach may be heuristically highly useful, as a procedure for revealing the usage potential of a given form, it has struck a number of people – even among cognitive linguists – as implausible as a hypothesis about speakers’ actual mental representations of word meanings (e.g. Vandeloise 1990; Tyler & Evans 2001). At the same time, it has been vigorously – and convincingly – argued in various quarters that language quite generally underspecifies meaning, leaving the derivation of a significant portion

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of the content communicated by utterances up to hearers’ inferential capacities (although the precise degree of underspecification and the manner in which the derivation of the communicated content takes place is subject to no little disagreement)(e.g. Garfinkel 1984[1967]; Fauconnier 1984; Sperber & Wilson 1986; Levinson 2000; Carston 2002, Recanati 2004). On the other hand, Sandra & Rice (1995) provide experimental evidence that speakers actually do discriminate fairly subtly, and on non-arbitrary grounds, among different senses of prepositions, while still perceiving relationships between the senses. What this suggests is that the polysemy approach is fundamentally on the right track, but that it may be useful to attempt to constrain the multiplication of independent senses in a principled way. In the present study, I will broadly adhere to Foolen’s (1993: 64) principle of “methodological minimalism”, whereby we should not “multiply senses beyond necessity”. How might this be achieved in practice? In the first instance, we have available a number of standard tests for discovering ambiguity (i.e. polysemy / homonymy) vs simple vagueness in lexical items. It is likely that the most ancient test is that proposed by Aristotle (Topica I.15), namely that one check if two different uses of the same word have one and the same term as their opposite, or rather two different terms. Thus, he says, the opposite of sharp is flat when we are speaking of musical notes, but dull if we are talking about knives. for instance, and from that we may infer that the word sharp is polysemous. As pointed out by Geeraerts (1993: 231), however, this test gives counter-intuitive results in at least some cases. Thus, the word fresh has rotten as an antonym if the entity it applies to is meat, but stale if the talk is about bread, and yet, most people would probably be reluctant to say that fresh had clearly different meanings in the phrases fresh meat and fresh bread. Another, more recently formulated, test is Quine’s (1960: 129) “differential truth-value test”, according to which a given lexeme is polysemous if it can be both true and false of the same referent at the same time. Otherwise, it is likely to be merely vague. This test allows us to analyze the verb run in (92) as polysemous between the senses “drip with” and “move rapidly on one’s legs”, but indicates that cousin in (93) might rather be vague with respect to the gender of the referent: (92) (93)

Victor’s nose is running [with snot], but it isn’t running [away]. ??Anne is Felix’s [female] cousin, but she isn’t his [male] cousin.

A third standard test is the “identity” test due to Lakoff (1970), whereby the coordination of two different readings of an ambiguous lexeme will result in zeugma, whereas vagueness in the lexeme tested will not affect the felicity of the coordination. When applied to run and cousin, respectively, this test gives the same results as the truth-value test: (94) (95)

??Victor’s nose is running, and so is Fred. Anne is Felix’s cousin, and so is Sebastian.

As shown by Geeraerts (1993) and Tuggy (1993), these tests resemble the negation/antonym test in not being as decisive as they may appear. For one thing, they may give conflicting results: as Tuggy (1993: 276) points out, (96) seems deliberately misleading if the speaker has been painting his house, while Jane has been painting a portrait in oil, indicating that the verb paint is ambiguous. However, (97) strikes me as self-contradictory:

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?I spent the weekend painting, and so did Jane. ??I spent the weekend painting [my house], but I didn’t spend it painting [portraits].

Secondly, the tests are subject to contextual manipulation; thus, (98) would indicate that the noun race is ambiguous, but when contextualized as in (99), the coordination of the two readings is perfectly acceptable: (98) (99)

??The Kentucky Derby is a race, and so are Caucasians. A. Daddy, what precisely is a race: a group of people with the same type of body, or a competition in which you try to be the fastest? – B. Well, darling, a competition in speed is a race, and so is a group of people with the same type of body. (from Geeraerts 1993: 245f)

A third problem is that different readings of a given lexical item may appear in such different contextual environments that it is difficult to think of test sentences that might be even potentially meaningful; hence, the tests may be largely inapplicable in such cases. The different readings of phasal adverbs are, in fact, good examples of this. In other words, the three tests in question may, at best, constitute useful heuristics for deciding whether two uses of the same lexeme actually instantiate separate senses or not.22 The fact that we do not have a single decisive criterion for polysemy suggests that it might be wise to work with a bundle of different criteria, no single one of which will be either necessary or sufficient, but which, when taken together, may point in one or the other direction. In previous work, I have varyingly applied a number of different heuristics, some synchronic, others diachronic, in the semantic / pragmatic analysis of the French phasal adverbs. Synchronically, different ways of negating different readings of the adverbs (or the possibility vs impossibility of negating them at all) is indicative of (although certainly not criterial for) polysemy. Substantially different logical and / or argumentational properties likewise suggest the existence of independent senses. Conversely, if a given reading can systematically be derived from another reading using salient features of the context together with pragmatic principles of general application, then this will argue in favor of subsuming both these readings under a single sense in langue. At the diachronic level, I will assume, as a working hypothesis, that if reading B appears in the data at a substantially later date that reading A, then A and B are separate senses. Conversely, if readings C and D appear to co-exist at any historical stage, and the interpretative difference

22

There is, in fact, a fourth criterion for polysemy / monosemy, also due to Aristotle (Posterior analytics II.13). This is a definitional criterion, according to which a word is ambiguous if its various uses cannot be brought under a single unified definition, and monosemous if they can. Riemer (2005: 150) argues that this is, in fact, the only truly useful test of the number of lexical meanings of any given item. I cannot agree with Riemer’s assessment, however. The heuristic value of the definitional criterion strikes me as limited, given that it is the result of the semantic analysis that is supposed to provide an answer to the question of whether or not a single semantic representation will suffice to cover all and only the existing uses of a given lexeme. Making the definitional criterion the input to semantic analysis would therefore ultimately be questionbegging, and, indeed, Aristotle himself does not present it as a test, but precisely as the result of the analytic process.

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between them can systematically be attributed to contextual factors, then C and D are likely to be different contextual modulations of one and the same sense.23 As argued in Hansen & Strudsholm (2008), contrastive synchronic analysis may also constitute a useful tool: thus, if two or more languages that are relatively closely related, genetically and areally, have corresponding lexical items which share one or more salient uses, then it is tempting to suppose that any uses of those same items that are not so shared must have the status of independent senses. Thus, for instance, detailed contrastive analysis reveals that the phasal uses of French déjà and the cognate Italian adverb già have essentially the same properties as the corresponding uses of English already, German schon, or Danish allerede. As a foreign-language learner and teacher, I cannot recall ever having had any trouble mastering, or getting my students to master, the phasal use of these adverbs in any of these languages. This suggests that the representation of that particular sense is likely to be similar for speakers of the languages in question. However, both déjà and già have another aspectual reading (described as the “iterative” reading in chapter 6 below) which has no parallel in any of the three Germanic languages mentioned, and which tends to be puzzling to learners when they first encounter it. Now, if the five adverbs are monosemous, their semantic representations in French and Italian must be substantially different from the ones they have in the three Germanic languages, an assumption which leaves unexplained the ease with which the phasal sense, but not the iterative sense, of the Romance adverbs is acquired.

4.3

The notion of “basic sense”

To sum up, the present study takes the stance that phasal adverbs are polysemous, and that they have a “basic sense”, or Grundbedeutung, which motivates subsequent extensions of meaning. The term Grundbedeutung, is, however, open to at least two distinct interpretations, a synchronic and a diachronic one. On the synchronic definition, the Grundbedeutung is that sense (if any) of a polysemous item which is cognitively most important, or salient, to language users, and to which they would presumably intuitively relate others senses of the same item.24

23

This having been said, two facts about diachronic data should, of course, be borne in mind: 1º The question of genre looms very large in diachronic research, given that certain types of meanings may be more or less likely to occur in certain types of texts (Jacobs & Jucker 1995: 6ff; Traugott & Dasher 2002: 45ff). Thus, to take a simple example, the phasal reading of déjà may occur in practically any type of text, but a clearly ”interpersonal” use such as that in (i) is unlikely to be found in, say, formal prose, and will rather turn up in drama texts, for instance. In other words, the genre parameter needs to be taken into account when drawing conclusions about monosemy vs polysemy based on the attestation of specific readings of lexical items in diachronic corpora, (i) Il est où, Pierre, déjà ? ’Where is Pierre, now?’ 2º Writing tends, as is well known, to be a good deal more conservative than speech. This means that certain readings of a given items may have been around in the spoken vernacular for quite some time before they were first attested in writing (Chafe 1985: 114; Jacobs & Jucker 1995: 6ff; Hansen 1998a: 100). When dealing with time depths of more than – at most – fifty years (i.e. before it became common to record spoken language data on tape), I see no way to control for this, other than by attempting, as far as possible, to include less formal, and more interactive, genres such as plays and personal correspondence in one’s data base. For further discussion, see ch. 5 below. 24 Such a “synchronically basic” sense may or may not also be that sense which is most frequently instantiated in actual language use. While far from being uninteresting or unimportant, the relative text frequencies of different senses of a given item are, however, likely to be subject to extralinguistic factors such as subject-matter, genre, register, and stylistic preferences, and they do in any case pertain squarely to the domain of parole, and can at best only indirectly affect langue, which with I am primarily concerned here.

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On the diachronic definition, on the other hand, the Grundbedeutung is rather the “original sense”, i.e. that sense of the item in question which can be reasonably assumed (whether by a study of extant source material or by internal semantic reconstruction [cf. Traugott 1986]) to have been diachronically prior, and to have given rise – in the history of the language – to more recently evolved senses. It goes without saying that “naïve” language users cannot be expected to be able to reliably identify the Grundbedeutung of a given item on this interpretation of the term. The two types of Grundbedeutung may, of course, happen to be coextensive in specific cases, but logically they are distinct. In actual fact, they may often be so as well, given that, even where a clear and uncontroversial diachronic path of semantic evolution exists for a given linguistic item, a more recently evolved sense may well have superseded its historical forebear as the sense which is perceived as synchronically central by speakers. In the present study, the term Grundbedeutung, or “basic” sense, will henceforth be used with the latter, diachronic meaning Thus, where nothing else is indicated, I refrain from taking a stance on exactly which senses of the adverbs under investigation may be synchronically more salient to speakers.

4.4

Summary

In this section, I have discussed the problem of polyfunctionality with respect to lexical items. I have argued that there is good reason to assume that lexical items may, and very often do, have a number of independently represented senses in langue, but that these senses will be linked to one another in motivated ways, such that the semantic representations of individual lexemes can be conceived of as networks of variously interconnected nodes. I have also proposed a set of heuristics for determining when a given use in parole does (or does not) correspond to a separate node of meaning in langue. It was noted that none of the proposed criteria could, in and of themself, settle the issue, but that, when taken together, they may provide a good indication. In the next section, I discuss a different type of relations between the meanings of lexical items, namely so-called “paradigmatic” relations, and the theoretical status (if any) that should be attributed to them.

5 THE PROBLEM OF PARADIGMATICITY IN LEXICAL SEMANTICS By choosing to refer to déjà, encore, toujours and enfin, as well as to ne…plus and ne…pas encore, as “phasal adverbs”, and treating them in a single monograph, I am, of course, suggesting that they have some salient semantic properties in common, and I have already sketched the nature of these properties in ch. 1. This naturally raises the question of whether these items can be conceived of as constituting a semantic field or paradigm, and if so, what precisely is the status of such a field or paradigm. The answer to these questions involves a further question about the nature of word meanings as such. In this section, I will discuss the notion of paradigmatic relations among lexical items in relatively general terms, paving the way for subsequent discussion of the paradigmaticity of phasal adverbs more specifically. The latter discussion will, however, be postponed until ch. 4, sect. 3 infra.

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Semantic fields and paradigmatic relations between lexical items

It is probably entirely uncontroversial that, in any given language, most – if not all – words can be grouped together with other words on the basis of certain meaning relations that are perceived to obtain among them. At the most basic level, such relations can be broadly divided into syntagmatic and paradigmatic ones. Thus, a prototypical syntagmatic meaning relation may be said to obtain between the verb gnash and the plural noun teeth, because they occur together in the phrase to gnash one’s teeth, where the content of the object noun is in a sense already contained in the verb, and therefore redundant, in so far as the only thing one can gnash is precisely one’s teeth. Paradigmatic relations, with which I will be centrally concerned in this section, can initially be subdivided into grammatical and lexical ones. The system of nominal cases in a language like Latin may serve as a textbook example of the former type: any given noun may appear in one of five (in certain instances, six) possible cases according to its grammatical role in the clause, as illustrated in (100): (100)

…nam simul te[acc.sg.], Lesbia[nom.(voc.)sg.], adspexi, nihil[nom.sg.] est super mi[dat.sg.] vocis[gen.sg.] in ore[abl.sg.],… (Catullus, Carmina 51, vv. 6-8) ‘…for as soon as I have noticed you, Lesbia, my voice disappears (lit.: nothing remains for me of voice in the mouth),…’

Paradigmatic relations of the lexical type, on the other hand, prototypically hold among items that may occupy the same grammatical slot. Four major kinds are traditionally recognized (cf. Lyons 1977: ch. 9; Cruse 1986), namely synonymy (cf. (101)), oppositeness / antonymy (cf. (102)), inclusion (cf. (103)), and meronymy (or part-whole relations)(cf. (104)), although these may be further subdivided in ways that are to some extent particular to individual researchers, just as additional relation types may be distinguished. (101) (102) (103) (104)

hide – conceal war – peace yellow – ochre house – roof

It is moreover frequently assumed that vocabulary items which stand in paradigmatic lexical relations to one another can often be grouped into larger semantic fields structured precisely by these same relations. A classic example of such a field is the set of color terms in various languages, which, although not identical from one language to the next, nevertheless have in common that they are related to one another by opposition (e.g. black – white), and, in cases of more highly developed systems, also by inclusion (e.g. (103)). While it seems fairly clear that grammatical paradigms must be linguistic in nature, and must to at least some extent be independent of the particular words that instantiate them in any given utterance, the status of lexical paradigms is a good deal more controversial: When we talk about “lexical paradigms”, should the term “lexical” be understood as “pertaining to, and represented in, the mental lexicon” or should it be understood simply as “involving words”? Are relations such as the ones mentioned above actually “lexical” in either of these two senses? And last, but not least, are lexical relations derivable from word meanings, or does the fact that individual words in a language are perceived as having meaning rather result from the

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networks of paradigmatic (and syntagmatic) relations they enter into? The answers to these three questions are largely interdependent. In the literature, two extreme positions can be discerned: atomism vs holism. In nuce, the atomist viewpoint is that words have inherent meanings that are essentially independent of the meanings of other words, and which can therefore be defined without taking into account any of the semantic relations the words might enter into. To a holist, on the other hand, words can have no meaning at all in isolation from the linguistic system of which they are a part, and the meaning of any given word can thus be determined only by means of a thorough examination of the structure of the semantic field that subsumes it (and ideally, of course, of the entire vocabulary of the language in question). As pointed out by Murphy (2003: 21) these should be seen as endpoints on a continuum, such that, currently, few – if any – researchers espouse the undiluted version of either. That, however, was not always the case. Thus, the European structuralist revolution in the first half of the 20th century represented in large measure a reaction to the perceived atomism of 19th-century historical linguistics, and Saussure (1972[1916]: 157) defines his notion of linguistic “value”, valeur, in opposition thereto: C’est une grande illusion de considérer un terme simplement comme l’union d’un certain son avec un certain concept. Le définir ainsi ce serait l’isoler du système dont il fait partie ; ce serait croire qu’on peut commencer par les termes et construire le système en en faisant la somme, alors qu’au contraire c’est du tout solidaire qu’il faut partir pour obtenir par analyse les éléments qu’il renferme. [emphasis mine] ‘It is a great illusion to consider a term simply as the union of a certain sound with a certain concept. To define it thus would be to isolate it from the system of which it is a part; it would be to think that one can begin with the terms and construct the system by adding them together, whereas, on the contrary, it is from the solidary whole that one must start in order to arrive, by analysis, at the elements it contains.’ While Saussure himself did not delve very deeply into questions of semantics, his notion of linguistic value has profoundly influenced the way in which the study of word meaning has been conceived by later scholars. The position that structural relations are primary, and that the meaning of individual lexemes must be derived therefrom, has probably been most forcefully defended by Trier (e.g. 1973[1931]), for whom the notion of “word meaning” simply had no theoretical status. To support his case, Trier (1973[1931]: 45) adduces – among others – a simple example like the grading system used in German schools in his day, claiming that one cannot grasp the content of a grade like mangelhaft (‘flawed’) at all unless one knows that it is the fourth of a descending scale of five possible grades, including sehr gut, gut, genügend, mangelhaft and ungenügend (‘very good, good, sufficient, flawed, insufficient’). Intuitively, however, the argument is unconvincing: while it is no doubt true that one needs to be familiar with the entire system of grades in order to fully appreciate the evaluation implied by mangelhaft (thus, for instance, the fact that the scale has five, rather than four or six, rungs will evidently be a factor in assigning a definite meaning to mangelhaft), it is nevertheless highly unlikely that anyone who knew what Trier calls the “etymology” of the word would interpret the note as evidence of praise for the student’s performance.25 25

As a counterexample, Volker Gast (p.c.) has pointed out to me that, in Germany, the Latin prepositional phrase cum laude (”with praise”), is actually the lowest possible grade that can be conferred on Ph.D.-thesis. I would, however, venture the guess that this may be due to its being a loan phrase from a dead language, which – although its literal meaning is presumably accessible to the relevant group of language users – is nevertheless likely to be

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Similarly unconvinced, Fillmore (1985: 229) argues that there is no reason to assume that the English word hypotenuse has a different meaning from its German cognate Hypothenuse, just because the German language possesses a contrasting item, Kathete, from the same semantic field, whereas English does not. Nor is it plausible that a German child who has learned the word Hypothenuse, but not the word Kathete, would have a different meaning for the former than those of his peers who know both words. Although Trier’s strong version of semantic field theory has subsequently been shown to be untenable (cf. Lyons 1977: 250ff), a weaker position continues to inform much research on lexical semantics up to the present. Thus, according to Lyons (1995: 77ff), the meaning of a word consists in a denotation and a sense, where “[t]he sense of an expression may be defined as the set, or network, of sense-relations that hold between it and other expressions of the same language” (1995: 80). Lyons moreover emphasizes that sense defined in this way is “a matter of interlexical and intralingual relations” and, as such, “wholly internal to the language system” (1995: 80). Hence, knowledge of sense relations among words must be part of language users’ specifically linguistic competence, and such knowledge must therefore be assumed to be explicitly represented in the mental lexicon. Currently, few people would probably deny that word meanings affect and constrain one another within a given language system. Thus, Clark (1992, 1993) has convincingly argued that in both acquisition and mature language use, speakers’ and hearers’ choices and interpretations of lexical items are guided, among others, by a pragmatic Principle of Contrast, according to which any two forms are presumed to contrast in meaning on some dimension (Clark 1992: 172). Clark (1993) demonstrates in some detail how children acquiring their mother tongue will gradually adjust their semantic representations of vocabulary items as they learn new words from the same semantic domain.26 Moreover, innovative expressions will in principle only be coined, and will – we may assume – a fortiori only take hold within the wider language community, if the same semantic content is not already covered by a competing conventional expression.27 Similarly, as has frequently been noted in the literature at least as far back as Bréal (1897: 30), potential synonyms will tend to be confined to different registers or dialects, without which one member of a potentially synonymous pair of words will instead be assigned a new, contrasting meaning (or, alternatively, disappear from the language). Indeed, Hansen (2005a) provides evidence that not only do the near-synonymous French phasal adverbs enfin and finalement mutually constrain one another’s synchronic use potential, but that they may also have influenced one another’s semantic / pragmatic evolution.

less than indissociably associated with positive meaning for native German speakers. In any case, the grade cum laude does express the fact that the thesis has passed, and as such, it may be seen as essentially positive in meaning. 26 It is probably safe to assume that the same is true of adult second-language learners and of adults learning new domain-specific (e.g. technical) vocabulary in their first language. 27 Degree adverbs like really, terribly, awfully,… may strike the reader as an obvious counter-example, since they appear to be continuously replaceable, and indeed replaced, by new coinages. However, this pattern is due to the expressive nature of degree adverbs, which is a central feature of their use: it is well-established that linguistic items serving expressive purposes generally undergo weakening as they become progressively more routinized. Once this weakening of their impact has been carried far enough, they are therefore likely to be superseded by new items, which, due to their very novelty, may better serve the original purpose. In other words, for a new ”synonym” to appear, some change must have taken place in the meaning of the older term.

