Les fluctuations de sens dans quelques formes modales à la lumière d’une approche quantitative et qualitative

Abstract

The expressions discussed in this article – certes, peut-être and sans doute – share the property of conveying a modal meaning (to be understood as non-denotational), which oscillates between an epistemic and a more or less conventionalized concessive value. To take this type of variation in meaning into account, the author on the one hand combines a qualitative and quantitative approach and on the other uses a theoretical framework, called the triadic model, which is based on the representation of the semantic contribution of the marker on three different levels: the semantic, the enunciative and the rhetorical level.

Keywords

• modal expressions
• quantitative method
• collocation
• statistics
• corpus