The representation of modal meaning of French sentence adverbs in a qualitative and quantitative approach

Abstract

Our aim is to give a representation of the modal contribution of sentence adverbs in comparison to other forms conveying modal meaning, such as tenses and modal verbs. Our analysis will focus on modal sentence adverbs conveying epistemic meaning. These will be compared with the modal verbs pouvoir (can) and devoir (must) as well as with some uses of the future tense (called epistemic uses), with the purpose to present a model allowing to apprehend modal meanings transmitted by lexical and grammatical forms in order to differentiate their functioning. We will then substantiate our qualitative analysis by quantitative studies on the collocates that the modal sentence adverbs co-occur with in contemporary corpora constituted of 21st century newspapers, as well as in two other corpora representing two different genres and time periods: Universalis Encyclopedia and the digital edition of the Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert.