L’expression de la subjectivité dans le discoursle cas de deux adverbes de phrase (sérieusement, peut-être)

Abstract

This paper addresses the traces of speaker’s subjectivity in discourse. In order to elucidate how it is conveyed, two French sentence adverbs are examined : an enunciative adverb (sérieusement) and a modal adverb (peut-être). Our hypothesis is that, even though they display different linguistic behavior, both of them communicate the speaker’s attitude : the enunciative adverb characterizes the enunciation itself, whereas the modal adverb focuses on a particular element of the content of the sentence. Our work is placed at the interface between syntax and semantics, therefore we will apply syntactic and semantic tests (i.e. their presence in a cleft-sentence with c’est … que, their placement in front of a negative sentence, the possibility to fall under the scope of the negation, etc.). Our hypothesis is tested against a personal corpus made up of several hundreds of authentic examples, attesting the uses of the two adverbs under study, sérieusement and peut-être.