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Finally, Lehrer (2002: 505) notes that a more or less conventionally established relation of semantic contrast between a pair of words in one of their senses is capable of carrying over to other, for instance metaphorical, contexts where only one member of the pair possesses an established sense. Thus, she argues that, in an example like (105), it is the conventional opposition between the concrete “temperature” senses of hot : cold that allows the hearer/reader to interpret the nonce metaphorical use of cold to mean “legally acquired” (as opposed to the corresponding, but conventionalized, use of hot with the meaning “stolen”). (105)

He traded his hot car for a cold one.

Although Lehrer concludes from the possibility of using cold as in (105) that antonymy must be intralexically specified, none of the above actually entails that semantic contrasts among expressions must necessarily be represented in the lexicon as such. As a matter of fact, in Hansen (2002: 47), I suggested, in a discussion of certain extended uses of déjà, encore, and toujours, that it might be metalinguistic (or pragmatic), rather than specifically linguistic (or semantic), knowledge of the contrast between the phasal uses of these particles that was responsible for the perception of a related contrast in non-aspectual contexts (cf. also ch. 7 infra). Indeed, it seems intuitively plausible to assume that the underlying rationale for coining new expressions is, as Bybee (1988: 253) puts it, that “people want to say something over and above what the default case signals, not [that] they want to express a new contrast”, and that, in semantic description, the inherent semantic substance of expressions might ultimately take precedence over the relations they contract with other expressions. As argued by Harris (1987: 219ff), a fundamental problem with the Saussurean assumption that the value of any lexeme is uniquely determined by the position it occupies within a larger network of interrelations, is that it excludes the possibility of linguistic variation: if different speakers and hearers do not operate with exactly similar values for the signs they use in communication, then we must infer that they are operating with dissimilar relational networks, and the entire notion of a supra-individual langue as constituted by the interrelated sum of those very networks becomes vacuous. Frame semantics offers an attractive solution combining the more important insights of the holist view with the idea that words do have at least some inherent meaning, independently of their paradigmatic alternatives. As we saw in sect. 1 supra, within frame semantics, the use of any lexical item is seen as evoking a structured set of background assumptions about particular domains of experience that speaker and hearer are presumed to share. We grasp the meaning of a word through our knowledge of the frame to which the word belongs. In a great many cases, groups of words will evoke one and the same frame, denoting various facets of that frame as well as their interrelations. Thus, although some frames (such as grading system frames, cf. supra) may most relevantly be described as created by language, rather than reflected by it, perceived semantic relations among words are prototypically grounded in conceptual knowledge about the world, and not in intra-lingual structures. At times, new coinages may appear whose meaning emerges from an explicit contrast with existing lexical items: for instance, when first introduced into the language, a name such as analog watch for what used to be simply a watch will only be meaningful if interpreted against the backdrop of the term digital watch. Importantly, however, the new lexical contrast does not create, but is rather motivated by, an antecedently

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perceived difference between two real-world phenomena belonging to the same experiential frame. To put it bluntly, there is typically little point in naming a category that does not contrast with anything; but this is fundamentally a matter of conceptual, and not of linguistic, knowledge. The fact that the introduction of new words to describe previously unnamed facets of a given frame may well result in at least some reorganization of the semantic content of existing neighboring words28 – a classic example being Trier’s (1973[1931]: 55ff) analysis of diachronic changes in medieval German words for different kinds of knowledge – can be explained by linguistic economy. The more clearly lexical items are differentiated, the fewer individual items will be needed to cover the same field of experience. In a recent monograph, Murphy (2003) presents a strong case for what she calls a “metalexical” treatment of semantic relations among words. On her view, awareness of such relations at best29 constitutes conceptual knowledge about words, as opposed to specifically linguistic knowledge of words. She convincingly shows that judgments of synonymy, opposition, inclusion etc. are highly context dependent, and argues that they are predictable by means of a pragmatic principle dubbed the Relation-by-Contrast Principle. This principle very simply states that lexical items are perceived as related if they are minimally different in contextually appropriate ways. In the case of synonymy, this minimal difference will involve linguistic form, in the case of other relation types, it will by default involve content properties, for instance polarity or level of categorization. Further, since the required difference is specified as a “contextually appropriate” one, there is in principle no requirement that any lexical item be perceived as related to the same set of paradigmatic alternatives in different contexts. Thus, for instance, one context may privilege sad as an appropriate antonym of happy, while a different context might rather evoke angry. Nevertheless, in the case of antonyms in particular, speakers may – in the absence of a context, and due to their frequent co-occurrence – recognize certain binary pairings (e.g. happy : sad) as “canonical”. Murphy’s treatment has several advantages: For one thing, it is simple and encompasses a wide range of data. Secondly, it is compatible with the frame semantic approach advocated above, in that it defines the knowledge of semantic relations as a subtype of encyclopedic knowledge, which may in some cases involve only concepts, and in others a combination of word forms and their associated concepts. Moreover, like frame semantics, but unlike holist approaches to word meaning, Murphy’s metalexical treatment provides for the possibility that language users may function adequately with a vocabulary in which some lexical items do not contract any very obvious relations with other lexical items, either because no synonymous or contrasting terms exist, or because a given language user possesses an (as yet only) imperfect knowledge of the target idiom. Thirdly, by not listing semantic relations in the lexicon, Murphy’s model accommodates the observable open-endedness and context dependence of word senses. No matter whether senses or relations are seen as primary, any theory that requires semantic relations to be listed in the lexicon will have to countenance the potential explosion of the latter unless senses are defined as fixed once and for all, because for any potential new sense, there is an equal potential for

28

A fact of which even pre-structuralist semanticists were aware, cf. Bréal (1897: 32). Murphy (2003: 216) argues that, while perceptions of synonymy and antonymy involve metalinguistic judgments, there is little evidence that other traditionally recognized relations such as hyponymy and meronymy actually involve knowledge about words at all, as opposed to knowledge about the concepts they denote. 29

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new semantic relations to be listed. The metalexical treatment is thus capable of dealing with both the synchronic and the diachronic dynamicity of word meanings.

5.2

Summary

In this section, I have critically discussed the notion of lexical-semantic paradigms. This is of importance to the study of phasal adverbs in as much as these items have – as we shall see in greater detail in ch. 4 infra – been described by some scholars as forming one or more perfect structuralist paradigms, where the sense of one item is essentially defined by the relations of opposition that it contracts with other items of the same paradigm. I have argued, contra this approach, that lexical “paradigms” are not semantic, but rather pragmatic in nature, that is, they are the object of metalinguistic knowledge about uses of words, not of linguistic knowledge of the senses of words. In that connection, I briefly discussed different approaches to lexical semantics and meaning relations in general, rejecting so-called “holist” approaches based on the Saussurean notion of linguistic valeur in favor of the cognitively and experientially based approaches found in Fillmore’s (1982, 1985) frame semantics and in Murphy’s (2003) metalexical treatment of semantic relations. Thus, although I would never deny the importance of keeping the systemic point of view in mind, I prefer to think of lexical items – including phasal adverbs – as having at least some inherent semantic content, which may or may not predispose them to enter into perceived (partial) relations with other lexical items. Such perceived relations will perhaps not infrequently give rise to default inferences which may over time crystalize into conventional elements of coded meaning, and may therefore lead to (partial) reorganization of the semantic field to which the items in question belong, but it is then the inherent meaning of the items, and not their interrelations, that are the prime movers in this process.

6

A PEIRCEAN APPROACH TO MEANING

The approach to (lexical) meaning that has been laid out in this chapter has the advantage of being dynamic at several levels. First, both the instructional approach to semantics and the notion of polysemy coupled with “methodological minimalism” are synchronically dynamic in that they allow for contextual modulation of the meaning of a given item. This is an important advantage of the approach, given that, as has been repeatedly pointed out by researchers in conversation analysis, the interpretation of any linguistic production is necessarily situated, and that no two actual situational contexts are exactly identical (e.g Schegloff 1978: 101, Heritage 1984: 283, 290). Lexical representations must be flexible enough to allow for this. Secondly, my approach is dynamic in another sense, too: namely to the extent that it allows for the conventionalization of new senses of morphemes and constructions based on frequently occurring contextual modulation of situated occurrences, these new senses being themselves subject to contextual modulation and subsequent conventionalization of the latter, such that the most recently created sense of a given item may in principle be quite far removed from the meaning of its ultimate diachronic origin. Here, polysemy stands in opposition to monosemy, which, although it allows for contextual modulation, is nevertheless an essentially static way of

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viewing meaning, capable only of comparing successive, but independent, synchronic stages of the language, in which the dynamic diachronic process of change as such can have no theoretical status (cf. Traugott & Dasher 2002: 11). In accordance with the above, it seems to me that the idea of the primacy of inherent word meanings over the perceived paradigmatic relations between lexemes, which I argued for in the preceding section, is better suited to accommodate the both synchronically and diachronically dynamic interplay between contexts of occurrence and interpretations of the meaning contribution of individual words to the meaning of utterances than is the essentially negatively defined structuralist concept of valeur. In a broader perspective, the present approach also points to a conception of the linguistic sign which is different from the binary one which is commonly accepted, and which – like the concept of valeur – is due to Saussure (1972[1916]). It seems to call, instead, for a triadic conception of the sign, such as is found in the works of the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1931-35, 1958), and which crucially defines signs as vehicles of actual communication, thereby incorporating the notion of situated interpretation into the sign function itself. Structuralist semiology, as is well known, posits an essentially static sign function consisting of two solidary parts, a “signifier” (signifiant) and a “signified” (signifié) (cf. Saussure 1972[1916]: 99). In opposition to this, Peircean semiotics operates with a pragmatic and dialogal sign relation holding between three entities, a “representamen” (i.e. an expression, or vehicle), an “object” (i.e. that which is represented), and an “interpretant” (i.e. an interpreting thought, or further, equivalent, sign, evoked in the mind of the comprehender by the original sign) (cf. CP2.22830).31 As Deledalle (1979: 66) points out, the ”object” is not necessarily a thing, nor even an event or a situation. Indeed, Peirce distinguishes two types of objects: 1° an ”Immediate Object”, which inheres in the sign itself, and which is described as a ”seme” (CP4.539), and 2° a ”Dynamic Object”, which exists outside the sign and determines it (CP4.536). The latter can never be expressed, but only indicated, by the sign (CP8.314). As such, it will not concern us further in this study. Importantly, the sign does not represent its object in all its aspects, but only with respect to a so-called “ground”, i.e. a particular frame of reference (CP2.228-229).32 This is illustrated in figure 2.2:

30 As is common in the literature on Peirce, ’CP’ refers to his Collected Papers, the number before the full stop refers to the relevant volume, and the number following the full stop refers to the paragraph cited. 31 I will only be concerned here with signs of a “symbolic” nature (i.e. signs where the relation between representamen and object is established in virtue of some convention, conceived of procedurally, as a habitual mode of action), and principally, of course, with linguistic signs. Peirce also operates with a variety of nonsymbolic (purely iconic or indexical) signs, whose meanings do not rely on convention. 32 It should be noted that the notion of ”ground” is controversial, and that Peircean scholars do not agree on how precisely it should be understood. My interpretation follows that of Hookway (1985: 123ff) and Dinesen (1991: 102).

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[Figure 2.2: The sign according to Peirce] Representamen

Δ

Ground Object

Interpretant

It should be noted that, for Peirce, signs can be of any size, from morphemes and words, through constructions, and up to entire utterances and texts. In the latter cases, one may, if need be, speak of “macro-signs”, to distinguish them from more elementary semiotic units. Lastly, and in line with the view of linguistic semantics presented in sect. 2.2 supra, for Peirce, the sign constitutes an action precept (CP2.330). The representamen (i.e. the specific linguistic form) may thus be seen as conveying a set of instructions (i.e. the object) which the hearer must carry out in order to grasp the intended meaning of the sign, while the interpretant can be understood as the result of the hearer’s having carried out these instructions, i.e. as a mental representation in the form of a new and more developed sign, which itself has the status of an action precept. This has two consequences: 1º Interpretation (or semeiosis) does not necessarily stop when the first interpretant has been produced – theoretically, it can continue indefinitely (CP1.339); 2º Given that any given instruction can, in principle, be carried out in a number of different ways (cf. Ducrot et al. 1980: 33 and sect. 2.2 above), the representamen does not determine a unique interpretant that is valid for all contexts – rather, it should be seen as offering a more or less restricted range of possible interpretations. The interpretant being itself subject to potential further interpretation, the correctness of the different possible interpretations of the sign is thus open to intersubjective evaluation. Consequently, Peirce operates with three types of interpretants (CP8.343): 1º An “immediate” interpretant, constituted by the conventionally established range of potential interpretations of the sign as such. This, in other words, is the level of “literal” meaning. 2º A “dynamic” interpretant, which is the effect actually produced by the sign on its recipient in a given context. In other words, the dynamic interpretant represents what is actually understood by the comprehender. This is not a matter of simple decoding, but of active construction of the intended meaning of the sign. According to Andersen (1984: 38), the dynamic interpretant is the result of an abductive process; hence, it has the status of a hypothesis. In other words, the situated comprehension of signs involves a form of inference which – contrary to deduction – is of an analog and merely potential nature, and which draws heavily on implicit knowledge (be it linguistic, contextual, or encyclopedic). This, then, is the level of context-dependent meaning. Given that hypotheses may, by definition, be modified or even rejected in the light of subsequent information, this brings us to the third, and last, type of interpretant, namely: 3º The “final” interpretant, which is the effect that would be produced by the sign in question on any recipient whose circumstances were such that he was able to grasp the full meaning of the sign. This final interpretant may only be reached through a process of intersubjective negotiation. Thus, the Peircean conception of the sign incorporates the notion that meanings

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are negotiated in interaction, and is thus compatible with the idea that not only speakers, but also hearers, play an active role in the creation of meaning. Corresponding to the first two types of interpretants, I suggest that we may posit two different types of “grounds”: Thus, at the level of the immediate interpretant, we may understand the ground as the linguistic code (or system). It should be noted that, on the present view, this code contains an encyclopedic, and in many cases non-referential, dimension, namely the interpretative frames that are evoked by signs “as such”. As argued above, many such frames will be essentially non-truth-conditional, but nevertheless fully conventional, in nature. More specifically with respect to the latter, I am thinking, not only of conventional implicatures such as the adversative element inherent in the connective but (cf. sect. 3.2 above), but also of the fact that a noun such as bachelor evokes a socio-cultural context which will normally exclude its felicitous use with respect to, say, a 16-year-old boy, the Pope, or a grown man living alone on a desert island (cf. Fillmore 1982). At the level of the dynamic interpretant, on the other hand, the ground represents the concrete context in which the sign is actualized in the dialog between linguistic code and situated use. This interpretation of the role of the ground, and of its relation to the semiotic triad is illustrated in figure 2.3: [Figure 2.3: Two levels of interpretants and grounds] Representamen 1 = the sign “as such”

Ground 1

Δ

= the linguistic system

Object 1

Interpretant 1 = immediate interpretant

Representamen 2 Ground 2

Δ

= specific context

Object 2

Interpretant 2 = dynamic interpretant

What figure 2.3 shows is that the (initial) dynamic interpretant is arrived at through a dialogic interplay between the sign and its context of appearance: On the one hand, the sign “as such” will convey a certain image of the context, by way of the conventional interpretative frames contained in what I call “ground 1” (and which we might perhaps call the “immediate” ground). On the other hand, the manner in which speaker and hearer conceive of the specific context in which the sign appears, and which forms the content of “ground 2” (by analogy, the “dynamic” ground), will influence the way in which the sign is comprehended. As a simple example of how the model works, consider a slightly more complicated version of the imaginary dialog already adduced as (59) in sect. 3.1 supra: (106)

[In a café at 10am] A. Do you want a croissant with your coffee? B. I’ve had breakfast. (>> implicature 1: B has had breakfast earlier on the day the utterance is produced.) (>> implicature 2: B does not want a croissant at the moment of speaking.)

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As indicated, this version of B’s utterance carries two implicatures. Its “literal” meaning, derived on the basis of what is linguistically coded in her utterance, is simply that “B has had breakfast at some pointing her life prior to the moment of utterance”. This proposition represents the immediate interpretant of her utterance. However, given the context, this is hardly sufficient to ensure current relevance, so based on this new sign and its interaction with the dynamic ground, the hearer will be invited to derive the first of the two implicatures in (106) as a dynamic interpretant. Now, this is where the idea of the unlimited nature of semeiosis becomes relevant, for in order to ensure full coherence with previous discourse, we need to derive a further, more developed dynamic interpretant from the new, third sign and its interaction with the dynamic ground, namely the second of the two implicatures in (106). The process as a whole is illustrated in Figure 2.4 infra. The “dynamic interpretant 2” in this figure probably represents the point at which the derivation of presumed speaker-intended meaning stops. Nothing, however, prevents the hearer from deriving a whole series of further inferences, which are not necessarily intended, nor assumed to be intended, by the speaker, such as “B is concerned about her calorie intake” > “B is someone who obsesses about her figure” > “B is vain and shallow” etc., on the basis of the dynamic interpretant 2. [Figure 2.4: A Peircean account of the interpretation of B’s utterance in (106)] Representamen 1 Immediate ground

Δ Object

Immediate interpretant = “literal” meaning

Representamen Dynamic ground

Δ Object

Dynamic interpretant 1 = implicature 1

Representamen

Δ

Dynamic ground Object

Dynamic interpretant 2 = implicature 2

This understanding of the semiotic process has implications not only for the synchronic interpretation of utterances, but for diachronic change as well. In the following chapter, which deals with the semantics/pragmatics interface in diachronic change, I propose a model of semantic change that incorporates the triadic sign function presented here.

