The semantics of particles: advantages of a contrastive and panchronic approach: a study of the polysemy of French deja and Italian gia (1).(Report)

Abstract

In this article, we propose a contrastive, panchronic method of semantic-pragmatic analysis, which we find particularly useful for uncovering the subtle distinctions of meaning and use that are characteristic of particle(-like expression)s in many languages. By way of illustration, we offer an in-depth analysis of the synchronic uses and diachronic development of two cognate particles from two Romance languages, namely French deja and Italian gia, equivalent in some of their most salient uses to English already. Synchronically, we have identified fifteen different uses of deja and gift, of which eight are shared between the two particles. We argue that both the gradual diachronic expansion of the range of uses of both items, and the small, but nevertheless clear, differences of use among the two that we observe in synchrony, support an analysis in terms of polysemy, as opposed to monosemy. What we propose is in the first instance a synchronic description of the two particles. The diachronic facts adduced are principally used to support our contention that deja and gia are polysemous, and as an additional tool for identifying which uses should be regarded as separate senses.

1. Introduction

The semantics and pragmatics of aspectual particles like English already, still and yet, and their equivalents in other languages, have been the object of a running discussion at least since Traugott and Waterhouse (1969). A central question has been how to appropriately represent the coded meaning of these items, given that, crosslinguistically, they not only tend to be polyfunctional, but are, in almost all their uses, non-truth-conditional, and invariably incorporate reference to contextual assumptions of various kinds as a crucial part of their meaning.

In this article, we propose a contrastive, panchronic method of semantic-pragmatic analysis, which we feel is particularly useful for uncovering the subtle distinctions of meaning and use that are characteristic of these and similar particle(-like expression)s in many languages. Specifically, we will analyze the synchronic uses and diachronic development of two cognate particles from two Romance languages, namely French deja and Italian gia, equivalent in some of their most salient uses to English already. (2) These two lexemes strike us as being good test items for our approach given that, (i) they both originate in the same etymon, namely the Latin demonstrative IAM (cf. Kroon and Risselada 2003); (ii) in both languages, they feature an unusually wide range of functions, which, as shown in Table 1 below, are largely, but not completely, similar; (iii) for both languages, large amounts of corpus data, both synchronic and diachronic, are easily accessible.

We may note, moreover, that on a purely descriptive level, unified analyses of the various uses of the particles in question are scarce, if not inexistent: thus, while previous analyses of deja do exist (Franckel 1989; Hansen 2000, 2003), we believe that they may be improved upon, and to our knowledge, no one has yet presented a unified description of gia.

Synchronically, we have identified fifteen different uses of deja and gia, as shown in Table 1 (where numbers in parentheses refer to the section of the article where the use in question is discussed), of which eight are shared between the two particles. As shown in Table 1, these fifteen uses can be grouped into four broader notional domains. Note that English already constitutes an idiomatic translation of only four of these uses, one of which is quite marginal in French and Italian (although not in Romance as such).