L’adverbe alias en français

According to dictionary definitions, the adverb alias in French seems to be a metalinguistic adverb and a kind of marker of paraphrastic reformulation. However, its semantic value is not reduced to these two characteristics: not only does it have non-metalinguistic uses, but its strictly metalinguistic and paraphrastic uses appear, in fact, rather marginal. Its principal uses are betwixt and between, since they blend information about the referent and its names.