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51

Summary

In this section, I have argued that a dynamic model of meaning, such as the one outlined in the present chapter, may profitably make use of the triadic Peircean conception of the linguistic sign, as a substitute for the traditionally accepted dyadic conception inherited from Saussurean structuralism. The advantage of the Peircean sign function for my purposes is that it incorporates a pragmatic dimension, and hence the seeds of synchronic variation and (emergent) polysemy, as an integral part of any given symbolic sign. In contrast, the Saussurean sign function is suited only for the study of langue as an abstract, relational system “où tout se tient” (Meillet 1964[1922]: ix; cf. also Saussure 1972[1916]: 124). Hence, language variation and polysemy remain essentially mysterious entities on that conception.

7 GENERAL SUMMARY The present chapter has outlined the approach to meaning that will be assumed in the remainder of this study. Some of the salient characteristics of that approach are the following: • The semantics/pragmatics distinction is drawn, not in terms of whether meanings are truth-conditional or not, but in terms of whether or not they are coded in specific linguistic items (including syntactic constructions). • All coded meanings are assumed to function, at the most basic level, as processing instructions to the hearer, directing him in his efforts to construct a mental representation of what the speaker means. • It is assumed that linguistic items frequently have more than one coded meaning, and that this is typically a result of diachronic extensions. This is to be expected, as linguistic signs are not dyadic, as in structuralist conceptions, but fundamentally triadic, incorporating the communicative dimension that is crucial in explaining variation and change. • Coded meanings are inherent in the signs that carry them, i.e. they do not, in the first instance, emerge as the result of those signs entering into networks of contrasting relations with other signs, as structuralist semantics would have it. In the following chapter, I will present a complementary approach to diachronic sense change.

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3 A FRAMEWORK FOR DESCRIBING THE DIACHRONIC EVOLUTION OF PHASAL ADVERBS

1 INTRODUCTION The descriptive aim of this study consists not only in the elucidation of the synchronic meanings and uses of the four French phasal adverbs déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin, but also in uncovering their diachronic semantic and pragmatic evolution. In the present chapter, I present the theoretical and methodological framework that I will be assuming in chapters 6-7 below, and discuss my position with respect to a number of questions that are currently salient in the study of meaning change. My point of departure being the specific set of forms mentioned, the exposition will be oriented towards semasiological issues, i.e. issues relating to changes in linguistic forms that are held (relatively) constant.1 The chapter is rounded off by an outline of how the semiotic model of meaning presented in chapter 2, sect. 6 above can be applied to semasiological change.

2 DIACHRONIC PROTOTYPE SEMANTICS In chapter 2, sect. 4 above, I argued for the usefulness of describing the synchronic semantics of lexical items partially in terms of the so-called extended prototype theory. In accordance with this, I will broadly adopt the framework of diachronic prototype semantics as presented in Geeraerts (1997) in accounting for the diachronic evolution of the French phasal adverbs.

1 Semasiological research, of course, allows for certain changes in form, such as phonological attrition, coalescence of neighboring words, loss of regular morphological alternation etc.

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Like synchronic prototype semantics (of both the standard and the extended kind) this framework takes its point of departure in the idea that linguistic categories are basically analog in nature, which implies the following four characteristics: 1. Degrees of typicality obtain between readings. 2. The internal semantic structure of a category consists in clustered and overlapping readings. (This applies both at the level of different senses of the same form, and within a single sense.) 3. Categories are blurred at the edges. 4. They cannot be defined by means of a single set of necessary and sufficient characteristics (Geeraerts 1997: 11). To each of these four characteristics, it is claimed, corresponds a specific implication for the structure of semantic change, viz.: 1. Changes in the meaning of a given item are likely to take the form of modulations on presumably more salient, and hence more stable, core cases. 2. Such changes will have the structure of a clustered set. Hence, new readings may originate in several older meanings at the same time. 3. Changes may be incidental and transient. 4. They will be encyclopedic in nature, such that even readings which do not constitute separate senses as such may nevertheless be structurally important (Geeraerts 1997: 23ff). As also discussed in chapter 2, sect. 4, a central assumption in prototype semantics is that lexical items tend to be polysemous. As is amply supported by both older and more recent work in historical semantics, lexemes do not typically start life as polysemous; rather, polysemy results, in the normal case, from stepwise extensions of the diachronically older, “basic” sense of an item. We have thus arrived at a point where some discussion of how such basic, or “original”, senses historically evolve into extended senses is in order. What kinds of processes may be at work? How do extensions take place, and why do they take place? These questions will be the subject of the remainder of this chapter.

3 THE EVOLUTION OF PHASAL ADVERBS: GRAMMATICALIZATION OR NOT? Among functionally oriented linguists, in particular, (e.g. Lehmann 1985, Heine et al. 1991, Hopper & Traugott 1993, Bybee et al. 1994), the past few decades have seen a wave of interest in language change in general, in particular in Meillet’s (1921) notion of grammaticalization, understood as the gradual, and (supposedly) largely unidirectional2, evolution of lexical items into grammatical items, or of grammatical items into more grammatical items.3 These two processes are sometimes referred to as, respectively, ”primary” and ”secondary” 2

A major issue in grammaticalization research of the past few decades has been precisely this so-called unidirectionality hypothesis, whereby the direction of grammaticalization spelled out in (1) is not reversible. If unidirectionality is posited as a matter of principle, it constitutes a very strong hypothesis, which is no doubt untenable, given that a large number of apparent counter-examples have been adduced in the literature (cf. Hopper & Traugott 1993: 126ff; Newmeyer 1998: 263ff; Campbell 2001). However, if ”degrammaticalization” is defined as the reverse of grammaticalization, i.e. as the gradual lexicalization of a grammatical form, then hardly any documented changes appear to fit the pattern (Brinton & Traugott 2005: 103f). If instantaneous changes are admitted as examples of degrammaticalization, a weaker form of the hypothesis, whereby unidirectionality would simply be a very strong statistical tendency, is perhaps more viable (cf. Heine et al. 1991: 4f). 3 Here I follow, not Meillet’s (1921: 131) definition of grammaticalization, which takes into account only the former type of process, but rather Kuryłowicz’s (1975[1965]: 52) by now almost canonical definition.

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grammaticalization (cf. Brinton & Traugott 2005: 77). In order to be meaningful, the notion of secondary grammaticalization, or of an already grammatical item becoming even more grammatical, of course presupposes an agreed-upon scale of ”grammatical-ness”. As noted by Newmeyer (1998: 227), for most people in the field, the scale in question looks as follows (going from less to more grammatical items): (1)

lexical categories > functional categories and pronominal elements > clitics > derivational affixes > inflectional affixes.

During approximately the same period, the study of so-called “pragmatic” markers (or, according to the terminology established in ch. 2, sect. 2, markers with context-level functions) of various kinds has soared. In so far as it is a quite generally made assumption that pragmatic markers derive ultimately from formally largely identical, but more “literal” expressions (cf. chapter 2, sect. 4 above), scholars have taken an interest in the possibility that pragmatic markers might represent instances of grammaticalization. This issue is highly relevant to the French phasal adverbs treated in this book, given that, as we have seen, they possess a range of uses in which they can be categorized as different types of pragmatic markers.

3.1

Parameters of grammaticalization

I will define grammaticalization as the rise of productive morphosyntactic structures out of lexemes and ad hoc constructions as used in discourse (e.g. Traugott & Heine 1991: 2f). Thus, when function words evolve out of content words, when independent words are reduced to clitics and morphemes, and when creatively used and largely compositional discourse constructions turn into fixed syntactic structures, the resulting items and constructions have been subject to grammaticalization. This definition is intended to be neutral with respect to the question whether grammaticalization is a distinct process of language change, such that the notion should be credited with explanatory value and afforded independent theoretical status, or whether it denotes simply a possible end result of the convergence of a number of independent changes (cf. the discussion in Harris & Campbell 1995: 20; Newmeyer 1998: ch. 5; Campbell 2001). Importantly, no item undergoing grammaticalization is compelled to travel the entire path from free lexeme to inflectional affix (cf. (1) above). Moreover, the status of any specific linguistic item as grammaticalized at any given synchronic stage of the language is a matter of degree. First, because full implementation of the new morphosyntactic potential of a grammaticalized item may lag behind the functional change in that item (Brinton & Traugott 2005: 26), and secondly, because it is likely that, in the early stages of change, the representations that different speakers have of the item will vary. At any given time, for any given language, a great many items will thus appear to have an intermediate status, seeming in some ways grammaticalized, and less so in other ways. Some such items will retain this intermediate status until they eventually become obsolete. In a seminal paper, Lehmann (1985) proposes a set of parameters that characterize grammaticalized items, and by which the degree of grammaticalization reached by a given individual item can be measured. Importantly, none of these parameters can, in and of itself, be considered criterial for classifying a given linguistic item as grammaticalized or not. When considered in conjunction, however, they constitute a useful diagnostic tool.

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Lehmann distinguishes three parameters, weight, cohesion, and variability, each of which has specific reflexes on the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic axis, respectively, and with each of which there is associated a specific type of gradual diachronic change (summarized in Table 3.1 below): [Table 3.1: Parameters of grammaticalization]

Paradigmatic axis

Syntagmatic axis

Weight Integrity Process: Attrition

Cohesion Paradigmaticity Process: Paradigmaticization

Scope Process: Condensation

Bondedness Process: Coalescence

Variability Paradigmatic variability Process: Obligatorification Syntagmatic variability Process: Fixation

I. Paradigmatic axis: a. Integrity. This concerns the “size” of the item in question, in terms of both phonological and semantic substance. A greater degree of phonological attrition and/or so-called semantic “bleaching” is thus said to correlate with more significant degrees of grammaticalization. The specific process leading to stronger grammaticalization is called “attrition” here. b. Paradigmaticity. This concerns the degree to which the item in question is integrated into a small, tightly constructed lexical or morphological paradigm. The greater the integration into such a paradigm, the greater the degree of grammaticalization. The associated diachronic process is called “paradigmaticization”. c. Paradigmatic variability. This has to do with whether, and to what extent, choice among members of the paradigm to which the item belongs is constrained by grammatical rule. The more constrained the choice, the more advanced is the process of grammaticalization. The associated change is one of “obligatorification” of the item involved. II. Syntagmatic axis: a. Scope. This has to do with the size and complexity of the constituents with which the item can combine. More grammaticalized items typically scope smaller, less complex constituents. Lehmann calls the shrinking of syntagmatic scope a process of “condensation”. b. Bondedness. This concerns the degree of independence of the sign vis-à-vis neighboring signs. The tighter the syntagmatic fusion, the more advanced is the grammaticalization of the item. The process of change involved is called “coalescence”. c. Syntagmatic variability. This last parameter has to do with the place that the item occupies in a syntagmatic string, and whether, and to what extent, that place is fixed by grammatical rule. The less freely the item can be shifted around in the string, the more grammaticalized it will be. The diachronic process, not surprisingly, is one of “fixation”. A standard example of grammaticalization in terms of these parameters would be the formation of the French future tense, which – as is well-known – developed out of a Vulgar Latin

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construction in which the lexical verb HABEO expressed obligation when used in association with an infinitive. In French, HABEO in this construction evolved into a mere tense inflection, expressing a neutral prediction about the future, cf. (2): (2)

cantareinf. habet3p.sg.pres.ind. (“s/he chantera3.p.sg.fut.ind. (“s/he will sing”)

is

obliged

to

sing”)

→

il/elle

From HABEO to the French future-tense inflection –ai etc., there is significant phonological attrition, and the deontic meaning component has been bleached out completely leaving only the notion of future relevance. The future-tense suffix is fully integrated into a morphological paradigm of tense suffixes, and its use is to a large extent constrained by syntactic rules. Whereas semi-auxiliary HABEO scopes the entire infinitival clause, the future-tense suffix scopes only the verb itself, and it has become completely bonded to the verb stem, with respect to which it appears in a fixed position. When we turn to pragmatic (or “context-level”) markers as a functional class, on the other hand, they do not, as pointed out by Waltereit (2002b: 1005) and by Eckardt (2003: 42), seem to fulfil Lehmann’s criteria to any noteworthy extent. It is true that many pragmatic markers exhibit some degree of phonological attrition (e.g. the temporal adverb enfin [ãf] > the repair marker ‘fin [f] / [fε], whose vowel is very frequently denasalized, cf. A.B. Hansen 1998: 187n) and/or result morphologically from coalescence of neighboring items (e.g. the prepositional phrase en fin > the adverb enfin), but this is far from true of all of the items and constructions classified as markers in the literature (e.g. and that sort of thing, cf. Aijmer 2002, ch. 64). The applicability of Lehmann’s remaining parameters to the case of pragmatic markers is even more problematical. First of all, markers appear, quite generally, to be characterized, not by scope decrease, but by scope increase and/or variability, as illustrated by the contrast between (3), where instead of functions as a complex preposition and has scope only over the following NP, and (4), where instead functions as a adversative discourse connective, having scope over the entire following clause (cf. Tabor & Traugott 1998): (3) (4)

Gwendolen ate an apple instead of the candy. Gwendolen didn’t want the candy. Instead, she ate an apple.

Further, although specific items may have a preferred slot, pragmatic markers frequently have great freedom of position within the host utterance, and are thus syntagmatically variable, cf (5)-(7): (5)

(6) (7)

4

A. non mais c’était une position encore une fois fondée sur des principes, je les ai rappelés tout à l’heure B. donc vous avez changé de principes (VS2: 18) ‘A. no but it was a position once again based on principles, I mentioned them a moment ago. B. so you’ve changed your principles’ vous avez donc changé de principes vous avez changé de principes donc

Markers like and that sort of thing may even, as Aijmer (2002: 224) points out, be formally variable. In this particular case, we find for instance and (all) that / this sort / kind / type of thing / stuff.

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They can, as a rule, be deleted or replaced by other markers without consequences for the grammaticality of the host, and paradigmatic variability is therefore high, cf. (5) vs (8)-(9): (8) (9)

[Ø] vous avez [Ø] changé de principes [Ø] alors / eh bien vous avez changé de principes ‘then/well, you’ve changed your principles’

Indeed, the notion that pragmatic markers form paradigms in any interesting sense of the word is, in my opinion, dubious, in as much as the meanings of markers which may appear in the same slot syntactically do not necessarily have anything much in common, and do not seem to emerge from contrasting relationships with a clearly circumscribed set of alternatives, cf. (4) and (10) (cf. Hansen 1998a: 68f): (10)

Gwendolen didn’t want the candy. However / So / You see / …, she ate an apple.

Finally, with respect to semantic integrity, it is widely recognized these days that the notion of “bleaching” is not useful when describing the semantic evolution of pragmatic markers. While it is undeniable that lexemes and constructions gradually lose concrete, truth-conditional content as they develop marker functions, these losses are offset by corresponding gains in “pragmatic” import, i.e. contextualizing potential, as Elizabeth Traugott was probably the first to point out (cf. Traugott 1989). Moreover, given that the present study defines semantic content as whatever meaning is coded in language, be it truth-conditional or not, as opposed to pragmatic meaning, which is inferred from the interaction between language use and context (cf. ch. 2), and given that I choose to approach the polyfunctionality of markers and their source items as a matter of actual polysemy, as opposed to mere contextual modulation of a single abstract Gesamtbedeutung (cf. chapter 2, sect. 4 supra), the notion of bleaching is hardly meaningful at all. Indeed, rather than markers being gradually emptied of semantic content in the course of their diachronic development from the source items, what takes place is simply a change in the nature of that content.

3.2

Pragmaticalization

The upshot of the preceding discussion is that the development of pragmatic markers in general, and of what I will call the various “context-level” uses of déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin in particular (see chapter 7 infra), is not a subtype of grammaticalization, but rather the result of only partially identical kinds of changes. In contrast to grammaticalized items, whose meaning prototypically relates to the (sub)propositional level of utterances, the meaning of contextualizing markers by definition relates their host utterances to the larger co- and context. Following Erman & Kotsinas (1993) and Dostie (2004), I will speak of this type of language change as “pragmaticalization”. The history of specific linguistic items may display evidence of both grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, either simultaneously or at different stages, but in principle the two processes are distinct. Thus, for instance, a few of what I will call the extended ”content-level” uses of the phasal adverbs may be analyzed as cases of grammaticalization. Yet other of these uses, on the other hand, do not seem to have arisen by processes of either grammaticalization or

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pragmaticalization in any meaningful sense of those terms. These will be treated simply as meaning extensions, with no concomitant change in either grammatical or content-level vs context-level status. 5 Contrary to grammaticalization, pragmaticalization is prototypically associated with a greater degree of syntactic freedom, and with an increase in the scope of the item concerned. It is not characterized by the “bleaching” of the semantic content of the source items, but rather by “pragmatic strengthening” (Traugott 1988) in various forms (see below). It is also characterized by the optionality of the items in question: pragmatic markers are, in an important sense, “outside” the grammar, given that they are typically not in construction with any other element of their host clause. Consequently, speakers are not structurally compelled to use pragmaticalized items (although, communicatively, they are likely to be more successful if they do). Like grammaticalization, pragmaticalization is typically associated with decategorialization of the source item. Thus, for instance, as Dostie (2004) shows, verb forms undergoing pragmaticalization (possibly, but not necessarily, as part of a parenthetical clause construction) will tend to lose morphological variability, and be restricted to appearing in a specific tense, aspect, mood, number and/or person, cf. the contrast between the standard imperative use of the verb tenir in (11) and the pragmaticalized form in (12). At the same time, they lose the valency properties of their source items (cf. (13)), and gain in positional variability within the host utterance (cf. (14)). In other words, they come to resemble adverbs in terms of both morphology and syntax:

(11) (12) (13) (14)

5

Tiens2.p.s. / Tenezpolite 2.p.pl. cette note un peu plus longtemps ! ‘Hold this note a bit longer!’ Tiens2p.sg. / *Tenezpolite 2.p.pl., vous chantezpolite 2.p.pl. bien ! ‘Ah [lit.: hold!], you sing well!’ Tiens (*ça), vous chantez bien ! Lit: ‘Hold (that), you sing well!’ Vous chantez bien, tiens ! ‘You sing well, I must say!’

