From aspectuality to discourse marking: The case of French deja and encore

This paper proposes a semantic-pragmatic analysis of the common French phasal adverbs déjà and encore. Besides their phasal uses, these particles have quite a large number of diverse uses. I argue that the different uses are neither homonyms nor purely pragmatic interpretations of essentially monosemous items, but that the two adverbs are rather to be seen as polysemous, their non-phasal meanings being derivable in a motivated way from the phasal ones, which I claim to be diachronically prior. Interestingly, with a few exceptions, the two particles seem to function contrastively in both their phasal and their non-phasal uses, a fact which raises important questions about the nature of linguistic paradigms.