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Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles: New perspectives
Edited by Chiara Fedriani and Andrea Sansó
[Studies in Language Companion Series 186] 2017
► pp. 459–480

Chapter 17
Just a suggestion

just/e in French and English

| University of the West of England, Bristol

This article aims to illustrate what a contrastive perspective, combined with sociolinguistic and corpus approaches, can bring to the investigation of the evolution of pragmatic functions which emerge through language contact (Ingham 2012a) and pragmatic borrowing (Andersen 2014). A recent collection of articles (Lauwers, Vanderbauwhede & Verleyen (eds) 2012) draws attention to the light which cognate forms and ‘false friends’ can shed on pragmaticalisation and semantic change. Sociolinguistic studies drawing on corpora of spoken interaction, which are tagged for demographic features, particularly speakers’ age and gender, coupled with modified matched-guise attitudinal studies, show that the use of new functions of pragmaticalising items reflects the incrementation model, posited by Labov (2001), with concomitant indexical obsolescence (Eckert 2014) of the older functions. The approach is illustrated for juste/just, and the conclusions confirm Dostie’s (2009) thesis that items whose meaning predisposes them to become pragmaticalised may do so to a greater extent in one region/language than in another.

Keywords: contrastive analysis, language contact, pragmatic borrowing, intensifier, mitigator
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The role of French in the history of English
  • 3.Regional variation, ‘false friends’ and pragmaticalisation
  • 4.External and socio-interactional factors, (cognitive) regularities and the role of persistence in semantic change
  • 5.The main senses of just/e in English and French
  • 6.Are just/juste false friends? A comparison of distributional frequencies and usages in English and French
    • 6.1Distributional frequencies
    • 6.2Justement
    • 6.3Intensifying juste: La Tour Eiffel est juste immense
    • 6.4Towards a semantic map for just/juste
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.186.18bee
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