The approach to language change taken in this article is broadly
sympathetic to that outlined by Croft (2000) in
two fundamental ways. First, it concurs with his insistence (2000:4) that “the real entities of language are
utterances and speakers' grammars. Language change occurs via
replication of these entities not through inherent change of an abstract
system.” Second, it adopts his distinction between
innovation—the mechanisms that involve both structure and
function—and propagation—“the mechanisms for which are
essentially social namely the various factors discussed by
sociolinguists.”1
Milroy (1993) made a similar key distinction between
“speakers” and “systems,” “innovation”
and “change.”
This study of
quand même
illustrates these two phases, first by exploring the shift in the
form–function relationship, and second in taking a quantitative
sociolinguistic approach (see
Milroy, 1992:230)
to the variable distributional frequency of its usages in a representative
sample of the community of French speakers in hexagonal France.
POLITENESS THEORY
The scope of this article does not permit lengthy evaluation of
politeness theory. Many theorists (e.g., Kasper, 1990, cited in Eelen,
2001:21) distinguished between two main trends in its
conceptualization: conflict avoidance and social indexation. It is this
dual conceptualization that underlies the two faces of what I call
Politeness-Induced Semantic Change (PISC) and which manifest themselves,
respectively, in innovation and propagation. Considerations to do with
politeness (conflict avoidance) promote new form–function
configurations; the spread of these is dependent on social evaluation
(deriving from social indexation). Spencer-Oatey (2000) reviewed Brown and Levinson's (1987 [1978]) theory in the context of
rapport-management, and my contention falls in with her line of argument.
Certain linguistic functions lend themselves particularly well to the
projection of humility, which is a key element in face-to-face
interaction. The exponents of these “humility-projecting”
functions include vague words, attenuators, downtoners, and mitigators,
expressions of uncertainty and tentativeness and of belief. The necessity
to include hedging expressions in every face-to-face encounter leads to
their abundance in speech and to the pragmaticalization of forms with
particular semantic cores. Though Brown and Levinson (1987) did not specifically address the question of
language change, they expressed the view (1987:255) that “face redress is a powerful
functional pressure on any linguistic system.” An increase in
frequency in a new politeness-mediating form–function configuration
may lead to a shift in the core meaning of an item in the manner described
by Traugott and Dasher (2002). The
politeness-induced invited inference spreads throughout the population
depending on factors having to do with social indexation and completes the
PISC.
Out of an explicit logical adversative or concessive sense (QM1),
quand même has developed a new attenuating
politeness-marking sense (QM2). For some speakers, QM2 is, for this
reason, salient (see Kerswill & Williams,
2002) and may be hypercorrectly avoided. QM (1 and 2) are
relatively frequent and thus good contenders for salience.
QUAND MÊME: FROM CONCESSIVE
CONJUNCTION TO HEDGING PARTICLE
Quand même appears to have developed in the first
instance as a strengthened form of one of the senses of
quand—an oppositional or concessive rather than a temporal
sense. The semantic shifts from (i) a temporal to a concessive sense and
(ii) a strengthened or emphatic form to a normalized or routinized one are
widely attested in both English and French. Traugott (1982:254) demonstrated the manner in which the noun
while meaning “period, time” (cf., G. Weile)
“came from its nominal and adverbial uses to be a temporal
connective…. only in the eighteenth century did while come
to indicate [a] concessive relation.”
That quand should extend its scope to include not just a
temporal but also a concessive sense is thus a process that is far from
being unprecedented. Quand même appears to have followed
processes of grammaticalization similar to the negative particle ne
… pas (see Posner, 1997:370–374), involving loss of the emphatic
force of the reinforcer. Though it is still written as two words, the
expression quand même, originally a fusion of a temporal
conjunction with a reinforcer, gradually underwent a semantic sea-change
as it grammaticalized, coalesced as an inseparable unit, and moved from a
conjunction to an adverbial usage.
Moeschler and de Spengler (1981) described
quand même as having a logical, concessive value based on a
causality relation, which may be expressed as p mais quand même
q (p but all the same q), giving the example:
Our real-world expectations that the swollen river might cause the
bridge to crumble are refuted in q. Moeschler and de Spengler
(1981:10) recognized in a footnote that
mais (but) is perhaps the concessive marker in their examples and
that it may be the case that “notre description a été
malencontreusement influencée par la présence de
mais dans les exemples étudiés” (“our
description has been affected by the inopportune presence of but
in the examples studied”).
