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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2021

Then and now in English and French: Parallel patterns?

Diana M Lewis

Résumé

English 'now' and 'then' and French 'maintenant' and 'alors' all exemplify the crosslinguistic tendency for temporal adverbs to grammaticalize into markers of rhetorical relations. This paper analyses the polysemy of these adverbs in a comparable corpus of written-to-be-spoken speeches and unscripted spoken interviews. For 'now' and 'maintenant', while the discourse patterns and the direction of change are remarkably similar, French and English seem to be at different points in the grammaticalization cycle, with 'maintenant' being less grammaticalized than 'now'. In the case of 'alors' and 'then', it is the French lexeme that appears to be more bleached, occurring in a wider range of rhetorical contexts and in different discourse patterns from English 'then'.

Domaines

Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-03266183 , version 1 (21-06-2021)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03266183 , version 1

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Diana M Lewis. Then and now in English and French: Parallel patterns?. Anna Čermáková; Thomas Egan; Hilde Hasselgård; Sylvi Rørvik. Time in Languages, Languages in Time, Benjamins, pp.181-200, 2021. ⟨hal-03266183⟩
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