Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen

University of Copenhagen

In French, as in a number of other languages (including English and German), aspectual particles like déjà (‘already’), encore (‘still’, ‘yet’), toujours (‘always’, ‘still’), and enfin (‘finally’) appear prone to develop additional, non-aspectual uses, including, prominently, discourse marking uses of various kinds.

This paper will take an in-depth look at the two particles déjà and encore, whose uses include, but are not limited to, ones such as the following:

Durativity:

(1) Il dort déjà/encore (‘He’s already/still sleeping’)

Iterativity:

(2) Tu as déjà/encore mangé des calamars ? (‘Have you eaten squid before/ Did you eat squid again?’)

(Potential) incrementation:

(3) Apportez-lui déjà/encore un demi (‘Bring him a beer to start with/another beer’)

Marginality:

(4) Un pingouin, c’est déjà/encore un oiseau (‘A penguin is after all/still a bird)

(Counter-)argumentation:

(5) J’ai bien aimé ce film : déjà, c’est original, et puis il y a de très belles photos (‘I liked this movie: for one thing, it’s original, and then there are some very beautiful shots’)

(6) En 2002, 60% des Français seront équipés de téléphones portables. Et encore, ce rythme de croissance reste modeste par rapport à d’autres pays européens (‘In 2002, 60% of French people will own portable phones. Nevertheless, this growth rate is modest compared to other European countries’)

Appeal to the interlocutor:

(7) Comment il s’appelait, déjà/encore, ce resto ? (‘What was the name of that restaurant now/again?’)

The above examples are not meant to suggest that the semantics of one particle perfectly mirrors that of the other. In fact, there are significant asymmetries of both meaning and frequency of use, and it would, moreover, appear that the evolution of encore has consistently preceded that of déjà. It is as if the language is striving towards the establishment of a mini-paradigm, but that the original meanings of the particles acts as constraints on their evolution.

Arguing that these particles should be seen as polysemous, rather than as having a single abstract core meaning, I will attempt to reconstruct the semantic networks underlying their different uses, putting special emphasis on their evolution towards discourse uses of various kinds. In so doing, I will focus on metonymy as the relevant mechanism of semantic extension and on the notion of increasing subjectivity as a further explanatory factor.