In the example:
Moeschler and de Spengler argued that the first movement of the
concession is missing and quand même is refutative. This
could equally have appeared more fully, as follows:
Moeschler and de Spengler did not directly address the question of the
redundancy of quand même in such an utterance which comes
out particularly clearly in the English translation. The literal
translation “but it's too long, though” is more naturally
rendered “but it's a bit too long.” The adversative
quality is, after all, expressed in mais (but). My own
interpretation is that quand même softens the refutation
and functions thus as a hedging particle, protecting the faces of both the
refuted and the refuter.
As Moeschler and de Spengler suggested (1981:195), “Il est quand même trop
long” (“It's too long, though”) contains an
implicit rejection of the proposition “Manhattan est un film
superbe” (“Manhattan is a great film”) of the type
“Non, il n'est pas superbe car il est trop long”
(“No, it's not great because it's too long”).
Quand même allows a speaker “à refuser le
contenu préalablement asserté par l'interlocuteur,
c'est-à-dire à réaliser un acte de
réfutation mais sur le mode de l'implicitation et de
l'atténuation” (“to reject the proposition
previously asserted by the interlocutor, that is to say, to perform an act
of refutation but in an implicit and attuned manner”). Moeschler and
de Spengler argued that quand même mediates the idea of a
norm, and this is a social rather than a logical norm. They cited the
example of J.M. arriving unexpectedly at N.S.'s house with five
friends. N.S. exclaims: “C'est quand même
exagéré!” (lit.: “That's going too far all
the same!” = “That's going a bit too far!”) This is
explained as “Je dis quand même que c'est
exagéré (bien qu'en tant que maîtresse de maison,
je ne devrais pas manifester une désapprobation)” (“I
say all the same that it's going too far (even though as mistress of
the house I should not show my disapproval”). An interpretation that
draws on politeness theory supports the argument that the presence of
quand même attenuates what would otherwise be an
over-strong assertion. The faces of both the speaker and the hearers are
thus saved. The sequence of events is as follows:
Moeschler and de Spengler suggested that a concessive usage of
quand même is more often associated with monologue and a
refutative usage with dialogue, but that the essential pragmatic effect of
quand même is to refer to a norm and “de créer
une rupture entre le monde décrit et le monde normé.”
In the examples in corpora of naturally occurring speech—and in both
the Bristol and the Orléans Corpus this is more often monologal
than dialogal in style2
There are, indeed, no
instances in either of the spoken corpora of the type of dialogal
quand même, which is used as a reaction to a declaration or
action of another, encapsulated in the exclamation: Mais quand
même! This dialogal usage of quand même reveals,
however, its highly oppositional function and demonstrates that it cannot
be considered as a conjunction.
—
quand même
is far more often an attenuator than a logical concessive device, whether
or not the information is implicit or explicit.
In contemporary French, there are two main uses of quand
même. In the first, it retains an adversative sense; in the
second it has a less adversative or relational function that appears to
hint at a possible over-assertiveness. This latter sense is sensitively
brought out by Grieve (1996), whose words seem
to capture the manner in which quand même can serve face
needs in preempting an anticipated objection or criticism on the part of
the interlocutor.
This mode has a familiar tone, more spoken than the first.
Robert's definition is Il faut avouer, à vrai dire, on en
conviendra. To that list, one should probably add je ne devrais
pas le dire mais … In speech it is a tactical gambit
which, by sketching an apparent attenuation of what might be sensed as
the impropriety of an affirmation, can enable the
reinforcement of the latter. It facilitates what has been called
la mise en acceptabilité d'une contradiction (Moeschler & Spengler, 1981, 110). That is, it
offers a justification for the statement it accompanies, even a sort
of excuse or apology for it. But thereby it too has an
adversative quality, faint and implicit, in that it hints at
contradicting an assumed objection. (Grieve, 1996:417, my emphasis).
