July 1, 2020
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Hagit Shefer, « Quality, quantity and beyond: The semantic development of favorable attributes », Lexique : revue en sciences du langage, ID : 10.54563/lexique.505
Several French and Hebrew adjectives denote favorable qualities as well as upscaling quantification for example (bon ‘good’, beau ‘beautiful’, honorable ‘honorable’, digne ‘worthy’, ‘respectable’) salaire ‘salary’ and their Hebrew counterparts. Yet, only French bon and its Hebrew counterpart tov continued to develop further meanings and functions. The first is an intensifier, as in une bonne demi‑heure ‘a good half an hour’, which does not refer to an actual quality or size. Rather, it clearly describes a subjective speaker’s assessment of a significant amount of time extending beyond the frame indicated. A later meaning which both bon and tov developed is that of a discourse marker, as in Bon, allons‑y à pied ‘well, let’s go on foot’, or Bo’u nelex lesham kodem. Tov ‘Let’s go there first. Ok’, where they denote approval or acceptance. Other discourse functions attributed to bon and tov mark the beginning and the end of a topic and shifts between episodes. Based on corpora, the article aims to demonstrate that the present‑day polysemy observed in the two adjectives is a result of tendencies of (inter)subjectification (Traugott 2010, Narrog 2017), which motivated the functions of intensification and discourse marking and will describe the type of constructionalization underlining the various stages of development of the adjectives and in particular the emergence of the intensifier.