Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

'Still' under debate: temporal, concessive, and discursive meanings

Recent years have seen increasing discussion of semantic change from a formal semantic perspective, where semantic rather than pragmatic content is taken to be the basis for change. Research in this new subfield of diachronic linguistics focuses on the compositional re-distribution of entailed meanings, to the exclusion of pragmatic inferences, in situations of language change (Eckardt 2009; Condoravdi and Deo 2014; Beck and Gergel 2015).

This talk investigates the applicability of this approach to change in the domain of modality, specifically in the well-known pathway in which temporal adverbs like 'still' develop a concessive meaning (König and Traugott 1982; König 1988; Tsirkin-Sadan 2019). Our test case will be the adverb 'still' in Modern Hebrew. I will present the results of an historical corpus study that exposes early bridging contexts from temporal to modal (concessive) meaning of 'still', and another study based on a contemporary spoken corpus that shows a more recent change this adverb has undergone, becoming a discourse marker. I will argue that the empirical findings support the semantic approach to change in modality over an alternative that is based primarily on pragmatic inferencing.