In his speech-act-theoretic analysis of quand même,
Waltereit (2001:1400–1405) took a similar
stance and demonstrated how “it exploits in a very particular
fashion the rhetoric of counter-expectation.” In my view, however,
Waltereit's analysis remains too closely wedded to the propositional
and the introduction of Grieve's notion of “excuse” or
“apology” allied to face needs and considerations of
politeness can help in explaining its usefulness when applied to the two
types of speech acts to which Waltereit claims quand même
is tied: subjective evaluations and directives. Referring to Searle,
Waltereit claims that directives require that it is not obvious to both S
(speaker) and H (addressee) that H will do A (act) in the normal course of
events “of his own accord” and goes on to say that “the
modal particle seems to work as a (negative) politeness device”
(Waltereit, 2001:1403). It is my contention that
the very usefulness, ubiquity, and frequency of quand même
as a politeness device may be gradually eclipsing its propositional,
adversative qualities. The focus of Waltereit's (2001) article is on expressions which set up
“preparatory conditions” to accommodate the speech act at
minimal expense. He posits that such forms arise through metonymic
semantic change and that the relevant metonymy takes as its conceptual
base a contiguity between a sound chain and a speech situation. My only
adjustment of this is to underline that at the extreme pragmatic end of
the spectrum, the conceptual base is semantically bleached, the term
functioning in the speech situation entirely as a politeness-mediating
hedging particle.
METHODOLOGY
The corpora investigated
The study includes a survey of the evolution of quand
même historically from the 16th to the 20th century, using the
corpus of literary texts contained in FRANTEXT,3
Available at http://atilf.atilf.fr/.
along with a comparison of the functions of
quand même in
two spoken corpora: the 1968 Orléans Corpus
4 Available from
http://bach.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/lancom.
and the 1988
Bristol Corpus.
5 Available from
http://www.uwe.ac.uk/hlss/languages/research/staff/CORPUS.pdf.
As we have no recordings of spontaneous spoken French before the
advent of the tape-recorder in the 20th century, to gauge how the form
evolved over the centuries we must look to written records. FRANTEXT
contains 210 million words in 3737 texts from the 16th to the 20th century
and thus represents a formidable source of robust evidence. What is more,
it is consultable by subscription on-line and gives information about
dates and numbers of texts, word counts and so on. Examples can be brought
up on screen, with greater context, if this is required, so that
colligations and collocations may be examined.
The Orléans Corpus is made up of transcriptions of
sociolinguistic interviews recorded in Orléans between 1968 and
1971. The subsection we are looking at comprises 157 hour-long
face-to-face interviews on standardized questionnaires with a
statistically random sample chosen according to the 1968 Institut national
de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE) census
list. The aim, according to the authors in their catalogue, was to
constitute a sociolinguistically representative sample of the population
in 1968. The speakers have been attributed an INSEE coding and have been
classified according to sociocultural categories established by Alix
Mullineaux (AM). There is no further information about the manner in which
Alix Mullineaux allocated subjects to sociocultural groups.
The Bristol Corpus, on the other hand, is made up of transcriptions of
some of the interviews recorded by myself over the years 1988–1991.
These interviews were recorded and some were transcribed as the basis for
French textbooks for A-level and undergraduate students of French
published by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press
between 1990 and 1993 (Beeching & Le Guilloux, 1990, 1993). The aim of
these recordings collected in the Minervois, the Lot, Brittany, and Paris
was to obtain a representative sample of French speakers from different
social and regional backgrounds speaking spontaneously about their jobs
and on a range of social issues, such as tourism and the tourist
attractions of a particular region, the environment, the place of the
Breton language and culture, religion, fashion and clothing, architecture,
cinema and theatre, politics, setting up a business, the computerization
of society, and so on. The interviewer's aim was to stimulate lively
and naturalistic spontaneous speech in the type of interview that Wolfson
(1997:120) called “the so-called
spontaneous interview” and which she claimed has been said to
provide excellent material. The Bristol Corpus is made up of a subset of
these interviews that was selected as the basis for my PhD thesis (an
abridged version of which was published in 2002). In the thesis I focused
on gender and social class and the Bristol Corpus aimed to contain
balanced samples of speech from men and women according to three
educational backgrounds: those who left school without the
baccalauréat, those who gained the baccalauréat, and those
who gained in addition a university degree or degrees. Although the
recordings were not made with a sociolinguistic research project in mind,
the notion that students of French should be exposed to samples of
authentic spontaneous speech and to a degree of variation dictated a
strong sociolinguistic bias that recommends the use of the corpus in
studies of variation. It distinguishes itself from other corpora in having
a good representation of working-class speech—many researchers use
speakers close to hand in universities, thus excluding a range of speakers
of this type. Though the Bristol Corpus cannot claim that the content is
constant for each speaker and, in this way, differs from the
Orléans Corpus, it would not exist had it not been for the
patronage of the University Presses of Oxford and Cambridge who
commissioned the textbooks, for which thematic uniformity across
interviews would have been inappropriate. One is struck, moreover, by the
similarity in style of the interviews in the two corpora. The interviewer
in both cases is a teacher of French in Britain, the interviews are
between two participants with little overlapping between turns and the
interviewees are aware that they are responding as typical French people
representing their country, as well as their own individual views, for
British learners of French. From the Orléans Corpus, 24 speakers
were selected, 4 males and 4 females, with 8 speakers from each of the
educational backgrounds under consideration (amounting to 287,272 words).
