RÉSUMÉL'article présente une recherche portant sur le fonctionnement de l'unité étrangement dans le discours, à partir des notions d'aspect et de stratégie discursive. L'approche adoptée vise à rendre compte du lien entre forme et sens par le biais de critères linguistiques et d'outils théoriques issus de la théorie de la polyphonie. Nous posons comme hypothèse que l'adverbe étrangement opère une sélection verbale sur la base de critères sémantiques aspectuels, et qui transparaît dans les propriétés distributionnelles des emplois. Ce faisant, il conditionne dans le même temps la structure polyphonique de l'énoncé dans lequel il apparaît.

This study aims at comparing three evaluative adverbs in contemporary French, namely étrangement, curieusement and paradoxalement, in order to contribute by means of linguistic criteria to their semantic categorization as discourse markers, as well as give account of their points of divergence. The corpus is mainly taken from literary texts, online journalism, digitalized archives from Le Monde Diplomatique, and includes some built up examples. Our study will be based on the Theory of Stereotypes, with special attention paid to the role of genericity and shared knowledge, and aims at building an explanatory model for the above mentioned adverbs. We will also point out the intervention of a criterium of semantic coherence and/or discursive coherence in their respective functions as modal expressions, as well as the role plaid in the background by one or two linguistic communities in deep structure.

French linguistics has recently paid close attention to discourse markers containing the verb dire, in line with the increased interest in discourse markers over the last few decades. At the heart of this debate are several intersecting and topical questions, among them: consideration of the speaker’s attitude within the semantic/pragmatic value of the marker, its dialogic function, and its level of fixedness. This study aims to examine the French discourse marker je vais te dire une bonne chose from this perspective, a phrase that purports to announce something that is not as good as it seems, in which the speaker plays a role halfway between advice-giving and imposition. The objective of this article is not only to uncover the discourse and interactional mechanisms governing the use of the phrase, but also to respond to criticism accusing some studies in semantics for their lack of operational criteria that could provide predictive and reproducible models. The analysis will be carried out through the identification of stable linguistic characteristics that can be identified by reproducible criteria. The study will be based on examples taken from Frantext and Sketch Engine, as well as personal readings and examples coined for the purposes of the discussion.