Contenu du sommaire : La Scalarité

The contribution aims to determine whether N can be gradable or not. The author adopts a narrow view of gradation and, after trying to draw the line between false gradable nouns and real ones, she shows that only two categories of nouns are suitable for nominal gradation : the massive N and plurals. These categories present indeed a continuous gradation.

The paper presents an analysis of Scalar Exclamatives in French. Are excluded from the study Parangon Exclamatives (e.g. Quel chapeau il portrait ! What a hat he had !). Scalar exclamative words (SEW) belong to several morpho-syntactic classes : adverbs (si, tant, tellement), adjectives (tel), WH-adverbs (combien, que (de N), comme, comment) or complementizers (comme, que, ce que, qu'est-ce que, si). For space reason, only exclamatives with Adjectives or Adjective Phrases are considered in the study. The main claim is that SEWs are ordinary degree modifiers. Qua modifiers, they select the Adjectives or APs they modify : they require the degree to be unequal to a threshold or a standard. Moreover, they are not felicitous with explicit boosters. The main implication of the study is that the specificity of Scalar Exclamatives does not hinge on degree semantics. Reference is made to another study in which it is analyzed in terms of ego-evidentiality.

From the 17th to the 20th centuries, the interpretation of comme P ( “ how S ”) in argumental position related to savoir ( “ to know ”) has changed : such sentences initially interpreted with an interrogative meaning acquire an exclamative interpretation in the 19th century. This evolution is correlated with the value of the main clause on the one hand, and of the embedded one on the other. The latter is examined in this paper. It is shown that there is a change in the lexical categorie of the items comme is depending on, but that scalarity is not sufficient to explain differences between interrogative and exclamative meanings.

Although the relationship between quantification and qualification –two universal linguistic functions in functional typological perspective– has been pointed out by several authors (such as Bally, Roggero and Molinier & Levrier), it does not seem to have been systematised thoroughly. This paper intends to analyse in what this relationship consists and how it is expressed in a concrete grammatical category : French adverbs in -ment, which, as Bally also said, are especially adequate for this kind of research. The corpus analysis is composed by 156 lexical adverbs (extracted from two French dictionaries –Le Petit Robert Électronique and Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé) with at least one quantificational sense. By applying four analysis variables, the comparison of the root adjective sense (s) and that (or those) of the corresponding derived adverb has allowed us to establish a scalar typology of the semantic changes observed between both categories, composed by six types (from objective quantification to subjective quantification and qualification) which shows that quantification is always derived from qualification and that the relationship between both functions is gradual, progressive and scalar.

The author demonstrates that the expression jusqu'à un certain point functions either as an “ endophrasal ” adverbial with quantifier or limitative values, either as an “ exophrasal ” adverbial used then to assess, from the outside, the adequacy or truth of an element of the predicate (narrow scope) or an entire statement (wide scope). Jusqu'à un certain point refers to the bottom of a scale, characteristic that predisposes to the function of co-concessive marker. The expression, initially a free prepositional phrase, acquires a modal value through a process of metaphoric transposition where space refers abstractly to definitional aspects that allow to use a particular term.

This article is about the meaning of the French adverb seulement and focuses on various uses which constitute challenges to traditional analyses : seulement in rhetorical questions and seulement which loses its restrictive meaning when associated with a temporal argument. It is argued that these various uses can be accounted for in a unified way, if one subtitutes to a two dimensional analysis, based on the distinction between assertion and presupposition, a three dimensional analysis, considering also implicatures triggered by the adverb. We claim that seulement, when it is associated with A in the sentence P (A), conveys three different types of contents : a negative one (no more than A is P), which corresponds to the assertive part, a positive one (at least A is P), which corresponds to the presuppositional part, and a scalar one (A is low on a contextually relevant scale), which is responsible for semantic and pragmatic effects such as the bias in questions and the evaluative or modal flavour in certain assertions. The article also shows that the associate of seulement may be a constituent or a word, but also a functional category such as the illocutionary force or the tense phrase.

In the field of numerals and temporal indications, there are markers specialized in the approximation of quantifying and temporal items, such as vers, environ, proche de, à peu près. These markers indicate the approximate position of a value relative to another value of the scale. The aim of the paper is to analyze the origins of scalarity (and non-scalarity) within this group of markers of temporal and numerical approximation, markers which are derived from prepositions or prepositional phrases.

By analysing a corpus of occurrences of quantifying scalar markers (au) tant (... que), and the different meaning effects produced according to their syntactic scope, this contribution aims at showing that the concept of scalarity deserves to be considered, beside that of quantification, as a relevant methodological tool.