Of the 95 speakers in the Bristol Corpus, only those were selected who
used quand même at least once. A number of the interviews
in the Bristol Corpus are very short and, for this reason, did not include
occurrences of quand même. The subjects of the 55
interviews retained were balanced according to sex and educational
background, so that the word count for each cell was approximately the
same. The total word count was 132,933. The word count of all the spoken
material was thus 420,205, almost half a million words of transcribed
speech.
The comparability of the corpora might be said to be imperfect—a
perennial problem—and the difficulties are compounded when discourse
features are the object of study. As Macaulay (2002a:298) pointed out, the study of discourse
variation is still at an elementary stage and there are many variables
that affect samples of speech. He claimed, however, “Yet we need not
despair. One way forward is in replication. As more studies are carried
out, the influence of accidental factors may be easier to
detect.”6
Macaulay (2002:299) made four recommendations, which I
full-heartedly endorse and to which I should like to add the following
comments. We need more data. This is particularly crucial for
spoken hexagonal French where on-line corpora are few and far between.
Amassing stores of comparative data. I would welcome approaches
from researchers with a view to creating such a data bank for discourse
features of spoken French in general and pragmatic expressions in
particular. The usefulness of the computer. This assertion is
undoubtedly true where finding and counting particular linguistic items
are concerned. Where functional attribution and insights into metaphorical
transfer are required, however, substantial legwork by a linguistically
trained researcher remains indispensable.
I chart here the results of my investigation of the two spoken corpora
at my disposal, one from 1968, the other from 1988, in the hope that this
will permit later researchers to replicate the studies with larger corpora
and arrive at finer distinctions and firmer conclusions. Any conclusions
drawn here can only be tentative. Differences between the spoken corpora
may be a result of diatopic as opposed to diachronic factors and/or
may reflect differences in the manner in which the data were
collected.
Rates of occurrence
First, rates of occurrence of conjunctival and adverbial quand
même were charted in FRANTEXT. Second, usages of quand
même were surveyed in the Orléans (1968–1971)
Corpus and the Bristol (1988–1991) Corpus. As the conjunctival usage
does not appear in the more recent spoken corpora, only the adverbial
usages (adversative and relational) of quand même were
charted with subdivisions according to both the educational background and
the sex of the speakers. It was hypothesized that there might be some
evidence of a shift towards a more relational usage in the later corpora
and, in the case of the spoken corpora, that there might be some
indications concerning class and sex as to where such a shift might be
generalizing more rapidly.
In my exploration of the degree of pragmaticalization of quand
même and (in the case of the two corpora of spoken French) its
sociolinguistic stratification, my first job, having selected
representative samples from the corpora, was to categorize individual
occurrences of the particle as “adversative” or
“relational.” As polysemy and multifunctionality are the
unmarked case, criteria had to be established to assist me in conducting
this process in as objective and rigorous a manner as possible.
Quand même: criteria for subclassification
The criteria7
Veland (1998) used similar criteria in his distinction between
the direct and indirect concessive values of quand même and
tout de même, employing the test involving “la
possibilité ou non d'une reformulation en bien
que.” (1998:240).
used to
classify occurrences of
quand même as either an explicit
adversative or an implicit (or relational) one were as follows.
Explicit adversative
Explicit adversative uses of quand même have two
conjoined clauses in which there is an explicitly expressed adversative
opposition of the type (Not) P, (but) quand même Q.
