Paradoxalement et étrangementperméabilité d’une frontière linguistique

Résumé

Among the so-called evaluative adverbs it is common practice to include the adverbs under study in this essay : paradoxalement and étrangement. Due to their appreciative value and their adjective base, both of them indicate a position of distance and surprise in the speaker’s point of view.. Our aim is to establish, from a comparative perspective, the extent to which the border between both adverbs is permeable, as well as whether they can be described within a unitary semantic model. We argue that each of the lexical units under study corresponds to two different semantic units. A precise characterisation is provided by making systematic use of formal, semantic and pragmatic criteria, largely taken from the scholarly literature in the field. In spite of the potential analogies between the distributional properties of both terms, we demonstrate that each of them gives expression to a different kind of evaluation. In this paper, we build a model that is based on two fundamental ideas. First, the fact that their very presence gives rise to an anti-orientation semantic relationship between two elements as regards a given norm ; and secondly, the attribution of their evaluative contribution to two different uttering instances. Our analysis draws from occurrences of the adverbs under study in literary, journalistic, and online texts.