Languages in Contrast - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2010

Functional linguists are in general agreement that semantic change may be triggered as part of the negotiation of meaning in interactional contexts: a ‘one-off’ contextual implicature generalises to become a new core meaning of a lexical item (Traugott and Dasher, 2002). In what ways, however, does the ‘one-off’ contextual implicature arise? Why would one language develop one aspect of meaning and another a different one? And how or why does it generalise and become a coded part of the structure of that particular language? Hansen (2008: 228) notes that “close crosslinguistic comparisons of the polysemies of semantically related items […] should turn out to be highly relevant” in this respect. ‘False friends’, forms deriving from a common etymon which have developed different meanings in different languages, offer useful insights. This paper presents lexicographic and spoken synchronic data on two false friends in French and English, effectivement/‘effectively’ and finalement/‘finally’, and explores the cognitive processes involved in their recruitment for interactional functions. The factors which are influential in the development of hedging usages of the terms are overviewed and the contribution that a detailed synchronic study of the semantics of false friends can make to the study of semantic change is evaluated.

Despite their formal resemblance, the English word ‘actually’ and the French word actuellement fulfil very different semantic-pragmatic functions in their present-day usage. In most cases they are ‘false friends’, as they overlap in meaning in a very limited number of contexts only. Since these words can — directly or indirectly (through borrowing) — be traced back to the same origin, their present-day meanings indicate that the words have followed different paths of change. It is the aim of the present article to trace the semantic-pragmatic developments of these words through a detailed examination of the discursive contexts in which they have occurred from their first attestations in the languages concerned until the present time. In this way, the subtle transitions from one meaning to another are laid bare. In addition, the cross-linguistic perspective offers insight into how polysemy may develop in different directions. The analyses are based on French and English monolingual corpus data, both synchronic and diachronic. In addition, translation corpus data provide further evidence for the semantics of the two adverbs. The results of the empirical analysis are interpreted within the framework of pragmaticalization and (inter)subjectification.

The English degree adverb absolutely and its Spanish equivalent absolutamente may function as modifiers of words of different kinds, as Adjuncts and as (parts of) minor clauses. This article sets forth a quantitative analysis, based on naturally-occurring linguistic data, of the distribution of these functions for both adverbs. Apart from distributional differences between the two adverbs and between their occurrences in spoken and written language, the results show that when they are modifiers of words or Verbal Group-oriented Adjuncts, their main function is to qualify (part of) the propositional content of the utterance; however, when they are clausal Adjuncts or (parts of) minor clauses, they are often geared to the performance of discourse functions such as contrast, concession or agreement. These functions are shared with some adverbs of certainty such as ‘certainly’ or ‘definitely’, which suggests that the semantic difference between degree and certainty tends to be blurred when adverbs of maximal strength of both types are used for performing discourse functions that enhance assertiveness.

This article is a synchronic study of the imperatives of intentional visual perception as pragmatic markers in English and Dutch. It examines the frequency of ‘look’ and kijk in spoken language, the types of text in which they occur and, above all, the way in which they are used. On the basis of cross-linguistic data from Romance, the article explores the development of the various uses of the imperative of intentional visual perception. It also addresses the question whether this development is a case of grammaticalization or not.

In this paper, we investigate the evolution from imperatives to discourse markers in Romance, with a corpus-based approach. We focus on the case of items coming from verbs meaning ‘to look’, in a semasiological perspective: Spanish and Catalan mira, Portuguese olha, Italian guarda, French regarde, Romanian uite. We show that they all share many uses, among which turn-taking, introduction of reported speech, hesitation phenomenon, topic-shifting and modalization, except for French regarde. We then establish (against Waltereit, 2002) that the development of these uses is the result of a process of grammaticalization, from lexical, clause-internal uses to uses as discourse markers, in a cline which tends to confirm the predictions made by Brinton and Traugott (2005). The lesser grammaticalization of French regarde could seem unimportant, but is in apparent contradiction with the now well-established fact that French is, of all Romance languages, the most grammaticalized. We try, in conclusion, to address this paradox: is French not so grammaticalized after all, or is this just an exception to the rule?