Example:
The interviewer had posed the question: “What is there for young
people in Sarzeau?” The “bridging” implicatures in
“Ce n'est pas une ville qui bouge” (It's not a very
lively town) include, in the context of the interviewer's question,
the absence of nightlife, such as cinemas and clubs, a situation that is
refuted in Q with a reinforcing quand même. If quand
même had been omitted, the discourse structure of the sentence
would have been P, Q (exemplification), which would constitute a
contradiction and not make sense. There is, however, in addition to the
oppositional sense, a slightly apologetic tone to quand
même—the town may not be very lively, but it does at
least have a cinema and two night clubs. So, although we can
categorize quand même here as an explicit adversative
according to our established criterion, it also contains the germ of
implicit or relational quand même. It is this invited
inference that coexists with the explicit adversative sense that
is generalizing to become one of the core or coded meanings of quand
même.
Implicit adversative/relational
The logical two-part structure (Not) P (but) quand même
Q is absent. It may be possible to infer/invent an
oppositional sense, but in many cases this appears speculative and hardly
justified by the contextual implicatures.
Example:
Two adolescent boys were shown magazine pictures of men in different
roles and contexts to elicit from them what they felt was the proper role
of men and women in society and the effect that the roles portrayed in
advertising might have. The picture discussed here was an advertisement
for Sopiquet tuna and showed a mother arriving at the dinner table with a
steaming bowl of food, the father and children sitting expectantly at
table. It is nearly impossible to infer or even invent a “Q”
oppositional, although we can infer a type of hedge that could be glossed
along the lines of: “Well, it looks like quite a rich kind of
family” (with an implied inference that this scenario would not be
typical of all families in France, but only of the rich ones). There is a
hedging (and simultaneously boosting) quality in all cases categorized as
implicit adversatives/relationals—a sense that remarks are
restricted in scope, and the speaker wishes the strength of their
assertion to be attenuated. It allows speakers to protect their own and
their interlocutors' face. [See Beeching, 2002:20–23 for a fuller discussion of the
contribution of Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1997), and
the notion of the face-enhancing act, to Brown & Levinson's
(1987) politeness theory.] The processes of
polysemy and the very gradual emergence of a new sense, coexisting with
the traditional usage, are at the very heart of semantic/pragmatic
change, which can be charted in the probabilistic terms reflected in
distributional frequencies. Polysemy and vague meanings constitute a
problem for researchers attempting to pin down the gradually developing
independence of a new core sense but, along with sociolinguistic
variation, they are fundamental to PISC. Polysemy and indeterminacy of
meaning constitute the raw material essential to semantic/pragmatic
change.
Summary
The difficulties of allocating each example of quand
même to a functional subcategory, with 639 examples studied in
detail from the “Théâtre” section of the FRANTEXT
Corpus, 477 in the selected interviews from the Orléans Corpus, and
214 in the Bristol Corpus should not be underestimated. In a practical
workshop designed to test the reliability of my interpretation of
quand même in context and conducted with eight
native-speaking French linguists working with Marie-Annick Morel at the
Université de Paris III, it was possible to reach consensus, but
only through strict adherence to the criteria formulated here. I have
attempted to be as objective as possible in allocating examples to only
two categories—explicit (adversative) and implicit (relational)
usages of the particle. To fall into the first category, P had to appear
explicitly in the speaker's utterance.
RESULTS
Survey of rates of occurrence of quand
même in FRANTEXT
Table 1 charts the number of occurrences of
quand mesme/quand même that appears as a colligated
expression in all of the texts in FRANTEXT, across the centuries. There is
a gradual but regular increase in numbers of occurrence of quand
même overall and, as we can see in Table
2, this was particularly marked in the last 50 years of the 20th
century.
Rates of occurrence of quand même per 10,000 words in
FRANTEXT, across the centuries
Rates of occurrence of quand même per 10,000 words in
FRANTEXT in the 20th century
Table 3 charts rates of quand
mesme/quand même in different genres of writing—the
most formal written modes, such as the funerary orations in the genre
“Eloquence” have low rates of occurrence, whereas those which
assimilate more to informal everyday speech, such as plays,
correspondence, and novels have higher rates of occurrence. Some caution
is required in interpreting such data, as the 19th and 20th centuries are
marked by the development of the novel. FRANTEXT reflects this in the
number of such texts included in the corpus for the 19th and 20th
centuries, and this is, in turn, reflected in the rates of occurrence of
quand même for those centuries. However, to the extent that
FRANTEXT is intended as representative of the texts written and the type
of language used, we can consider the rates of occurrence of quand
même as being representative of the period indicated.