The so-called ”modal” particles that are characteristic of the continental Germanic languages (cf. (i)) are very interesting in this respect, for they constitute a prominent, but typologically highly restricted, example of a set of linguistic items with clearly contextualizing functions, but which nevertheless appear to fulfil several of the central criteria for grammaticalization. (i) (Danish) Finn kommer jo / da / vel / vist / nok / nu / … i morgen. ’Finn is MP coming tomorrow’ In contrast to other types of pragmatic markers, modal particles constitute a formally definable class of very limited productivity; they form small, circumscribed paradigms, the members of which tend to be constrained to certain sentence types; they occupy a specific syntactic slot, and their semantic scope is fixed at the level of the proposition (cf. Hansen 1998a, ch. 3). Although both English and the Romance languages possess linguistic items and structures that fulfill largely similar functions (cf. Weydt 1969, Hansen 1998b, Waltereit 2001, 2002a), they do not possess an identifiable class of modal particles as such. The existence of such a class of particles in at least some languages appears to support the view (defended, among others, by Newmeyer 1998: ch. 5 and Campbell 2001) that grammaticalization (and, by extension, pragmaticalization) are not unique types of structural change, but that their results (increased grammatical status or increased contextualizing potential of an item) are focal points of a prototypical nature, upon which clusters of smaller, independent changes tend to converge.

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Further, similarly to grammaticalization, pragmaticalization is a matter of degree (in the sense defined in sect. 3.1). If the French imperative tiens as a pragmatic marker is constrained to appear in the 2nd person singular, the imperative of the verb dire, in contrast, remains morphologically variable when used as a marker, cf. (15):6 (15)

Dis2.p.sg. / Ditespolite 2.p.pl. donc, on est pressé ! (As said to a single addressee who has just jumped ahead of the speaker in a line) ‘Well, we are in a hurry, aren’t we?’

Finally, either process can happen more than once to the same source item, giving rise to separate grammaticalization/pragmaticalization chains. In such cases, we may speak of “polygrammaticalization” (cf. Craig 1991) and “polypragmaticalization” (cf. Dostie 2004: 33), respectively. A simple example of the latter (borrowed from Dostie 2004: 34) would be the French verb aller (‘to go’), different inflectional forms of which have given rise to the different pragmatic markers in (16)-(18). It will be seen in later chapters that all four French phasal adverbs have been subject to such polypragmaticalization. (16) (17) (18)

Allons1.p.pl.imperative donc ! Vous n’êtes pas sérieux ?! ‘Come on [lit.: let’s go then]! You’re not serious?!’ Ne pleure pas, allez2 p.pl. imperative, ce n’est pas si grave… ‘Don’t cry, now [lit.: go], it’s not that bad…’ Ça va3p.sg. pres. ind., je m’en occuperai. ‘It’s OK [lit.: it goes], I’ll take care of it.’

Since pragmaticalization is primarily a process that takes place at the level of lexical or constructional semantics, as opposed to the level of morphosyntax, the existence of polypragmaticalization provides an additional reason to prefer the extended version of prototype semantics, which allows for network-style relations of arbitrary complexity between the different senses of polysemous items.

3.3

The role of reinterpretation / reanalysis

A prerequisite of both grammaticalization and pragmaticalization is reinterpretation of the meaning contribution made by the linguistic item or construction that is undergoing change. Such reinterpretation also constitutes the very essence of a great many semantic changes that do not instantiate either of these processes, prominently metonymically-based changes (but excluding metaphorically-based ones). In much of the existing literature, semantic reinterpretation goes by the name of “reanalysis”. As I will use the terms, however, they are not equivalent. Rather, it seems more appropriate to regard semantic reanalysis as a subtype of semantic reinterpretation. To my knowledge, the term “reanalysis” was first used by Langacker (1977) and Timberlake (1977), to denote resegmentation of the underlying morphosyntactic representation of a given string which – at least initially – does not involve any changes in the surface manifestation of 6

Note, however, that while number variability remains possible in the case of dis / dites, it is not obligatory. The singular form dis (donc) can, in fact, be felicitously used in an utterance directed at a plurality of addressees (or at one addressee with whom the speaker is on formal terms). In other words, dis (donc) does appear to be in the process of losing its original part-of-speech affiliation.

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that string. As I will be using the term, it refers, rather, to a semantic phenomenon. To that extent, I follow the usage of, for instance, Detges & Waltereit (2002) and Eckardt (2003). Reinterpretation occurs when an innovative semantic representation of a given utterance or utterance-part(s) appears – for pragmatic reasons – to result in at least as plausible an interpretation of what the speaker means in a given speech situation as the conventionally established representation would. Reinterpretation thus takes place as a result of the “tension between literal meanings and understood meanings of utterances” (Eckardt 2003: 77), and it can be compared to solving a mathematical equation with one unknown element (Eckardt 2003: 12). As I prefer to use the terms, a reinterpretation is sometimes also a reanalysis, in the sense that the semantic representation constructed by the hearer is not only innovative in terms of its content, but is also structurally different from what would be the result of a conventional analysis. The distinction can be illustrated with the aid of the following examples: Detges & Waltereit (2002: 164), following Koch (1999: 145) adduce the metonymical extension of the Latin noun FOCUS from meaning “fireplace” to meaning “fire”, plausibly due to its use in ambiguous contexts like (19). Here, there is no structural difference between the original and the innovative representation, in so far as FOCUM plays the same semantic role (namely, that of “theme”) with the respect to the verb in both cases. This, then, would be a case of simple semantic reinterpretation of an element: (19)

Incendamus focum! ‘light up’1p.pl.pres.subj. – ‘fire(place)’masc.sg.acc. ‘Let’s light up the fireplace!’ > ‘Let’s light up the fire!’

Similarly, the difference in the meaning of encore in (20) and (21) would be a matter of simple reinterpretation (from phasal to “categorizing” adverb, cf. chs. 6-7 below), in as much as neither the syntactic role (sentence adverbial), the scope (the whole predication), nor the position (immediately after the finite verb) of encore has changed: (20) (21)

Alexis est encore là. ‘Alexis is still here.’ Un pingouin, c’est encore un oiseau. ‘A penguin is still a bird.’

On the other hand, Detges & Waltereit (2002: 152f) offer the example of the Spanish middle construction in (22), which has been reanalyzed as an impersonal SVO construction, as shown in (23). Here, we are dealing with reanalysis in the strict sense that I prefer, given that the semantic relation between the verb vender and its arguments, the noun cerveza and the reflexive se, has changed, resulting in structural resegmentation: (22)

(23)

Se vende cerveza en el patio. refl.pr.3.p.sg./pl. – V3p.sg.pres.ind. – N – prep. – def.det.masc.sg. – N ‘Beer is sold on the terrace.’/’Theygeneric sell beer on the terrace.’ [se vende] cervezatheme/grammatical subject > seagent/clitic subject [vende [cerveza]theme/grammatical object]

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Similarly, encore in (24) has not only been reinterpreted as a degree adverb (cf. ch. 6, sect.6.2), but has also undergone reanalysis, from sentence adjunct to phrasal adjunct, with a concomitant decrease in scope and change of syntactic position, such that it is, in this use, constrained to move with the adjective or adverb phrase that it specifies: (24)

Voilà un tableau encore plus beau que le premier ! ‘Here’s an even more beautiful painting than the first one!’

In other words, semantic reinterpretation of an element may or may not result in reanalysis of the underlying semantic structure of the string. Where the latter type of change is involved, it may ultimately lead to morphosyntactic changes that are perceptible in surface structure. Such changes will, according to Detges & Waltereit (2002), be the result of language users’ attempts to match identical functions with identical forms. It is thus the semantic representation that language users attribute to an item or construction at any given time that will pose constraints on its morphological form and syntactic behavior, not the other way around. It has been observed by a number of people (e.g. Diewald 2002, Heine 2002, Traugott & Dasher 2002: 35, Eckardt 2003: 9) that the possibility of reinterpretation normally relies on the existence of (ideally relatively frequent) types of context in which both the source meaning and the target meaning are possible interpretations of the utterance hosting the element that is reinterpreted.7 I will refer to such contexts as “bridging contexts”. In this, I take my point of departure in the model of the contexts of grammaticalization proposed by Heine (2002: 86), who identifies the following four contextual stages in the process of semasiological change: • Stage I: The expression appears only in contexts where it clearly has its source meaning. • Stage II: The expression starts to appear in bridging contexts, where, in addition to its source meaning, it allows an inference to an alternative interpretation, the “target” meaning. I differ from Heine, however, in assuming that this target meaning may, at this stage, remain backgrounded with respect to the source meaning (see further below). • Stage III: The expression is now found in “switch contexts”, where the new target interpretation is not only clearly the intended, and hence foregrounded, one, but is also incompatible with its source meaning. This stage thus corresponds to what, in sociolinguistic terms, has been called the “innovation” stage in language change (cf. Coseriu 1973[1957]: 78, Croft 2000: ch. 7, also Weinreich et al. 1968). • Stage IV: The target meaning is fully conventionalized. In between Stages III and IV, we thus find what has been called the “propagation” (cf. Croft 2000: ch. 7), “adoption” (Coseriu 1973[1957]: 78), or “actualization” (Timberlake 1977: 141, Harris & Campbell 1995: 77ff), stage of linguistic change, that is, the stage where the new meaning not only spreads to more and more users within the community, but also to more and

7 Certain, presumably mainly metaphorical, instances of semantic change are. however, not plausibly attributed to the existence of bridging contexts. Intuitively, for instance, the change in Latin MUSCULUS ”little mouse” > ”muscle” could hardly have come about as a result of its use in contexts where it was truly unclear whether the speaker was referring to a rodent or to a anatomical part. Nevertheless, such instances are probably in the minority.

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more contexts, as language users become aware of the full range of applicability consistent with the meaning in question (cf. also Weinreich et al. 1968). As briefly suggested above, the above account differs from Heine’s in so far as he requires that the target interpretation be the most plausibly intended one already at Stage II. Based on what I have found in my own data, I prefer to weaken that requirement, such that the alternative interpretation of the expression in question should simply be possible in addition to, and not necessarily in place of, its source meaning. So, where Heine posits the target interpretation as foregrounded in bridging contexts, my claim is that, while new, this interpretation is still backgrounded with respect to the source meaning, and only moves into the foreground when we reach Stage III. The reason is that bridging contexts are not, in and of themselves, evidence that reinterpretation has, in fact, taken place. Such contexts allow for innovative interpretations, which hearers may or may not bring to bear, let alone choose to subsequently exploit in their role as speakers. Evidence of actual reinterpretations is therefore found only when innovative meanings occur in contexts where the source meanings are highly implausible or even impossible. Such is the case in (21), for instance. Encore in that sentence cannot plausibly be interpreted as conveying its basic phasal sense, in which case the sentence as a whole would mean that penguins have been birds for a while, and continue to be so at the time of utterance, but may stop being birds at some point in the future (cf. ch. 6, sect. 4.2). Rather, (21) should be interpreted as a suggestion that penguins are a marginal kind of bird (see further ch. 7, sect. 2.2). Importantly, given this model of the contexts of change, not any arbitrary target meaning will be available as a result of reinterpretation. What the idea of bridging contexts implies is that whether a given item or construction will be subject to grammaticalization, to pragmaticalization, or to neither, might, to at least some extent, be predictable from its source meaning (cf. Visconti 2005, 2006), in as much as any changes will be motivated – and hence, constrained – by that source meaning. It also means that semantically similar items in different languages should, in principle, be subject to similar types of diachronic change (which is emphatically not to say that speakers of any and all languages will actually choose to exploit this potential). Phasal adverbs are, indeed, a good example of this, as they tend not only to be polysemous across languages, but also to feature similar types of meaning extensions. This is illustrated. among others, in Hansen & Strudsholm’s (2008) analysis of déjà and its Italian cognate già. I will return to this in my discussion of the notion of “persistence” in sect. 5 infra. A final issue to be mentioned is that of the gradualness vs abruptness of the changes resulting from reinterpretation / reanalysis. The so-called Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change (IITSC) formulated by Traugott & Dasher (2002) relies on the idea that, in the normal case, semantic change happens gradually. Inspired by Levinson (1995: 95, 2000: 263), these authors posit a diachronic cline of conventionalization of meaning extensions, as in (25), arguing that semantic changes start out as inferences that are closely tied to specific contexts (analogously to Grice’s [1989a(1975)] particularized conversational implicatures), become increasingly independent of such contexts, while still being defeasible (much like Grice’s generalized conversational implicatures), and end up being fully conventionalized, i.e. coded, and hence non-cancelable, elements of meaning:

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Particularized invited inference > generalized invited inference > coded meaning

However, as argued in Hansen & Waltereit (2006), this hypothesis is not tenable on either conceptual or empirical grounds (for further discussion, see sect. 4.1 below), and I will therefore follow Eckardt (2003: 49), who points out that …the speaker [at the stage where reinterpretation has occurred] is not uncertain about the nature of the new entry or has to develop the new entry “gradually” from the older one. The only uncertainty s/he experiences is of a sociological nature: Do other speakers actually possess and use this new entry, or not? While the speaker may be gradually more and more convinced that the new item is indeed part of the common language, they [sic] do not, according to this picture, gradually develop the meaning and grammar of the new entry. What does take place gradually is the extension of the reinterpreted item to more and more relevant contexts, as speakers realize the full potential of the new item. In this stage, known as the “actualization” stage (cf. Timberlake 1977, Harris & Campbell 1995: 77ff), multiple interpretations of the item are available, and language users can be expected to avail themselves of the different alternatives at different times, making it appear as if the process of reinterpretation itself were a gradual one.

3.4

Summary

In this section, I defined grammaticalization and pragmaticalization as distinct results of the convergence of different, but partially overlapping, processes of language change. I concluded that the evolution of pragmatic markers represented an instance of pragmaticalization, not of grammaticalization, in as much as it is characterized by features such as scope increase, syntagmatic and paradigmatic variability, and pragmatic strengthening, although it may also – like grammaticalization – be accompanied by phonological attrition, morphological coalescence, and decategorialization of the source item. I noted that, like grammaticalization, pragmaticalization is a matter of degree, and, moreover, that one and the same source item might give rise to two or more pragmaticalized items, in which case we may speak of “polypragmaticalization”. Finally, it was pointed out that reinterpretation of the semantic contribution of the source item was a prerequisite not only for pragmaticalization, but also for grammaticalization and any metonymically-based semantic change. In the next section, I will discuss three issues that are central to the study of semantic / pragmatic change from a semasiological point of view, namely paths, mechanisms, and motivations.

4 TRACING SEMASIOLOGICAL CHANGES When studying semantic / pragmatic change from a semasiological angle, it is first of all important to point out that no extension of the meaning of a given form necessarily results in semanticization. Diachronic semantics therefore needs to operate with two levels of change, namely on the one hand micro-dynamics, i.e. the short-term innovation of a new meaning within the context of a single speech event, and, on the other hand, macro-dynamics, i.e. the

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long-term propagation, by new speakers, of such innovations (e.g. Nerlich & Clarke 1992: 127; Traugott & Dasher 2002: 34f; Enfield 2003: 11). In principle, any meaning extension may stop short of ever reaching the macro-level, that is, it may remain a nonce formation (or at least an idiosyncratic feature of the innovating speaker’s language). Furthermore, at the macro-dynamic level, the conventionalization of a new meaning may in principle take two different forms: the extended meaning may either become entrenched as what Blank (1997: 119) calls a “discourse rule”, possibly operative only within a specific genre or tradition, and hence defeasible, or it may become fully semanticized as an independent sense of the item in question. An example of the former would be a rule of metonymic reference which appears to be in use among restaurant personnel, such that the name of a dish may stand for a patron who has ordered that dish (cf. Nunberg 1978: 22): (26)

The coq au vin has asked for some more bread.

In the context of (neo-)Gricean pragmatics, which takes up a central place in contemporary historical semantics / pragmatics due, in large part, to the work of Elizabeth Traugott, the distinction between nonce extension, discourse rule, and semanticization appears to a certain extent to overlap with the distinction between particularized implicature / invited inference (PCI / PIIN), generalized implicature / invited inference (GCI / GIIN), and coded content (including both truth-conditional content and conventional implicature), respectively. However, the parallelism between the GCI-level and that of discourse rules, in particular, is far from complete: thus, for instance, the “name of dish → patron” discourse rule mentioned above could not plausibly be a GCI, in as much as its applicability is entirely dependent on a very specific type of context, whereas a GCI will, in principle, go through by default whenever a given linguistic item or construction is used. Whatever the frequency of the discourse rule in question within the restaurant context, it must, in Gricean terms, constitute a PCI (the more so as, even within that type of context, the majority of mentions of names for dishes are surely not intended to designate patrons instead). It is important to keep this lack of a direct fit between the two distinctions in mind when discussing the so-called “transition” question, to which I turn presently. Whoever wishes to chart lasting changes at the macro-dynamic level, needs to address three central questions (cf. Traugott 2004: 548, also Weinreich et al. 1968): 1. The “transition” question: what is the path of change in each case? With respect to déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin, this addresses the question of which senses of each adverb are original (or “basic”) and which are derived, and how the various extensions of meaning are ordered with respect to one another. 2. The “actuation” question: what mechanisms of semantic / pragmatic change are involved in the extensions? 3. The “motivation” question: what probable motivation can we find for each of the extensions charted?

4.1

Transition

With respect to the transition question, the null hypothesis would be that the path of meaning change followed by any individual lexical item is essentially arbitrary and unpredictable, and, indeed, that appears to have been the accepted view throughout most of the history of modern linguistics (cf. Traugott & Dasher 2002: 60).

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It is true that, particularly in the latter half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th (before research into semantic change was made unfashionable by the advent of generative linguistics), several attempts were made to arrive at workable classifications of semantic change (e.g. Bréal 1897, Meillet 1975[1905-06], Nyrop 1913, Stern 1932, Darmesteter 1937, Ullmann 1957). However, these do not necessarily identify typical paths, but may rather consist in classifications of possible motivations for change (Meillet 1975[1905-06]), of possible mechanisms (Stern 1932, Ullmann 1957), or of several of these at a time (Bréal 1897, Nyrop 1913, Darmesteter 1937), and such paths as are identified may point in opposite directions (e.g. Bréal’s pejorative vs meliorative tendencies; or his generalization of sense vs restriction of sense), or they may be very restricted in scope (e.g. Stern’s [1932: 185ff] law concerning the evolution of English adverbs of the rapidly class). However, semantic change being – as we saw above – a prerequisite for grammaticalization, discussions of the nature of the changes involved (bleaching or not? subjectification or not? metaphorization vs metonymization?) have, in the past couple of decades, led to a renewed focus on meaning change more generally. Of particular theoretical importance is the question of whether it is possible to identify both universal and unidirectional tendencies of semantic change, independently of whether such changes are part of a process of grammaticalization or not. As briefly mentioned in the previous section, at the most abstract level, Levinson (1995: 95, 2000: 263) suggests the existence of a general diachronic sequence of meaning changes as in (27). Traugott & Dasher (2002: 38) revise this sequence as in (28), to constitute the centerpiece of their Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change (IITSC). Note that instead of PCI and GCI, these authors speak of (G)IIN, i.e. “(generalized) invited inferences”, where “invited inference” is basically an alternative name for “implicature”, although Traugott & Dasher emphasize the role of the interactive negotiation of meanings to a greater extent than Levinson does.8 Moreover, they explicitly restrict the domain of application of the sequence in (28) to metonymically-based changes (cf. infra). (27)

(28)

Utterance-token meaning (primarily PCI) > Utterance-type meaning (primarily GCI, but also, for instance, presuppositions) > Sentence meaning (including, but limited to, conventional implicature) IIN > GIIN > coded meaning (i.e. new polysemy)

The tenability of this hypothesis is, however (as argued in Hansen & Waltereit 2006), open to debate, on both theoretical and empirical grounds. What seems intuitively uncontroversial is that innovations must start out as particularized to a specific context of utterance. Whether or not they must necessarily go through the intermediate stage of generalization before becoming fully lexicalized is much less clear. First of all, there seems to be no principled reason why particularized inferences could not become semanticized straightaway. For instance, it seems unlikely that the Italian expression brava donna, literally translatable as “good / honest woman”, but which has subsequently acquired the additional meaning “prostitute” (cf. Blank 1997: 224), should have had the latter as its default interpretation across a range of contexts (this being the definition of a GCI as opposed to a PCI, cf. ch. 2, sect.3.1) before it eventually became lexicalized as a polysemy. 8

Invited inferences in the stricter sense first defined by Geis & Zwicky (1971) correspond quite closely to Grice’s (1989a[1975]) generalized conversational implicatures.

