Moi, marqueur discursif : une émergence en diachronie
The French morpheme moi displays a variety of paraphrastic uses and functions, tying to what Blanche-Benveniste has referred to as discourse grammar. In this contribution, we offer to depict these uses as stemming from a unique discourse marker moi. To substantiate this claim, we have extracted all...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses universitaires de Caen
2025-07-01
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| Series: | Discours |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/discours/13837 |
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| Summary: | The French morpheme moi displays a variety of paraphrastic uses and functions, tying to what Blanche-Benveniste has referred to as discourse grammar. In this contribution, we offer to depict these uses as stemming from a unique discourse marker moi. To substantiate this claim, we have extracted all matching tokens from an oral corpus, CEFC-Gold, and we show that they indeed fulfill the criteria distinctive of this category. Moreover, they yield the properties that are expected from discourse markers, that is, the possibility to accumulate with other discourse markers, and an overall involvement in disfluencies and reformulations events. Next, we investigate the diachronic process of emergence of this marker, using historical corpus data from Frantext. Our main result is that the functional range of moi gradually emerges over time, starting from the 16th century up to the 20th. Additionally, this allows us to contribute the ongoing debate regarding the role of cooptation and pragmaticalization in the rise of discourse markers. While cooptation may trigger the first paraphrastic uses and feed a source context from which the marker may further develop, this development obeys the same patterns as those of grammaticalization, and more broadly of semantic expansion. Our study rather emphasizes the complex character of this diachronic process, which involve dynamically interrelating functions operating over different levels of the language structure. |
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| ISSN: | 1963-1723 |