Rates of occurrence of quand même per 10,000 words in
FRANTEXT, according to genre of writing
Although novels and correspondence have the highest rates of
occurrence of quand même, it was decided in the first
instance to survey uses of quand même in theatre, first
because, though it has been said that intimate correspondence,
particularly love-letters, are a good source of information concerning the
state of the spoken language before it was possible to capture this on
tape, theatre could be said to aim at echoing spoken modes and to reflect
spoken usage. Second, the relatively restricted numbers of examples of
quand mesme/quand même in theatrical works (639
occurrences) made a survey of all occurrences in this genre feasible. To
survey all 5,066 examples in the novels is clearly a research study that
goes beyond the scope of this article, albeit an interesting one.8
Veland (1998) surveyed
usages of quand même and tout de même in ten
19th century novels and noted that: 62% of occurrences are to be found in
direct speech which “indique probablement que les marqueurs du type
en question ont pris naissance dans la langue parlée” (1998:237); frequencies doubled in the 150 years from
1800–1950, and, whereas in the 19th century, tout de
même constituted 70% of the total, in the 20th
century, quand même represented 65%.
Table 4 charts the rate of occurrence of
quand même in theatrical works from 1500–2000 and, in
the main, it echoes the broader picture of Table
1. Occurrences increase overall from 0.04 per 10,000 words in the
period from 1500–1599 to 1.2 in 1950–2000. The rates in this
latter period are double those for the average over all genres in the same
period and also double that for novels over the whole period. There is an
interesting dip in the 18th and 19th centuries, and I can only speculate
that this may reflect the somewhat more formal dramatic works of the
writers of this time.
Rates of occurrence of quand même per 10,000 words in
the genre “Théâtre” in FRANTEXT, across the
centuries
Table 5 charts the occurrences of quand
mesme/même in theatrical works through the centuries with
an indication of its grammatical and functional usage. In the early
period, the vast majority of the occurrences of quand mesme/quand
même are conjunctions and are followed by a conditional tense
(mainly present conditional, with a very small proportion of past
conditional forms) and can be glossed “even if” /
“even though.” All four examples of quand mesme in
the 16th century are attributable to Etienne Jodelle. In the 17th century
plays, quand mesme/même continues to be used as a
conjunction with a conditional tense, indicating its irrealis, conditional
force. A typical example is:
Number and relative percentage rates of occurrence of quand
mesme/quand même in theatrical works in FRANTEXT, used as
conjunctions with a concessive vs. temporal function or adverbs with an
adversative vs. relational function, from 1500–2000
When quand mesme/même occurs with a nonconditional
tense, it is most easily interpreted as a temporal conjunction with
intensifer as in:
A few of the examples of quand mesme/même followed
by verbs that are not conditional are ambiguous and can be interpreted as
temporal or concessive, as in the following example:
In the 18th century, as well, all examples are conjunctions and the
vast majority are concessive. In some cases, quand même
appears to be more easily interpretable as contrastive, rather than
concessive, as in the following example:
However, as Table 5 shows, the vast majority
of examples from this period are concessive conjunctions.
It is in the 19th century that the first adverbial usages of quand
même begin to occur—and in quite large numbers. Overall,
54% of occurrences are conjunctions and 42% are adverbs. Most of these
adverbs still retain a strong and explicit adversative sense and can be
translated “all the same,” as in the following example:
There is a sense of ellipsis here that we can reconstitute as
“quand même elle ignorerait la présence de son
mari.”
It is only in the early years of the 20th century that quand
même is used as an adverb in a relational way and no longer
retains a clearly adversative quality. The conjunctival use of the term
has dropped considerably: only 8% of occurrences are conjunctival, 55% of
occurrences are adverbial and adversative, while 32% are relational. The
latter uses can either be boosting or hedging. By the second half of the
20th century, conjunctive uses have dropped to 0.5% of all occurrences
(mainly in the works of Albert Camus), adversative adverbial uses have
dropped to 44%, and relational uses have come to the fore, at 50%. Though
the rate of adverbial (and in particular relational) quand
même usage is at its highest level from a historical point of
view in the plays from 1950–2000, it is still only 1.16 per 10,000
words. Rates are consistently far higher in the spoken corpora surveyed,
as we shall see next.9
Despite its
limitations, the present study provides much greater substantiation than
Fónagy (1995) did of the evolution in the
use of quand même from a concessive to a more
“modal” usage. As Veland (1998:219)
reported, Fónagy's conclusion, based on a comparison of a
specimen of spoken language with the first few pages of Saussure's
Cours de linguistique general, does not lead to the more
generalized conclusion that the adverb is rising in distributional
frequency.