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Secondly, as we have just seen in sect. 4, there seem to be cases in which a given type of inference has been standardized as a discourse rule, while retaining the status of PCI, as opposed to GCI. Thirdly, specifically with respect to the sequence in (27), the assumption of a necessary intermediate stage would seem to preclude the eventual semanticization of PCI based on Grice’s (1989a[1975]) maxims of quality or relevance, given that Levinson (1995; 2000: 35ff) defines all GCI as based on inferential heuristics equivalent to Grice’s maxims of either quantity or manner. This essentially eliminates the possibility of semantic change based on metaphor, in as much as metaphor, on the Gricean view, relies on an ostensive flouting of the maxim of quality. This latter objection does not apply to (28) to the same extent, given that Traugott & Dasher’s (2002) GIIN constitute a more inclusive and more loosely defined category than Levinson’s GCI, a fact which, on the other hand, makes the postulated sequence of evolution less falsifiable. Finally, the account of GCI in ch. 2, sect. 3.1 above, as well as in Hansen & Waltereit (2006) gives reason to think that, in those cases where a former GCI does seem to have been lexicalized, that GCI used to constitute a backgrounded inference. Consequently, it must first have been foregrounded through a PCI in order to accede to the status of a new polysemy (see also below for an account of the role of foreground and background in metonymic change). For these reasons, this particular macro-path will not be retained as a working hypothesis in the present study. At a more concrete level, major contributions in the area of predicting macro-paths of semantic change have been made, among others, by Heine et al. (1991: 48ff), who put forward the hypothesis of a generalized metaphorical chain operative in grammaticalization, reproduced as (29), whereby any of the categories in the chain may serve as a vehicle for conceptualizing any category on its right, and by Sweetser (1990), who identifies the metaphorical chain in (30) as relevant to extensions of the meanings of verbs of perception, modal verbs, and sentence connectives: (29) (30)

PERSON > OBJECT > ACTIVITY > SPACE > TIME > QUALITY CONTENT LEVEL MEANING > EPISTEMIC MEANING > SPEECH ACT MEANING

However, specifically with respect to the field of adverbials and discourse markers (including connectives), the framework developed by Elizabeth Traugott, and which has been continually revised over the years (e.g. Traugott 1986, 1990; Traugott & Dasher 2002), is no doubt by far the most comprehensive one currently on the market. In its most recent manifestation, found in Traugott & Dasher (2002), it comprises the following nine diachronic tendencies in the semantic-pragmatic evolution of lexical items from four different notional areas, viz. modality, discourse marking, performativity, and social deixis (2002: 281): 1. Meanings tend to become increasingly subjective (i.e. explicitly grounded in the speaker’s subjective perspective), and possibly even intersubjective (i.e. explicitly grounded in the relationship between speaker and hearer). 2. Meanings that were contentful at the outset tend to become increasingly procedural in nature, where the distinction between contentful and procedural is not seen as

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

absolute but rather as a matter of degree (pace Relevance Theory, e.g. Blakemore 1987: 144).9 Items that originally had scope within the host proposition tend to progressively enlarge that scope, possibly even up to the discourse level. Meanings that were truth-conditional at the outset tend to become non-truthconditional. Meanings that originally made reference to the described event progressively come to refer to the speech event itself (once again, the distinction is a matter of degree). Modal meanings tend to develop in a sequence from pre-modal to deontic to epistemic. Manner adverbials tend to evolve into adversatives, subsequently into elaboratives, and finally into hedges. Speech act verbs tend to develop in a sequence going from pre-speech-act verbs to speech act verbs to performatives to parentheticals. Social deictics tend to evolve from pre-honorifics through referent honorifics to lexical addressee honorifics, and finally to affixal addressee honorifics.

Of these, tendencies 1-5 are of relevance to the four phasal adverbs with which I am principally concerned, and in the descriptive part of this study, the five tendencies in question will indeed be shown to be operative in the evolution of French déjà, encore, toujours, and enfin. The tendencies posited are broad, but nevertheless on the whole fairly clearly identifiable, and they are claimed to be unidirectional, a claim which is amply supported by empirical data from two genetically and areally quite different languages, namely English and Japanese. Three main criticisms have, however, been leveled against the framework from a purely theoretical point of view (cf. Visconti 2004: 824): Firstly, the fact that the tendency towards subjectification, in particular, appears difficult to quantify, and hence, also difficult to falsify. Secondly, that the evolution from subjective to intersubjective may “[seem] to counter the trend towards an increasing degree of interiorization of the perspective expressed on the described event, a feature intrinsic to subjectification”. The third objection concerns the fact that the IITSC does not speak of exceptionless “laws”, but merely of “tendencies”, the question here being the precise statistical frequency with which a phenomenon must occur before it can usefully and justifiably be called a tendency. I do not think these objections vitiate the theory: as for the first, Traugott & Dasher (2002: 22) actually do make at least an informal attempt at quantifying subjectivity when they define “those expressions [as] most objective that require the fewest inferences depending on [the speaker-hearer dyad]”, this being spelled out as involving minimal modal marking, maximal expression of event structure participants in surface structure, minimal deictic marking, and maximal contextual determination of meanings. Moreover, recent work by Torres Cacoullos & Schwenter (fc), using the evolution of the Spanish concessive connective a pesar de (“in spite of”) as a test case, shows that the notion of subjectification can, indeed, be operationalized, their results appearing to uphold the tendency proposed by Traugott & Dasher (2002).

9 In the framework argued for in this study, all meanings are considered to be instructional, hence procedural, at the most basic level, as laid out in ch. 2, sect. 2.2 supra. In a subset of cases, however, the semantic instructions coded by a linguistic item or construction involve the identification or construction of conceptual material. This conceptual material may play a greater or smaller role in the interpretation process, and the present framework is thus compatible with Traugott & Dasher’s model.

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Visconti’s (2004) second criticism seems to rely on a Langackerian definition of subjectification as interiorization of the perspective (Langacker 1991), whereas Traugott (1999) actually defines it as a process whereby meanings come over time to encode or externalize the speaker/writer’s perspectives and attitudes as constrained by the communicative world of the speech event, rather than by the so-called “real world” characteristics of the event or situation referred to. (emphases mine) In this formulation, there is no obvious contradiction involved in the claim that intersubjectification, defined as externalization of the speaker’s attention to the hearer within the framework of the speech event, is a natural outgrowth of subjectification. (Whether or not intersubjectification is also a strong tendency in semantic change across expression types is another question, the answer to which is less clear.) As for the third point, the tendencies are – as far as I can tell – defined as regular in the sense of being unidirectional, i.e. reverse orders of development are hypothesized to be ruled out unless very special circumstances obtain (Traugott & Dasher 2002: 281). Whether or not they actually are unidirectional is an empirical question, which does not undermine the theoretical foundations of the framework. In sum, the IITSC appears to provide good indications of where to look for plausible paths of change in the semantic evolution of the four French phasal adverbs with which I am concerned. One question which raises itself, however, is whether, if the paths identified are supposed to be unidirectional, they must therefore also be linear. That is, supposing that a given lexical item has developed a new extended sense from an originally unique sense, and has thus become polysemous, in case a further sense develops, will this third sense necessarily be an extension of the second, or might it be traced directly back to the original sense, such that senses 2 and 3 would be extensions based on different aspects of this original sense? There does not appear to be anything in the formulation of the IITSC to preclude such a scenario, and we would, in that case, simply be dealing with two different paths of extension from a single original meaning, a phenomenon which – in the context of the evolution of pragmatic markers – was identified in sect. 3.2 above as “polypragmaticalization” (cf. Dostie 2004: 33), but which might more generally be termed “polysemanticization”. This would mean that the hypothesized senses 2 and 3 might subsequently become the bases for two independent further extensions of meaning, which might well be conceptually quite far removed from one another. The descriptive part of this volume will show – particularly in connection with the analysis of enfin – that, indeed, the possibility of highly complex networks of senses should be envisaged.

4.2

Actuation

Having formed a hypothesis about the paths that extensions of the meaning of phasal adverbs are likely to take, we come now to the actuation question, i.e. the question of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the extensions. Significant attempts at exhaustive classification of possible mechanisms of change have been made, among others, by Stern (1932), Ullmann (1957), and Blank (1997). The approaches of these three authors are markedly different: Stern’s study is empirical and inductive, drawing heavily on psychological and pragmatic notions. Ullmann’s classification is purely theoretical

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/ deductive, and is based strictly on the dualistic Saussurean concept of the linguistic sign. Blank’s is likewise a semiotic approach, but his model of the linguistic sign is a far more comprehensive one than Ullmann’s, and psycholinguistic and pragmatic adequacy figure prominently in the exposition. Going into detail about the specifics of each of the three classifications would take us too far afield with respect to the main purpose of the present study; what is of primary interest here is the fact that, despite the differences in their models, all three authors appear to agree that diachronic sense changes are ultimately based on patterns of association either between aspects of different linguistic signs or between linguistic signs and aspects of the cognitive or realworld entities they stand for. The two principal patterns of association identified are similarity and contiguity, both of which may apply on the content side and / or the expression side of lexemes undergoing semantic change.10 That this should be so is hardly surprising, because, as pointed out by Nerlich & Clarke (1992: 137), speakers will only use words with new meanings if they trust they will nevertheless make themselves understood, and the two main ways to achieve that is to either “use words for near neighbors of the things you mean” or “use words for the look-alikes of what you mean”. Traditionally, the latter strategy, similarity – particularly on the content side, where it manifests itself as metaphor – has been regarded as the most important mechanism, not just in lexicalsemantic change, but also in grammaticalization, which (as discussed above) is always accompanied by some degree of semantic change in the item or construction concerned (cf. Blank 1997: 361; Traugott & Dasher 2002: 78). This view has tended to be perpetuated within the framework of Cognitive Semantics, a prominent example being the work of Eve Sweetser (e.g. 1990), and in cognitively-oriented historical linguistics more generally (e.g. Heine et al. 1991: 45). In the last decade or so, contiguity – or “metonymy” in a typically very broad sense of the term – has come to the fore, and it has been argued that it is as important a mechanism as, and may even be more important than, metaphor (e.g. Hopper & Traugott 1993: 81; Bybee et al. 1994: 24f; Blank 1997: 259; Barcelona 2000; Radden 2000; Traugott & Dasher 2002: 9). While it is observed that the two may be difficult to distinguish in concrete cases, and consequently, that it may be more fruitful to conceive of the clear cases as opposite poles on a continuum (e.g. Bybee et al. 1994: 24f; Barcelona 2000; Radden 2000), it is argued that metonymy is the more likely candidate for pre-eminence.11 The reason is that, with respect to the core cases, at least, metaphor relies on a qualitative leap from one conceptual domain to another (from “source” domain to “target” domain)(cf. Lakoff & Johnson 1980), and is based on factual incompatibility between these two domains, such that a given lexeme or construction must be understood either literally or figuratively (cf. Blank 1997: 161). Thus, (31) for instance, may either be understood as referring to a concrete cup which is too full, or as meaning that the speaker is overwhelmed by her good fortune, but not simultaneously as both. In other words, out of context, innovations based on metaphor will be ambiguous, the context determining one or the other interpretation. Metaphorical changes

10 In the spirit of Blank (1997: ch. 2), ”content” is here to be understood broadly, to include for instance encyclopaedic knowledge of concepts and referents. 11 In accordance with this, the hypothesized continuum is conceived of as having metonymy-based metaphors in the middle, not metaphor-based metonymies, and ”metaphors which are grounded in metonymy are more basic and natural than those which do not have a metonymic basis” (Radden 2000: 93).

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must therefore be conceptualized as abrupt and discontinuous (cf. Traugott & Dasher 2002: 77). (31)

My cup runneth over.

Metonymy, on the other hand, is based on the simultaneous or sequential co-presence of elements within the same conceptual frame (cf. Panther & Thornburg 2003: 7). The elements in question are therefore mutually compatible, such that one may not only be able to slide from literal to metonymic meanings (or vice versa) within a short stretch of text (cf. Blank 1997: 243ff; Fauconnier 1984: 18), as in (32) infra – a possibility which is normally excluded in clear cases of metaphor – but in many instances, the addressee need not even choose between the two possible meanings, given that both may be germane to the interpretation of the utterance.12 Such is the case, for instance, in (33), in respect of which one can imagine a great many contexts in which both the temporal and the causal interpretation of since will be simultaneously applicable. Rather than exhibiting ambiguity, innovations based on metonymy will therefore, if anything, be interpretatively vague. The effect of metonymy thus lies mainly in a more or less perceptible figure-ground shift, i.e. a reversal of those aspects of the content that are, under normal circumstances, respectively foregrounded and backgrounded within the relevant frame (cf. Blank 1997: 243; Panther & Thornburg 2003: 7; Waltereit 2006). (32)

(33)

On va boire une bouteille. Quand elle sera vide, on en ouvrira une autre. (from Blank 1997 : 244) ‘We’re going to drink a bottle. When it’s empty, we’ll open another one.’ Since Susan left him, John has been very miserable. (from Bybee et al. 1994: 197)

It would seem that, when diachronic sense changes are carefully charted in a chronologically continuous body of texts, the investigator is, in fact, highly likely to come across “intermediate” examples like (33), which precisely instantiate what was called “bridging contexts” in sect. 3.3 above. (Indeed, my own analyses in chapters 6-7 infra will bear witness to this.) That is so even in the case of changes which might otherwise be analyzed as metaphorical in nature (e.g. Traugott & Dasher 2002: 80, Bybee et al. 1994: 198), which suggests that the mechanism actually relied on by the language users may rather have been metonymy. This is further supported by the fact that metonymy may be conceptually simpler than metaphor due to its fundamentally indexical nature, which exploits factual, rather than imaginative, associations (cf. Blank 1997: 234f). I mentioned above that the notion of metonymic change employed in much recent work on meaning change is a very broad one. Thus, Koch (1991: 295), for instance, uses the term “speech act metonymy” (Sprechaktmetonymie) to denote delocutive change in the sense of Benveniste (1966[1958]) and – more particularly – Anscombre (1979, 1985), that is, cases where an expression that is typically used in the performance of a specific type of speech act eventually comes to denote (some aspect of) that same speech act. A standard example of this 12

It is true that, as observed by Koch (2001), certain metonymies, such as the metonymic change in Latin and Romance words for ’tongue’ > ’language’, may exhibit no referential overlap, either. However, the fact that the different senses of words like French langue are part of the same frame means that contexts can be found in which either interpretation might be meant: (i) [In reference to a speaker of a foreign language, whose speech has an unpleasant sound] Sa langue est un peu rude. ’His / her tongue is a bit rough.’ or ’His / her language is a bit harsh.’

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process is French merci (“thanks”), which originates in a late Latin noun meaning “favor” or “mercy”, and which is assumed to have taken on its currently more salient meaning as a result of frequent, more or less formulaic, use in utterances expressing gratitude. In a similar vein, Traugott & Dasher (2002: 78ff) take metonymic change to include the conventionalization of all manner of contextually invited inferences. This broad sense is the one in which I will be using the term in this work, and I will show in chapters 6-7 infra that the history of the French phasal adverbs supports a metonymical analysis of the meaning changes they have undergone. Now, clearly, the frame- and Gestalt-based nature of metonymic change, and the interpretative vagueness of examples such as (33) above, raises the question of the status of the different readings of lexical items whose interpretation in specific utterances appears to involve metonymic processes. Given, for instance, that the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy is an implicature of a large number of utterances involving the temporal succession of events, whether or not they contain the conjunctive since, what allows us to say that the causal reading of since is an actual sense to be listed in the lexicon, as opposed to its being simply a (more or less systematic, but nonetheless defeasible) conversational implicature? I take the view that, as long as an innovative interpretation of the meaning contribution of a given item cannot occur independently of the source meaning of that item, and as long as hearers continue to attribute the new meaning to the item by default at best, i.e. in contexts where such an interpretation does not conflict with what was otherwise asserted or known, the new meaning in question has the status of a (more or less generalized) pragmatic inference. As argued in Hansen & Waltereit (2006: 254), semanticization can, as a rule, only take place once the new meaning occurs without the old one being plausibly intended. By this criterion, since is, indeed, polysemous between a temporal and a causal sense in contemporary English, given the possibility of its marking a purely causal relation between propositions, as exemplified in (34): (34)

Since Peter arrived early, I asked him to help me peel the potatoes.

Once this stage has been reached, however, the status of the causal interpretation of utterances like (33) becomes problematic, in as much as it remains defeasible here. Claiming that since has become semantically ambiguous between a temporal and a causal sense is not really a viable option, given that the two readings are not mutually exclusive. We must, therefore, assume that polysemy networks allow the simultaneous activation of several senses of a lexeme where these are not incompatible with one another.

