Abstract
ABSTRACTThis paper analyzes the alternation between the near-synonymous French adverbialsà nouveauandde nouveau‘again’, which has received scarce attention in the literature. While previous descriptions assume that both adverbials are used to express that an eventuality is repeated, it is shown thatde nouveauandà nouveaudiffer systematically with respect to their preferred usage contexts. On the basis of combined results from a questionnaire that tests speakers’ intuitions and a probabilistic analysis of the alternation between the two adverbials in corpus data,à nouveauis shown to be more likely to express a repetitive meaning, whereasde nouveauis more likely to express a restitutive meaning, i.e. the return to a previous state of affairs. The analysis also suggests that due to its status of an innovative variant that is gradually displacingde nouveau,à nouveauis less restricted regarding its usage contexts. Finally, a significant difference between the two variants is found regarding modality, in that the use ofà nouveauis more likely in written language, whereas the use ofde nouveauis more likely in spoken language.
Highlights
In Modern French, there is variation between two adverbials that express the meaning ‘again’, and which formally only differ in their preposition: à nouveau ‘lit. to new’ and de nouveau ‘lit. of new’ (1).(1) Jeanne court {à/de} nouveau
The Académie française maintains that the adverbials express different types of iteration: whereas de nouveau is used for unmarked repetition, à nouveau could be paraphrased as ‘in a completely different manner’, as in example (2)
4.4 Results In general, participants judged the sentences of the corpus to be more likely to express a repetitive meaning (n = 664) than a restitutive meaning (n = 427), with only n = 85 cases in which the participants were undecided
Summary
In Modern French, there is variation between two adverbials that express the meaning ‘again’, and which formally only differ in their preposition: à nouveau ‘lit. to new’ and de nouveau ‘lit. of new’ (1).(1) Jeanne court {à/de} nouveau. In Modern French, there is variation between two adverbials that express the meaning ‘again’, and which formally only differ in their preposition: à nouveau ‘lit. While dictionaries frequently list the two adverbials as synonymous, the scarce linguistic literature on this topic has pointed out possible differences in their use. The Académie française maintains that the adverbials express different types of iteration: whereas de nouveau is used for unmarked repetition, à nouveau could be paraphrased as ‘in a completely different manner’, as in example (2)
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