French déjà, Piedmontese Regional Italian già: A case of contact-induced pragmaticalization

This chapter analyses the Romance descendants of Latin (de) iam ‘already’, exploring the pragmatic values acquired by Fr. dejà and the Piedmontese Regional Italian cognate già. Both adverbs are recurrent in interrogative contexts, where they are used to request the repetition of information (cf. Eng. what’s his name, again?). These adverbs have iterative and phasal values in origin. However, once recruited at the level of pragmatics, they develop an interaction-managing function, as they trigger a new turn which repairs a setback in the interaction. These patterns of pragmaticalization are analysed through an areal survey within different European languages that frames the following analysis. The chapter shows that these developments are not arbitrary but are linked to the original semantics of the adverbs, and suggest a scenario of contact-induced pragmaticalization. The chapter closes with an analysis of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic behaviour of these markers with a view to reassessing their status within the theory of grammaticalization