4.3

Motivation

Finally, we need to address the question of why semasiological changes occur at all. Except for the possibility that language communities may sometimes need to lexicalize concepts that are new to their culture, there is no logical necessity for languages to change, and yet we know that any natural, living language invariably does so, not just intermittently, but continuously. As noted by Blank (1997: 345), the mechanisms of change identified in 4.2 clearly do not constitute a full explanation, since language use is rife with associative possibilities that go unexploited. What is more, that fact is itself in need of explanation: not only should our

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theory be capable of accounting for why languages change; ideally, it should also explain how it is, given the inevitability of change, that they nevertheless also remain – to a large extent – stable (cf. Keller 1994[1990]: 95). In order to properly address the question of motivation, a number of important distinctions must be drawn. The most basic of these is that when we say that “language changes”, what we really mean is that “language users change their language”: languages are not living entities that exist and evolve independently of their users. So what we will be concerned with are the motivations of language users. But as soon as we use the verb change transitively, and furthermore speak of users’ motivations, we imply that intentional action is involved, so a second distinction is in order, namely that between intentional actions that actually have language change as a goal, and intentional actions that are geared toward some other goal, but which have language change as an unintended by-product. Language changes due to the first type certainly do exist, and may be observed in cases of conscious language planning on the part of, for instance, various (semi-)official agencies, but also on the part of individual language users in a micro-setting (cf. Fasold 1984, ch. 9). Usually, such changes will be made, not for their own sake, but with a more long-term goal, possibly of a socio-political nature, in mind. Within the field of lexical semantics, planned changes may for instance aim at raising the status of members of oppressed sub-communities (e.g. certain ethnic groups) by encouraging users to refer to them with certain types of expressions rather than others (cf. Murphy 1997). In the unmarked case, however, changes of this type probably constitute a very small minority. My exclusive concern here is, therefore, with changes of the second type, i.e. long-term changes that Keller (1994[1990]: ch. 4) defines as non-intended social consequences of individually intentional actions directed toward some other, more immediate, result. The intentionality – and hence, the motivation – involved in this type of changes thus belongs firmly to the communicative micro-level.13 At the macro-level, there is no intentionality, and the stabilization and conventionalization of any given change can be regarded as an “invisiblehand” phenomenon as defined by the 18th century economist Adam Smith (apud Keller 1994[1990]: 37). Invisible-hand phenomena can be aptly illustrated by the non-linguistic example of a traffic jam (Keller 1994[1990]: 63): Suppose that one driver on a busy one-lane road suddenly brakes, with a micro-level intention to, say, avoid hitting an animal that is crossing the road. The drivers that follow her will also brake, not because of the crossing animal, but because they see the first one braking, their individual micro-level intentions being to avoid a car crash. As the following drivers will probably each tend to reduce their speed too much rather than too little, to be on the safe side, the whole lane will gradually slow down, eventually coming to standstill. This unintended standstill constitutes a macro-level invisible-hand phenomenon. Analogously, the micro-level innovations that ultimately result in language change may, as a rule, be assumed to be motivated by individual, context-dependent communicative goals of which language change as such does not form a part. As to the types of motivations that language users may have for either innovating new meanings or for adopting (and thereby contributing to the propagation of) innovations initiated by others, various proposals have been 13 Hence, there is, as far as I can tell, no reason to insist (as is done by Blank 1997: 371) on a strict distinction between the goals of innovating speakers and the goals of propagating speakers, as these can be expected to be quite similar.

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made in the literature, but the more recent ones – although not identical – all seem to converge on a communicative cost-benefit analysis (e.g. Keller 1994[1990]: 101; Blank 1997: 369ff; Geeraerts 1997: 104ff; Croft 2000: ch. 4). Such an analysis takes its point of departure in the asssumption that the most fundamental purpose of language is communication. Moreover, in keeping with speech act theory, it is taken for granted that communication (understood as intentional communication in the sense of Grice 1974) aims at modifying the relationship between speaker and addressee in some way, for instance (in the case of assertions) by committing the speaker to the truth of some piece of information in order that the addressee may accommodate it into his short- or long-term memory, or (in the case of directives) by inducing the addressee to carry out some action in the world (cf. Searle 1976). Because communication thus involves a desire to make some kind of impact on hearers, speakers must respond simultaneously to a set of partially conflicting constraints: On the one hand, they orient to a principle of “saying no more than one must”. In part, this constraint is no doubt speaker-based, in as much as it enjoins speakers to express themselves with as little expense of effort as possible. Levinson (1995: 96, 2000: 6) has hypothesized that a very basic problem of communication is what he calls the “articulatory bottleneck”, or the fact that human beings think a good deal faster than they are capable of articulating their thoughts. Consequently, a speaker who aimed at making her thoughts entirely explicit (assuming that such a thing is all possible)14 might very easily take a disproportionately long time to make a relatively minor impact on her addressee. The existence of such an articulatory bottleneck would therefore encourage speakers to rely instead on hearers’ inferential abilities in order to derive the full meaning of the utterances they hear.15 This constraint is largely the equivalent of Grice’s (1989a[1975]) second maxim of quantity, and Horn’s (1989: 194) R-principle, just as it subsumes Levinson’s (2000: 37) I-heuristic. Its operation is exemplified by the PCI in (35), and by the GCI in (36): (35)

(36)

A. It’s 10 o’clock. Shouldn’t the bride have been here by now? B. I saw her a couple of hours ago with a boarding pass. (>> The bride got cold feet and left the country.) If you give me a bite of your ice cream, I’ll give you a bite of mine. (>> If and only if you give me a bite…)

However, as both these examples suggest, such a “say-no-more-than-you-must” principle is no doubt also partially hearer-based. That is, for reasons of tact and politeness, it will, in a great many cases, be more expedient not to make one’s meaning entirely explicit. Thus, in (35), 14 There is good reason to think that such a thing is not possible. As the experiments reported in Garfinkel (1967) show, the pursuit of complete explicitness in everyday interaction in practice results in communicative breakdown. 15 Richard Waltereit (p.c.) has suggested to me that the putative bottleneck could as well be circumvented by exploiting more fully the phonemic potential of languages. That is, most languages have been shown to possess 30-50 distinct phonemes, but the distinctions offered by the articulatory system allow for as many as 150. With more phonemes, words could be shorter, and speech consequently faster. As far as I can tell, this does not undermine the basic cost-benefit analysis, however, since it would take greater effort on the part of speakers to clearly articulate very subtle phonemic differences, particularly in less-thanoptimal acoustic conditions. Moreover, given that hearers are not always as attentive as speakers would like, and that faster speech is typically harder to process, it is likely that speakers would try to ensure the correct transmission of their messages by a greater amount of expressive redundancy.

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speaker B states only what she has observed prior to the exchange, but carefully refrains from stating, and hence committing herself to, the implicated conclusion, not only because it is less effortful, but also because that conclusion (whether true or not) may be hurtful or otherwise offensive to either the addressee or some third person (saliently, the bride and/or the groom). Similarly, in (36), using if instead of if and only if is not only less effortful, it is also more polite, in as much as stating something as a merely sufficient (as opposed to necessary and sufficient) condition for the speaker to undertake some action on behalf of the addressee at least nominally leaves the addressee alternative options for obtaining what he wants. On the other hand, speakers are also operating under a different, and clearly hearer-based, constraint according to which they must at the same time orient to their addressees’ interests in order to be communicatively successful. It seems to me that there are several aspects to this constraint. At the most basic level, it is presumably indispensable for speakers to express themselves with sufficient clarity that hearers will actually be able to understand both what they mean and why it needed to be said. In other words, speakers should “say as much as they must”, which, among other things, entails that they should make their statements as strong as they possibly can under the circumstances (“the circumstances” of course including interactional considerations, such as tact and politeness). This part of the hearer-oriented constraint is largely equivalent to Grice’s (1989a[1975]) first maxim of quantity, to Horn’s (1989: 194) Q-principle, and it subsumes Levinson’s (2000: 36ff) Q- and M-heuristics. It is illustrated by the PCI in (37) and by the GCI in (38): (37) (38)

A. Do you know Professor Jones? B. I’m familiar with his work. (>> I haven’t actually been introduced to Professor Jones.) Some of my undergraduate students understand GCI theory. (>> Not all of my undergraduate students understand GCI theory.)

Beyond that, however, speakers may sometimes find it opportune to either “say more than they must, or less than they should”, that is, in order to make what they have to say even more interesting and more memorable, or to avoid hurting or offending their hearers, they may have recourse to (over- or under-)expressive rhetorical strategies of various kinds. This corresponds, not to observing, but to infringing, in a benign way, one or more of the maxims of quantity, quality and manner. Such expressive strategies may be exemplified, among other things, by the hyperbolic use of intensifiers, as in (39), by live metaphors, as in (40), by downtoners, as in (41)16, or by euphemisms, as in (42) : (39) (40) (41) (42)

A. Do you really think Joan will divorce Max? B. No, despite all their quarreling, she’s still desperately in love with him. You’re the jelly on my peanut butter. A. Anne is pretty smart, isn’t she? B. Yeah, I’d say she has half a brain. I’m sorry to tell you that your husband has passed away.

Speakers constantly seek to balance these constraints, and will frequently be pushed towards linguistic innovation in order to comply with them. The example of the acquisition of causal meaning by English since is a perfect example of meaning change that can be attributed principally to the action of the “say no more than you must” constraint.

16 Note that, as the example shows, downtoners are not necessarily used to soften messages that might offend the hearer and / or a third party, but may be a way of calling attention to the message by antiphrasis, rather than via exaggeration.

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The expressiveness constraint is the origin of a great many meaning changes, and, as argued by Waltereit (2002b, 2006), it is likely to be a prime factor in the evolution of discourse markers. Thus, for instance, an inherent function of imperatives of perception verbs such as look, listen etc. is to draw the hearer’s attention to an interesting phenomenon in the immediate environment. Waltereit (2002b, 2006) plausibly attributes the rise of the discourse marking uses of such forms, uses that are found in many languages, to speakers’ desire to mark the content of their utterances as worth attending to, a desire which leads them to a “rhetorical overuse” that is frequently unwarranted by the original semantics of the forms. The “say as much as you must” constraint, on the other hand, is probably less a factor of change than a stabilizing one, and it is difficult to think of examples of meaning changes, especially in the domain of adverbials and connectives / discourse markers, that would be clearly attributable to this particular constraint (cf. Levinson 2000: 70, and Traugott 2004: 560, who both note that the Q-heuristic will, indeed, normally retard change). In all cases of linguistic innovation, speakers must, of course, make at least some effort to ensure that they are not misunderstood. In principle, the situational context alone may make the intended interpretation clear, but Traugott (2004: 560) observes that, in actual fact, innovations are typically introduced in linguistically “harmonic” contexts, i.e. contexts where other items express meanings similar to the intended innovative one. In other words, the contexts in which meaning changes are first introduced are characterized by a certain redundancy. This creates a problem for the analyst, in that it may, in some cases, be difficult to determine with any certainty whether a given lexeme is, indeed, being used innovatively, or whether what one perceives as a change in the use of that item is simply the unintended interaction of an already extant sense with a context that is biased in a certain direction. This leads directly to the question of whether meaning changes are ultimately speaker-based or hearer-based. Traugott & Dasher (2002: 7) argue that the speaker’s role is central because not only is it speakers who innovate, but even if innovations need to be understood as such by hearers, it is in their role as speakers that the latter take it upon themselves to propagate those innovations that have appealed to them. To some extent, this is a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Nevertheless, I believe that it is possible to clarify our concepts in a way that shows the role of hearers in meaning change to be at least as important as that of speakers. Thus, inspired by Detges & Waltereit (2002), we may distinguish between two facets of semanticization, namely “reinterpretation” and “propagation”. As discussed in sect. 3.3, the activity of reinterpretation is crucial to language change, and it rests very firmly with hearers: speakers may innovate as much as they please, but if hearers do not perceive those innovations, they obviously will not take hold. Conversely, hearers may well be responsible for reinterpretations that were entirely unintended by the speaker. This is particularly important in the context of a theory of meaning change that regards metonymic processes as central, since, as observed in sect. 4.2 above, literal and metonymic meanings are often mutually compatible, so reinterpretations of this type will be particularly prone to arise as the result of actual misunderstandings, rather than being attributable to speakers’ intentions (cf. Nerlich & Clarke 1992: 134).17 17 As an example of this, Koch (2004: 16f) hypothesizes that the Latin noun TESTIMONIUM (’testimony’, ’evidence’) evolved into French témoin (’witness’) because it was used by judges in courtroom contexts like (i), where both meanings are contextually possible, and equally likely, while only the former can be assumed to have been intended: (i) Audiamus testimonium proximum! ’Let’s hear the next piece of testimony!’ → ’Let’s hear the next witness!’

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The process of propagation, on the other hand, relies on language users who reproduce a reinterpreted item in their role as speakers; yet, given that propagation is necessarily a gradual – and often quite protracted – process, the addressees of the propagating speakers will need to continue to reinterpret the item undergoing change on a large number of individual occasions before the new meaning can be considered to have become entrenched in the language.

4.4

Summary

In this section, I have discussed three issues that are crucial to any account of semantic change, namely the transition question, i.e. the nature of the paths followed by items that have undergone or are currently undergoing changes of meaning; the actuation question, i.e. the nature of the mechanisms involved in such changes; and the motivation question, i.e. the psychological factors responsible for the initiation and propagation of change. With respect to the issue of transition, I rejected the hypothesis, due to Levinson (1995; 2000) and to Traugott & Dasher (2002), that semantic change tends to follow a macro-path from PCI > GCI > coded meaning. On the other hand, I retained Traugott & Dasher’s (2002) hypothesis that there are nevertheless some observable regularities in semantic change, which these authors spell out in nine unidirectional tendencies pertaining, among others, to the evolution of pragmatic markers. It will be shown, in the descriptive part of the present book (chs. 6-7), that the existence of a subset of these tendencies is supported by the evolution of the French phasal adverbs. As for the issue of actuation, I mainly discussed the mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy, and argued that metonymy, understood lato sensu as Gestalt-shifts within a given conceptual or experiential frame, constitutes the prime mechanism in the types of semantic / pragmatic changes with which I am concerned in this book. Finally, with respect to the motivations for change, I distinguished between a macro- and a micro-level, and I defined the kind of changes studied here as being, at the macro-level, invisible-hand phenomena. At the micro-level, on the other hand, it was argued that they could be attributed to speakers’ attempting to comply simultaneously with conflicting communicative constraints, related, respectively, to economy / restraint and to expressiveness. Finally, I emphasized the crucial role played by hearers in the process of semantic / pragmatic change, arguing that while speakers are responsible for innovation and propagation, hearers are responsible for reinterpretation, without which there can be no actual change.

5 THE NOTION OF “PERSISTENCE” IN SEMASIOLOGICAL CHANGE In chapter 2, sect. 5 supra, I argued that linguistic items crucially possess inherent meanings (rather than their meanings being determined by the structural oppositions into which they enter with other similar items). Earlier in the present chapter, I argued that semantic reinterpretation was typically facilitated by the existence of “bridging contexts”, i.e. contexts where both the established meaning of an item, and an innovative meaning were potentially applicable. This suggests that the inherent meanings of linguistic items constrain the directions that semantic / functional extensions can take, and how far extensions can go.

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As mentioned in ch. 1 supra, it is well-known in the grammaticalization literature that grammaticalized items usually retain some aspects of the meaning of their diachronic source items, a phenomenon known as “persistence” (cf. Hopper 1991). Indeed, this appears to be true of items that undergo semantic / functional change more generally, including (but not limited to) pragmaticalization. However, in the bulk of the literature, persistence is considered in a “backwards” perspective, that is, it is observed mainly as a fact about the target item. It will be argued here that persistence is also relevant in a “forwards” perspective: contextual inference, and in particular frame-based metonymies, being a prime motor in semantic / functional change, meaning extensions are, to a significant extent, motivated by contexts that are compatible with the inherent source meanings of the items undergoing extension, but which at the same time point to the target meanings. This requirement of compatibility with the source meaning in at least the initial stages of metonymic change means that a given existing form cannot be recruited to express just any arbitrarily chosen new meaning. In other words, if persistence in the “backwards” perspective is meant to explain the partial identity of features of an old and a new meaning of a linguistic item, persistence in the “forwards” perspective amounts to the hypothesis that there are constraints on the kinds of differences that can arise between the old and the new meaning. A corollary of this is that two source items may seem largely synonymous in a number of contexts, and yet differ on one salient dimension, such that a particular meaning / usage extension becomes possible – perhaps even likely – for one of the two items, but not – or at least much less so – for the other. This point is nicely argued and illustrated in Visconti’s (2005) fine-grained analysis of the development of Italian scalar particles perfino and addirittura (both similar to English even) from prepositional phrases meaning, respectively “through to the end” and “in a straight line”, and it will receive further support from the analyses of the evolution of the French phasal adverbs in chapters 6-7 infra. In other words, the notion of persistence might have greater explanatory power than has thus far been assumed, and perhaps even some predictive power, both in respect of meaning changes that can and do take place, and in respect of those that do not – and perhaps cannot. Of course, if explaining why something happens is often a complicated task, attempting to explain why something does not happen is no doubt even more so. In the case of semantic / functional changes like the ones charted here, the factual non-existence of any logically possibly use of a lexical item may be due to any number of factors.18 Nevertheless, provided that one possesses a thorough enough analysis of existing uses of a set of lexical items with comparable functions, an analysis which reveals the commonalities between the uses both of each individual lexeme and of the different lexemes, and hence those elements of meaning that may be assumed to be most salient to language users, it is not unthinkable that one might account for at least some functional gaps in the semantic representation of individual lexemes. In the next, last section, I will sketch how the issues discussed in the preceding sections fit into the dynamic conception of the linguistic sign that was laid out in chapter 2, sect. 6 supra.

18 For instance, Hansen (2005a) argues that phonetics and morphology may have played a role in constraining the extensions of French finalement (”at last”) in comparison with the semantically closely related enfin.

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6 A PEIRCEAN APPROACH TO MEANING CHANGE In that chapter, I discussed the philosopher Charles S. Peirce’s dynamic conception of the linguistic sign, and of the semiotic process, contrasting it with the essentially static conception inherited from Saussurean semiology. I argued that Peircean semiotics constituted a better framework for an approach that takes the notion of lexical polysemy seriously. As Traugott & Dasher (2002: 16) point out, if monosemy and, more marginally, homonymy are viable approaches in synchronic lexical semantics, polysemy becomes a necessary assumption if one wants to account for semantic change. As an at least potentially dynamic notion, polysemy allows for the conventionalization of new senses of morphemes and constructions based on frequently occurring contextual modulations of situated occurrences, these new senses themselves being subject to contextual modulations and subsequent conventionalization of the latter, such that the most recently created sense of a given item may in principle be quite far removed from the meaning of its ultimate diachronic origin. Here, polysemy stands in opposition to monosemy, which, although it allows for contextual modulation, is nevertheless an essentially static way of viewing meaning, capable only of comparing successive, but independent, synchronic stages of the language, in which the dynamic diachronic process of change as such can have no theoretical status. The Peircean understanding of the semiotic process, which – as we saw in chapter 2, sect. 6 supra – posits a dialogic interplay between the (linguistic) sign and its context of use, has implications not only for the synchronic interpretation of utterances, but for diachronic change as well. For should a sufficiently large number of comprehenders produce more or less similar chains of inference when interpreting the situated uses of a given linguistic sign in a sufficiently large number of contexts, the speaking community may well end up establishing a new interpretative habit which will henceforth form part of the meaning range of the sign “as such”. In other words, thanks to the frequency of a particular kind of dynamic interpretants, level 1 of the sign in question may be abductively modified, resulting in either polysemy or actual semantic shift. A simple example will, hopefully, suffice to clarify what is meant: Waltereit (2002b) argues that discourse-marking uses of imperatives such as Look! and its equivalents in other languages arose as a result of a figure-ground shift. Imperatives of this kind carry a conversational implicature to the effect that the object to which the hearer’s visual attention is directed is worthy of that attention. Such a “canonical” semeiosis is diagrammed in Figure 3.1:

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[Figure 3.1: A “canonical” understanding of Look!] Representamen 1 Symbolic form: [luk]

Immediate ground

Δ

Includes grammatical oppositions between moods, and semantic oppositions between various verbs of perception

Object

Immediate interpretant

Symbolic content: Process the sign as a request to direct visual attention to something

S wants me, H, to look at something in the environment

Representamen 2 Dynamic ground There is something worth looking at in the immediate environment of H

Δ

Object

Dynamic interpretant

Process the sign as a request to identify something worthwhile in the environment and direct visual attention to it

I, H, should look at this thing

However, speakers who wish to exploit that implicature may “overuse” such imperatives for rhetorical purposes when there is actually no particularly interesting object to look at in the hearer’s immediate environment. Such abuses will give rise to a semeiosis of the type diagrammed in figure 3.2, in which the precise form of perception is backgrounded, while the idea that a noteworthy feature is present in the context becomes foregrounded (cf. also Hansen & Waltereit 2006):

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[Figure 3.2: A possible understanding of an innovative use of Look!] Representamen 1 Symbolic form: [luk]

Immediate ground Includes grammatical oppositions between moods, and semantic oppositions between various verbs of perception

Δ

Object

Immediate interpretant

Symbolic content: Process the sign as a request to direct visual attention to something

S wants me, H, to look at something in the environment

Representamen 2 Dynamic ground There is nothing relevantly worth looking at in the

Δ

immediate environment of H. The currently most salient feature of the environment is the discourse itself

Object

Dynamic interpretant (1)

Process the sign as a qualityflouting request to look at something that is not there

S is pretending that there is something worthwhile for me, H, to look at

Representamen 3

Δ Object

Dynamic interpretant (2)

Process the sign as a request to turn attention to some non-visual phenomenon in the environment

S wants me, H, to turn my attention to some other salient, but non-visual phenomenon that is worthwhile

Representamen 4

Δ Object

Dynamic interpretant (3)

Process the sign as an indication that the current discourse is worthwhile

I, H, should turn my attention to the current discourse

If this happens often enough, it will result in reanalysis of Look! as a discourse marker aimed at gaining the floor for the speaker’s own upcoming discourse instead, by conventionally (i.e. no longer merely conversationally) implicating that this discourse will be worthwhile. In other

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words, the speaking community will establish a new interpretative habit, which now forms part of the sign “as such”, and which is represented in figure 3.3: [Figure 3.3: Look! reanalyzed as a discourse marker] Representamen Symbolic form: [luk]

Immediate ground

Δ

Includes knowledge of other DMs

Object

Immediate interpretant

Symbolic content: Process the sign as a request to direct attention to the current discourse

S wants me, H, to turn my attention to the current discourse

In sum, a dialogic process has taken place between the level of the sign “as such” and that of a particular dynamic interpretant, which originally was part of the actualized sign, but which, by abduction, has been incorporated into the conventionally established content of the sign.

6.1

Summary

In this section, I have argued that a model of meaning change like the one outlined in the present chapter, may profitably make use of the triadic Peircean conception of the linguistic sign that was presented earlier. By explicitly incorporating a pragmatic dimension, the Peircean sign function also implicitly incorporates the seeds of diachronic meaning change, in marked contrast to the dyadic Saussurean sign, where the notion of valeur makes both variation and change (where the former is a prerequisite for the latter) essentially inexplicable.

7 GENERAL SUMMARY This chapter has dealt with a number issues of general theoretical and methodological interest to the study of meaning change in general, and of the evolution of pragmatic markers in particular. I discussed the nature of the process whereby context-level markers evolve out of erstwhile content-level items, concluding that the relevant process is not grammaticalization, but pragmaticalization. I also pointed out the importance of reinterpretation of the original meaning of the source items, a factor which highlights the crucial role played by so-called “bridging contexts” in the process of diachronic sense change. Subsequently, I reviewed the three central aspects of language change in general, namely the paths, the mechanisms, and the motivations of change. Following up on the discussion of inherent meanings in ch. 2, I suggested that the idea that elements of diachronically older source meanings persist in newer, extended meanings might have greater explanatory force in diachronic semantics than it is usually credited with. Finally, I sketched a Peircean approach to meaning change which matches the synchronic approach also presented in ch. 2.

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In short, I have outlined an approach that takes the notions of contextual inference and of inherent meanings very seriously, and which is capable to elucidating the details of the rise of context-level markers as a specific type of language change. We are now in a position to proceed to a fine-grained analysis not only of the synchronic semantics and pragmatics of phasal adverbs more generally, and of the French phasal adverbs more specifically, but also of the gradual diachronic evolution of the French phasal adverbs from temporal / aspectual markers to ever more interactionally-oriented items. That will be the subject of the following four chapters. Ch. 4 discusses cross-linguistically relevant properties of phasal adverbs. Following a methodological excursion in ch. 5, ch. 6 analyzes the contentlevel uses of the French phasal adverbs both synchronically and diachronically, while ch. 7 does the same for their context-level uses.

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4 GENERAL PROPERTIES OF PHASAL ADVERBS ACROSS LANGUAGES

1 INTRODUCTION In this chapter, I will present and discuss what I see as the main points that have been and / or should be made with respect to the more or less general syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of phasal adverbs across languages, and examples will therefore be drawn from several European languages (although the bulk will be provided from French and English). Subsequent chapters will deal specifically and in much greater depth with the four French particles that are the focus of this study, and mention of very (language-)specific or detailed aspects of the French items in particular will be postponed until then.

2 THE ASPECTUALITY OF PHASAL ADVERBS It appears immediately obvious that the meaning of phasal adverbs has to do with notions of time. More precisely, the preliminary definition of these adverbs given in chapter 1 supra, and which involves actual or potential transition between different phases of a state of affairs (SoA), suggests that they can be conceived of as expressing some form of aspectuality. However, the linguistic expression of notions of time and aspectuality is recognized as spanning several different, although clearly related areas, the traditionally most important ones being tense, aspect and Aktionsart. In this section, I will be concerned with elucidating the relations obtaining between adverbs like déjà, encore etc. and these more traditional areas of inquiry.

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Note that while the broader notion of “aspectuality” is intended to comprise that of “aspect”, the two are not co-extensive: As the terms are used here, “aspect” is, in the first instance, a morphosyntactic phenomenon that characterizes finite verb phrases, and which may be more or less grammaticalized in different languages. “Aspectuality”, on the other hand, is a semantic phenomenon that characterizes whole clauses, and which is largely compositional in that it is standardly taken to result from a combination of different factors, including, prominently, verbal aspect and Aktionsart, but also the number and (in)definiteness of the arguments of the verb, as well as any relevant adverbials present in the clause.

2.1

The linguistic expression of time: tense, aspect, Aktionsart

The issue of how to define tense, aspect and Aktionsart in relation to one another, and how the three categories interrelate on the formal level, both within specific languages and more generally, has caused a great deal of ink to flow over the past century. Currently, however, there appears to be a widespread agreement on at least the following points: In accounts of the linguistic expression of time, a broad distinction must be made between situation-external and situation-internal time (cf. Comrie 1976: 5). The former is concerned with the temporal location of SoAs with respect either to the moment of utterance or to other SoAs, while the latter is concerned with the internal temporal constituency of SoAs. In Klein’s (1992) model of tense and aspect, both of these categories crucially relate to a notion of “topic time” (henceforth TT), understood as the time with respect to which the main point of the utterance is made. TT, which is conceived of as an interval (as opposed to a point in time), and which is normally coded in the tense of the finite verb of the clause, but also at times by adverbials of temporal location, is an alternative to the more common, but vaguer, Reichenbachian term “reference point” (cf. Reichenbach 1947: 287ff). Although Klein himself does not discuss it, it will be assumed in the present study – in line with current thinking in, for instance, Discourse Representation Theory (e.g. Kamp & Reyle 1993: 523ff) – that TT is a dynamic entity, which, particularly in narrative contexts, may be continuously reset, thus accounting for any temporal progression that is understood to obtain among sequences of events recounted in the same tense. Of the three traditionally recognized categories, tense expresses situation-external time, while perfective / imperfective aspect and Aktionsart are traditionally held to express situationinternal time (cf. Comrie 1976: 5). In Klein’s (1992) model, this is reflected in a modified form by the fact that tense is analyzed as expressing the relation between TT and the time of utterance, while perfective / imperfective aspect expresses relations of inclusion between TT and the time at or during which the SoA denoted by the clause takes place (the “time of the situation” or TSit in Klein’s terminology). This difference in focus does not, however, preclude formal overlap between the categories, and in particular between tense and aspect, in the morphosyntax of specific languages. Thus, in French, the perfective and imperfective past necessarily always express tense and aspect simultaneously, cf. (1)-(2).1 On the other hand, the future tense in French, for instance, is

1

De Swart (1998) convincingly argues that the French perfective and imperfective past tenses are not aspectual operators as such, but rather aspectually sensitive tenses, which select for telic or atelic SoAs, respectively (1998: 369). If the inherent Aktionsart of the SoA conflicts with the constraints imposed by the past tense form, aspectual coercion will take place (see below).

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incapable of expressing aspectual distinctions, although it can be combined with an imperfective periphrasis if the speaker wishes to insist on that aspect, cf. (3)-(4): (1) (2) (3) (4)

L’été dernier, Pierre lut[perf. past] Guerre et paix. ‘Last summer, Pierre read War and Peace.’ L’été dernier, Pierre lisait[imperf. past] Guerre et paix. ‘Last summer, Pierre was reading War and Peace.’ L’été prochain, Pierre lira[fut.ind.] Guerre et paix. ‘Next summer, Pierre will read War and Peace.’ L’été prochain, Pierre sera[fut.ind.] en train de lire[progr. periphrasis] Guerre et paix. ‘Next summer, Pierre will be (in the process of) reading War and Peace.’

Within the category of situation-internal time, Aktionsart expresses relatively objective distinctions between types of SoAs, such as the Vendlerian categories of states, activities, achievements and accomplishments (Vendler 1968, Hoepelman & Rohrer 1980) and modifications thereof (e.g. Comrie 1976: ch. 2; Moens & Steedman 1988; Smith 1991: ch. 2), according to parameters like dynamicity, telicity (i.e. orientation towards a specific goal), and durativity of the SoA. Thus, states are non-dynamic, atelic, and durative, cf. (5); activities are dynamic, atelic, and durative, cf. (6); accomplishments are dynamic, telic and durative, cf. (7)(8); while achievements are dynamic, telic, and non-durative (i.e. punctual), cf. (9). A fifth category may be distinguished, namely semelfactives, which are dynamic, atelic, and nondurative, (cf. Smith 1991: 30), cf. (10). Note that, as (6)-(8) show, it is not the verb itself that determines the Aktionsart of the SoA, but rather what Smith (1991: 7f) calls the entire “verb constellation”, consisting of the verb, its arguments, and any relevant adverbials. (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10)

Jean a les yeux bleux. ‘Jean has blue eyes.’ Jean a couru. ‘Jean ran.’ Jean a couru le marathon. ‘Jean ran the marathon.’ Jean a couru jusqu’à la porte. ‘Jean ran to the door.’ Jean a gagné le marathon. ‘Jean won the marathon.’ Jean a éternué. ‘Jean sneezed.’

Perfective / imperfective aspect, on the other hand, expresses the speaker’s more or less subjective perspective on the SoA, in terms of whether she envisages the SoA as an indivisible whole, in which case she will use perfective aspect, or rather wishes to focus on some part of it that is presented as on-going at TT, in which case imperfective aspect will be chosen (e.g. Comrie 1976: 4, Smith 1991: 6), cf. (1)-(2) above. As already implied in connection with exx. (1)-(4), any given clause will be endowed with a specific Aktionsart, but depending on the language in question and/or the tense used, it may or may not express aspectual distinctions. Moreover, as pointed out above, Aktionsart will be determined by a composite of the verb, its arguments, and any relevant adverbials, and it can thus be said to be expressed lexically. Aspect, on the other hand, will typically be expressed by morphosyntactic means, prominently involving modifications of the verb stem.

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The two situation-internal categories are, however, conceptually related in as much as the basic Aktionsart types may be broadly divided into two groups, namely events and states (Herweg 1992; Michaelis 1998: 6), where the former are conceived as individuals, and thus comprise accomplishments, achievements, and semelfactives, whereas the latter – comprising Vendler’s (1968) states and activities – are not. Basically, sentences in the perfective aspect present the denoted SoAs as individuals, as (if they constituted) events, whereas sentences in the imperfective aspect present SoAs as non-individuated, i.e. from an essentially stative viewpoint. Indeed, aspect (or aspectually sensitive forms) may in some cases be instrumental in coercing a derived interpretation of an SoA, i.e. forcing its transition from one Aktionsart type to a different type (Moens & Steedman 1988; Smith 1991: 27; De Swart 1998). For instance, in (11), the imperfective past is responsible for coercing the interpretation of an SoA denoting an accomplishment [WALK TO SCHOOL]LUC as a derived state, namely an habitual (cf. Kleiber 1987):2 (11)

Luc allait à l’école à pied. ‘Luc used to walk to school.’

Now, the precise classification of certain forms in at least some languages with respect to the three categories tense-aspect-Aktionsart has been the subject of much debate in the literature. The English present perfect is one of the most important examples (e.g. Comrie 1976: ch. 3; Kortmann 1991: 17f, Smith 1991: 146ff, Herweg 1992: 390; Klein 1992; Harder 1996: 323, Michaelis 1998: 3f): should this form be considered an aspect, a tense, or neither? At the most basic level, the present perfect can be analyzed as denoting a current state resulting from some completed past event, so if one focuses on the notion of completion of the past event, then the perfect will seem to belong with aspect, whereas if one focuses on the location of the past event relative to the current state, the perfect will appear to be a tense. Both Kortmann (1991: 20) and Michaelis (1998: 4) choose to consider the perfect a thing apart from either tense or viewpoint aspect as traditionally conceived: thus, Michaelis places it, along with the English progressive (be V-ing) and inceptive (e.g. start V-ing) constructions, in a separate category of “phasal aspect”. While she does use the term “aspect”, this type is crucially distinct from the more traditional category, which (following Smith 1991) might more precisely be termed “viewpoint aspect”, and which comprises the perfective and imperfective subtypes. The phasal aspects in Michaelis’ system are held to be relational, in as much as they indicate a relationship between a particular TT (or, in her terms, “reference time”) and the degree of development of the verbal process (Michaelis 1998: 4).3 As such they indicate situation-external time. At the same time, they also express situation-internal time, in as much as they habitually map event propositions onto state propositions or vice versa. Thus, for instance, the present perfect is, as we will see below, basically an imperfectivizing operator denoting a present state resulting from a past event. Hence, they count, according to Michaelis 2

Co Vet (p.c.) points out that the usual test for state-hood vs event-hood, namely combinability with a durational adverbial in pendant or en, does not work here, as the imperfective past is not compatible with the expression of temporal boundedness, cf. (i): (i) * Luc allait à l’école[imp. past] à pied pendant trois ans. ’Luc walked to school for three years.’ This incompatibility is accounted for in De Swart’s (1998) model, where the imperfective past is – as already mentioned in note 1 above – analyzed not as an aspectual operator in the strict sense, but as an aspectually sensitive tense form. As such, it takes wide scope over durational adverbials, and the use of the imperfective past in (i) thus forces the absurd interpretation that the habitual duration of Luc’s walk to school was three years. 3 Klein (1992: 537) analyzes perfect aspect in general as indicating that TT is posterior to TSit.

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(1998: 69), as “override constructions”, in that they will systematically shift the Aktionsart value of the lexical material in the clause in case of conflict. Kortmann (1991: 24), for his part, proposes a four-way distinction within the domain of time between tense, aspect, Aktionsart and “orientation”, the latter category comprising the present perfect (which he prefers to call “anterior”) and the “posterior”, or prospective, construction (e.g. be going to V). He then posits the existence of two separate continua, which he defines with the aid of three parameters: grammatical / lexical, deictic / non-deictic, and situationinternal / situation-external, and whose endpoints are constituted by the four notional categories mentioned. Thus, tense and orientation form the endpoints of a continuum of situation-external time, and both are, prominently, expressed by grammatical means,4 but while tense is deictic, orientation is non-deictic (i.e. relational in Michaelis’ terms). Aspect and Aktionsart, on the other hand, form the endpoints of a continuum of situation-internal time, and both are non-deictic in nature, aspect being grammatically expressed, and Aktionsart lexically expressed (Kortmann 1991: 19ff). Although, at the extensional level, the category of orientation and that of phasal aspect are held by their inventors to have partially different membership, there are nevertheless obvious similarities between them from the intensional point of view, given that both are said to express situation-external time in a fundamentally relational manner. For present purposes, I will therefore treat these categories as conflatable, and refer to them as phasal aspect in the remainder of this study.5 This choice of terminology is, of course, intended to suggest that phasal aspect is relevant to the analysis of phasal adverbs, as, indeed, is also the position of Michaelis (1998: 177ff) and – although they do not use the terms – of a number of authors preceding her.

2.2

The linguistic expression of time: adverbials

Notions of time can, of course, also be expressed in language through the use of adverbials. Various broad distinctions between semantic classes of adverbials have been proposed in the literature (e.g. Quirk et al. 1972: 482ff; Allerton & Cruttenden 1978: 156f; Vet 1980: 105; Grevisse 1988: 1464). The taxonomies are not precisely identical from one author to the next, but they do tend to overlap to quite a large extent. Here, I will follow Quirk et al. (1972: 482ff) in assuming the existence of four classes as follows: 1. Adverbials of temporal location, which denote the topic time TT of the SoA denoted by the clause. As (12)-(13) show, adverbials of temporal location may be deictic or non-deictic. They may also denote either a point in time at which the SoA takes place or a temporal interval within which the SoA is situated, cf. (14) vs (12): (12) (13)

En novembre 2003, Arthur Duschnok a réussi la quadrature du cercle. ‘In November 2003, Arthur Duschnok succeeded in squaring the circle.’ Avant-hier, Arthur Duschnok a réussi la quadrature du cercle.

4 Kortmann (1991) is principally concerned with verbal categories, and therefore classifies both tense and orientation as grammatically expressed, without qualification. However, clearly, situation-external time may be coded by adverbials, i.e. lexically, as well. 5 I will deliberately eschew a detailed discussion of whether or not certain specific forms, such as the inceptive construction, properly do or do not belong in the category, as this does not appear to be of crucial importance to the present study.

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(14)

‘The day before yesterday, Arthur Duschnok succeeded in squaring the circle.’ A exactement 15h42, Arthur Duschnok a réussi la quadrature du cercle. ‘At exactly 3 :42 pm, Arthur Duschnok succeeded in squaring the circle.’

2. Durational adverbials, which denote the length of the interval during which a given SoA holds. Some of these may also wholly or partially indicate the “time-when” of the SoA, cf. (16)-(17): (15)

(16)

(17)

Pendant deux heures, Arthur Duschnok a essayé de résoudre la quadrature du cercle. ‘For two hours, Arthur Duschnok tried to solve the problem of squaring the circle.’ De 1998 à 2003, Arthur Duschnok a passé tout son temps à essayer de résoudre la quadrature du cercle. ‘Between 1998 and 2003, Arthur Duschnok spent all his time trying to solve the problem of squaring the circle.’ Depuis 1998, Arthur Duschnok essaye désespérément de résoudre la quadrature du cercle. ‘Since 1998, Arthur Duschnok has been desparately trying to solve the problem of squaring the circle.’

3. Adverbials of quantification, which denote the frequency of occurrence of the SoA (cf. de Swart 1991). This frequency may be definitely or indefinitely specified, cf. (18)-(19): (18)

(19)

Arthur Duschnok a essayé de résoudre la quadrature du cercle trois fois. ‘Arthur Duschnok has tried to solve the problem of squaring the circle three times.’ Arthur Duschnok a souvent essayé de résoudre la quadrature du cercle. ‘Arthur Duschnok has often tried to solve the problem of squaring the circle.’

4. “Relational” adverbials, comprising sequential adverbials (cf. (20)) and our phasal adverbs, both types expressing, in different ways, relations between at least two SoAs (the precise way in which phasal adverbs are relational will be discussed more fully below): (20)

D’abord, Arthur Duschnok a réussi la quadrature du cercle ; ensuite il est passé à l’étude de la mémoire de l’eau. ‘First, Arthur Duschnok succeeded in squaring the circle; next, he went on to study the memory of water.’

The relational, as opposed to absolute, nature of the meaning of phasal adverbs is no doubt responsible for two properties noted by van Baar (1990: 4, citing Vandeweghe 1978), namely the fact that: 1. They can never by themselves be the answer to a when-question: (21)

A. When did you see him? − B. *Already / Still / Finally.

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2. They do not change the temporal reference point of the host clause, and they do not help to fix it either. 6 These four categories of adverbials can be paired two by two, according to whether they have to do with situation-external or situation-internal time. Thus, adverbs of temporal location and “relational” adverbs denote situation-external time, whereas durational adverbials and adverbials of quantification denote situation-internal time.

2.3

Interaction of phasal adverbs with aspect and Aktionsart

Although some later authors (e.g. König 1977, Vet 1980) still refer to them as adverbs of time, the aspectual nature of phasal adverbs is emphasized at least as early as Traugott & Waterhouse (1969: 287), who note the existence of a close connection between verbal aspect and the possibility of occurrence of English already and yet, a line of inquiry that is further developed by Martin (1980), Hoepelman & Rohrer (1980), and Michaelis (1992, 1993, 1996). Thus, it is observed (Traugott & Waterhouse 1969: 287; Michaelis 1992: 322) that already is closely connected with the perfect, in particular the so-called resultative perfect, which most directly denotes a present state resulting from a past event (Michaelis 1992: 324; Comrie 1976: 56).7 Indeed, already and its counterparts in other languages appear at first sight to carry a necessary implication of a change of state, as evidenced by the fact that they do not felicitously occur in gnomic, i.e. eternally true, statements: (22) (23)

Two plus two (?already) make four. Deux plus deux font (?déjà) quatre.

However, the apparent infelicity of (22)-(23) does not entail that such sentences can never occur: indeed, as (24) shows, if a special universe of discourse is created such that the gnomicity of such statements is qualified or actively canceled, then they will be perfectly acceptable: 8 6 Van Baar (1990: 4) argues further that phasal adverbs are distinct from other adverbials of time in not influencing the truth value of the host clause. Thus, he says, if (i) is true, then (ii) is true as well: (i) He’s already/still/finally here. (ii) He’s here. Actually, in that direction, the implication would seem to hold of a great many adverbials, temporal or not, so the real question is whether the opposite implication, i.e. from (ii) to (i), also holds. That, however, is much less clear; especially, perhaps, where already and finally are concerned. Personally, I tend to find it true, but in most contexts strongly misleading, to say He’s already here, even if the referent of the subject pronoun has been present at the speaker’s location for quite some time, and has not arrived prior to the expected time. In the same way, it will be true, but misleading, to say that He’s finally here, even if the referent of the subject pronoun has again been present for some time, and the time of his arrival is in no way late as compared with a set of contextually relevant expectations. In the contexts sketched, I would certainly preface such utterances with a # designating pragmatic infelicity, but an asterisk seems too strong. 7 The so-called experiential perfect (cf. (i)), on the other hand, denotes a past event that might conceivably recur at present, while the continuative perfect denotes a past state that continues into the present (cf. Michaelis 1998: 9f). Note that this latter variant is not found in the Romance languages, which prefer to use an inclusive present tense in such cases, cf. (ii)-(iii), which have the same meaning: (i) I have been to China [at some time in the past]. (ii) J’habite[pr.ind.] à Londres depuis cinq ans. (iii) I have lived in London for five years [and I still live there now]. 8 What already does in this example is, of course, to point out a discrepancy between Smith’s belief world and what speaker B takes to be reality.

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(24)

A. Smith believes that whoever devises a theory of mathematics in which two plus two make four will get the Nobel Prize. B. But two plus two already make four!

On the other hand, in languages like French and Italian, which distinguish not only between perfect and past, but also between perfective and imperfective aspect within the past tense, phasal déjà and già normally occur only with the imperfective (Martin 1980: 176; Hoepelman & Rohrer 1980: 128): (25) (26) (27) (28)

?* Il travailla[perf.past] déjà. ?* Già lavorò[perf.past]. ‘He already worked.’ Il travaillait[imperf.past] déjà. Già lavorava[imperf.past]. ‘He was already working.’

This means that, in these languages, where the perfect (or passé compose / passato prossimo) doubles, as is well known, for the perfective past in less formal registers, the presence of déjà/già in a clause whose verb is in the passé compose / passato prossimo will normally disambiguate the verb form and impose the perfect, rather than the perfective past, interpretation. To the extent that utterances like (25)-(26) are found at all in actual discourse (and rare examples do exist), the particle will either scope a constituent smaller that the sentence, not including the verb, and it will thus be functioning as a focus particle rather than as a standard sentence adverbial (cf. (29)-(30) where the temporal adverb can be argued to constitute the scope of déjà/già; see further ch. 6, sect. 6.1); or else the combination of particle and perfective aspect will imply at least virtual iteration of the SoA in question (cf. (31)). (29) (30) (31)

Il naquit[perf.past] déjà en 1900. Naquè[perf.past] già nel 1900. ‘He was born as early as 1900.’ J’étais encore dans ma tendre enfance, et aux bras de ma nourrice, quand ma nature cruelle et farouche montra[perf.past] déjà sa barbarie. (Camus, quoted in the Trésor de la langue française 1978: 1005) ‘I was still in my infancy, and hanging on the arms of my nurse, when my cruel and unsociable nature already began to show its barbarity.’

As for encore, Martin (1980: 176) observes that, basically, the continuative (or “phasal”) reading of that particle is compatible only with atelic predicates in imperfective aspect, cf. (32). Encore-sentences with telic predicates in the imperfective (cf. (33)), or with predicates of either Aktionsart type bearing perfect (cf. (34)) or perfective (cf. (35)) aspect, will thus be interpreted iteratively, he says. Vet (1980 : 154) notes that the same holds for telic predicates in the present tense, cf. (36): (32) (33)

Les enfants dormaient encore. ‘The children were still sleeping.’ Pierre sortait encore avec Jeanne. ‘Pierre still went out with Jeanne.’

General Properties of Phasal Adverbs Across Languages (34) (35) (36)

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Pierre était encore sorti avec Jeanne. ‘Pierre had once again gone out with Jeanne.’ Pierre sortit encore avec Jeanne. ‘Pierre once again went out with Jeanne.’ Pierre sort encore avec Jeanne. ‘Pierre still goes out/is once again going out with Jeanne.’

I would, however, prefer to modify Martin’s and Vet’s accounts, and argue instead that the basic constraint on phasal encore is that it can occur only with imperfective aspect, irrespective of the Aktionsart of the predicate,9 and that those authors’ grouping of examples like (33) and (36) with (34)-(35), rather than with (32), can be attributed to an unwarranted conflation of the interpretation of encore itself with the interpretation of the SoA denoted by the sentence. Thus, with respect to (33), it is true that, due to the telicity of the predicate SORTIR AVEC QUELQU’UN (‘to go out with someone’) the SoA in itself must be interpreted habitually (as opposed to iteratively), but, given that – as noted above – habituals can be analyzed as derived states, encore nevertheless retains a continuative reading, such that our global understanding of the sentence is one in which Pierre continued, during some past interval, to go out with Jeanne on an unspecified number of occasions. The same holds for one of the two possible interpretations of (36), except that TT is here located in the speaker’s present rather than in her past. Martin (1980: 177) goes on to say that a continuative interpretation of encore is possible with atelic verbs in the perfective, but only if the particle scopes a constituent below the sentence level, as in (37), where it takes the durational adverb deux heures in its scope. In ch. 6, sect. 6.1 infra, I will analyze encore in this use as a temporal focus particle: (37)

Les enfants dormirent[perf.past] encore deux heures. ‘The children slept for another two hours.’

As suggested by Michaelis (1992: 324), the compatibility of déjà / already etc. with both the perfect and the imperfective, as opposed to the perfective aspect, can be explained if the perfect is analyzed as an imperfective operator, which maps eventualities of any kind onto state predications (see also Hoepelman & Rohrer 1980: 130; Herweg 1992: 390; De Swart 1998: 353f), such that the subject of a verb in the perfect is in fact described as being in an unalterable state of having done something (or of having had something done to him / her / it). Thus, in (38), it is not as much the past action of invading France that is being predicated of the U.S. Army, as it is the present (and permanent) property of having invaded France: (38)

The U.S. Army has invaded France.

Let us refer to the SoA scoped by a phasal adverb (whatever its Aktionsart) by the variable e, and to the non-instantiation of that SoA as ~e. The above considerations allow us – largely following Doherty (1973: 175) – to say that in their basic phasal use, déjà and its equivalents assert that at least the inception of the SoA e expressed in their host sentence has taken place prior to topic time TT. Moreover, it must be the case that e still holds at TT, given that imperfective situations are held to subsume their topic time (cf. Partee 1984: 255, who prefers the term “reference point” where I speak of topic time). Encore and its equivalents, on the

9

This also appears to be the position of Hoepelman & Rohrer (1980).

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other hand, assert the continued existence of the SoA e at TT, such that e must have been the case for at least some time prior to TT. Due to their focus on the beginning of the SoA in question, déjà and corresponding particles in other languages have been classified as inchoative markers by several authors (e.g. Muller 1975; van der Auwera 1993, 1998; van Baar 1997), whereas particles like encore, which focus on some middle (i.e. non-initial and non-final) part of the SoA are classified as continuatives. As such, phasal adverbs qualify as “superlexical” morphemes in the terminology of Smith (1991: 75ff), that is, as morphemes that present SoAs from a narrowed point of view, focusing on a specific internal stage of the SoA rather than specifying its content.10 Although the above descriptions of the respective semantics of the two markers in their phasal uses suggest that they will be truth-conditionally equivalent in many (if not all) cases, the difference in aspectual focus explains why only déjà, and not encore, is compatible with the perfect aspect: by denoting a state resulting from a prior situation (cf. Comrie 1976: 52), the perfect at the very least strongly suggests a change of state, and thus naturally comes to attract attention to the beginning of the state it denotes. Such a focus is entirely in line with the semantic specification of déjà, but it conflicts with that of encore. In terms of their compatibility with verbal aspect, phasal enfin would appear to observe the same constraints as déjà, while phasal toujours patterns with encore.

2.4

Perspectivity

The notion of perspectivity was introduced by Vandeweghe (1992: 47ff; as well as earlier work, cited in Löbner 1989 and van Baar 1990) in connection with the phasal adverbs of Dutch (principally al [‘already’] and nog [‘still’]). In marking a potential or actual transition between a given SoA and its opposite in terms of polarity, individual phasal adverbs contrast along the dimension of perspectivity by being oriented either towards the past or the future. Now, the relational nature of phasal adverbs mentioned above is constituted precisely by this property of implicitly locating the SoA in their scope with respect to some other past or present SoA, and it is in virtue thereof that we may classify them as belonging to the category of phasal aspect (or orientation), as defined above. A possible objection to such a classification is the fact that, as pointed out by van Baar (1990: 25ff), the form of prospectivity found in encore / still etc., where the speaker is looking ahead to the moment at which the SoA will end, is not identical to the traditional notion of prospectivity found, for instance, in temporal periphrases like English be going to, where the speaker is rather looking ahead to the moment at which the SoA will become actual. However, while it is, of course, important to point this out in order to prevent misinterpretations, I do not think it vitiates the subsumption of phasal adverbs under the category of phasal aspect as such.

10 This accounts for Muller’s (1975: 32ff) intuition that déjà is related to the verb commencer à V [‘begin to V’], and encore to the verb continuer à V [‘continue to V’], since these verbs are also superlexical in nature according to Smith (1991: 75ff). However, Muller is clearly wrong to claim that the superlexical verbs can constitute straightforward paraphrases of the phasal adverbs.

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Van Baar (1990: 25ff) also claims (contra Vandeweghe 1992: 47) that whereas the traditional notion has to do with situation-external time, both retro- and prospectivity in Vandeweghe’s model rather concern situation-internal time. This interpretation is, I believe, strictly speaking incorrect, given that, as we have just seen, perspectivity in Vandeweghe’s sense has to do with the temporal location of one SoA with respect to a different one, and this is, in fact, a matter of situation-external time. At the same time, of course, the fact that phasal adverbs are also superlexical, and thus focus on different internal stages of SoAs, does make them partake of situation-internal time as well. As this difficulty of categorization is largely analogous to what we have seen to be the case with the present perfect (cf. sect. 2.1 supra), I choose to maintain the hypothesized overarching category of phasal aspect intact. I would like to point out, however, that, on a different dimension, phasal adverbs, like traditional viewpoint aspect, are essentially subjective in nature. Thus, just as, in French, one and the same past event may frequently be recounted in either the perfective or the imperfective past, according to the speaker’s subjective viewpoint and the current focus of the discourse, so speakers may often choose to perspectivize one and the same SoA in different ways, depending on contextually relevant assumptions and expectations, and on the argumentational aim of the utterance. That speakers are thus expressing a subjective stance when using a phasal adverb even in its basic sense is presumably a not unimportant factor in the development of the various context-level (i.e. modal and discourse-oriented) senses of these items. (These senses will be dealt with in depth in ch. 7 infra.) Returning to the perspectivity parameter, déjà / already / schon / al are then retrospective adverbs, because they mark that the transition between the SoAs ~e and e has taken place in the past, whereas encore / still / noch / nog are prospective, given that they mark the transition between e and ~e as being a potential future occurrence. Thus, from (39), we will normally infer that there was some point in time preceding TT at which Marie was not here, and similarly, from (40), we will tend to infer that there may come a point in time following TT at which Marie will no longer be here. Hence, as pointed out by Vandeweghe (1992: 1), phasal adverbs tend to add to their host clause a sense of dynamicity, in the form of a suggestion of actual or possible temporal evolution of the described situation (cf. the unmarked (41), which contains no such element of dynamicity): (39) (40) (41)

Marie est déjà là. ‘Marie is already here.’ Marie est encore là. ‘Marie is still here.’ Marie est là. ‘Marie is here.’

For Vandeweghe, perspectivity is closely tied up with two further parameters, namely polarity and direction of sequence (1992: 102). Thus, Dutch al is said to contrast with nog in terms of retrospectiveness vs prospectiveness. However, the above examples suggest that they might both function as markers of positive polarity, in as much as both sentences entail the existence of the positive SoA e at R. Dutch niet meer (‘no longer’) and nog niet (‘not yet’), on the other hand, would function as, respectively, retrospective and prospective markers of negative polarity.11 By analogy, we would expect the same to be true of their French equivalents ne…plus and ne…pas encore given that we may infer from (42) that there was some point in 11 As the title of his book indicates, van Baar (1997) makes the expression of polarity the main feature of the semantic contribution made by phasal adverbs to their host clause.

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time preceding TT at which the positive SoA [BE AROUND]MARIE was actual, but that it has become non-actual at TT; and similarly, from (43), that there may come a point in time following TT at which the positive SoA [ARRIVE]MARIE will become actual, but that it is nonactual at TT: (42) (43)

Marie n’est plus là. ‘Marie is no longer around.’ Marie n’est pas encore arrivée. ‘Marie has not yet arrived.’

The second parameter with which perspectivity is intimately connected in Vandeweghe’s model is direction of sequence, from positive to negative (i.e. e → ~e) or vice versa. This, of course, follows directly from the combination of perspectivity and polarity. Thus, al is said to mark the sequence neg → pos; nog to mark the sequence pos → neg; niet meer pos → neg; and nog niet neg → pos. Again, given examples such as (39)-(43), it is tempting to extend the model to the corresponding particles of other languages, including French, by analogy. While I am not competent to take a stand on the nature of the Dutch particles, I will, however, maintain that, as far as French is concerned, the analogy must be resisted. Thus, neither déjà nor encore is inherently a marker of positive polarity, as not only the existence of the collocation ne...pas encore, but also that of authentic examples like (44), in which déjà falls under the scope of negation, and (44)-(46), in both of which déjà / encore clearly takes the sentence negation in its scope, show:12 (44)

(45)

– Tu vois, Montale, ça m’étonne que tu ne l’aies pas déjà fait. A ta place, moi, j’aurais commencé par là. (Jean-Claude Izzo, Chourmo, 1996, p. 190 – from Frantext) ‘You see, Montale, I’m surprised that you haven’t already done so. If I were you, I’d have done that first.’ Je n’étais déjà pas d’accord avec les communistes avant l’affaire des camps, ce n’est pas maintenant que je vais me jeter dans leurs bras. (S. de Beauvoir, Les mandarins, 1954, from Frantext)13

12 It will be shown in ch. 6, sect. 4.2, that Old French encore could actually function on its own as a negative polarity item in questions and conditionals. Such a use is admittedly marginal in contemporary French, but not, it appears, entirely non-existent. 13 Co Vet (p.c.) has expressed doubts about the interpretation of déjà in this example as phasal, and feels that its function might rather be modal / argumentational in nature (cf. ch. 7, sect. 2 infra). However, I would argue that the fact that we have a clearly temporal adverbial avant l’affaire des camps in the same clause, and a contrasting, just as clearly temporal, adverbial maintenant in the following clause is a fairly strong indication that déjà here does, indeed, have its basic phasal sense. Thus, I take S. de Beauvoir to be asserting that her lack of agreement with prevailing Communist views had begun prior to a topic time fixed by avant l’affaire des camps, and that this lack of agreement continues at utterance time (marked by maintenant). Indeed, other examples of phasal déjà