Survey of rates of occurrence of quand
même in the Orléans and Bristol Corpora
Appendix A charts the raw numbers of occurrences and distributional
frequencies of quand même, adversative quand
même, and relational quand même for each of the
79 subjects in the selected subsections of the two corpora. There is a
wide range in the frequency with which speakers use quand
même from 1 to 65 per 10,000 words. Both Macaulay (2002b:365), in his study of you know, and
Vincent and Sankoff (1992:207), in their study
of punctors, show a similar range of use of such markers. There is some
evidence that use of such hedging or relational particles may be
idiolectal (see Delomier, 1999:138 on
hein, which she claimed is “largement présent dans
le discours de certains locuteurs qui n'en ont souvent pas
conscience”). Such individual variation makes averaging in terms of
class and/or sex appear somewhat meaningless as large standard
deviations are obscured in the averaging process. However, overall
tendencies may be tentatively explored.
Mean rates of usage of quand même in the spoken corpus
(conflating the data from the Orléans and Bristol Corpora) are 19
occurrences per 10,000 words, 7 (37%) for adversative, and 12 (63%) for
relational quand même. This is considerably higher than the
most recent, highest, rate of occurrence in the written theatrical works
for 1950–2000 (1.246), and the proportion of adversative to
relational usages shows an even more marked shift in the direction of the
relational sense. Table 6 shows the rates of
quand même in the two corpora. It is clear that rates are
increasing and that this is particularly the case for relational quand
même. As the data did not have a normal distribution (they were
negatively skewed), the nonparametric Mann-Whitney test was used to check
for statistical significance. In so far as this could be said to be
reflected in the difference between the Orléans (1968) Corpus and
the Bristol (1988) Corpus, the rise in frequency of quand
même is statistically significant (p = .015).
Rates of occurrence of quand même, adversative
quand même and relational quand même per
10,000 words in the Orléans (1968–71) and Bristol
(1988–1991) Corpora
The full results, subdivided according to corpus, sex, and educational
background, with values for N (raw number of occurrences) and
r (rate of occurrence per 10,000 words), are set out in Appendix
B. Figures 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 display the data in a more visual form. If we
conflate the spoken data from the two corpora and consider them as being
representative of the speech of the population of France in the second
half of the 20th century, in however imperfect a way, we can see, in Figure 1, that the mid-educated group use quand
même to a greater extent overall, and that relational quand
même outweighs adversative quand même in all
education groups, but particularly in the mid-educated group. The
difference between education groups 1 and 2 on relational quand
même is statistically significant (p = .032).
Mean rates of occurrence of quand même per 10,000 words
in the Orléans and Bristol Corpora, subdivided according to
educational background (1 = speakers who left school without the
baccalauréat; 2 = speakers who gained the baccalauréat; 3 =
speakers who have a university degree or degrees).
Mean rates of occurrence of relational quand même per
10,000 words in the Orléans and Bristol Corpora, subdivided
according to sex (1 = males; 2 = females) and educational background (1 =
speakers who left school without the baccalauréat; 2 = speakers who
gained the baccalauréat; 3 = speakers who have a university degree
or degrees).
Mean rates of occurrence of quand même per 10,000 words
in the Orléans (1) and Bristol (2) Corpora, subdivided according to
sex (1 = males; 2 = females).
Mean rates of occurrence of adversative quand même per
10,000 words in the Orléans Corpus, subdivided according to sex (1
= male; 2 = female) and educational background (1 = speakers who left
school without the baccalauréat; 2 = speakers who gained the
baccalauréat; 3 = speakers who have a university degree or
degrees).
Mean rates of occurrence of relational quand même per
10,000 words in the Orléans Corpus, subdivided according to sex (1
= male; 2 = female) and educational background (1 = speakers who left
school without the baccalauréat; 2 = speakers who gained the
baccalauréat; 3 = speakers who have a university degree or
degrees).
Mean rates of occurrence of adversative quand même per
10,000 words in the Bristol Corpus, subdivided according to sex (1 = male;
2 = female) and educational background (1 = speakers who left school
without the baccalauréat; 2 = speakers who gained the
baccalauréat; 3 = speakers who have a university degree or
degrees).
Mean rates of occurrence of relational quand même per
10,000 words in the Bristol Corpus, subdivided according to sex (1 = male;
2 = female) and educational background (1 = speakers who left school
without the baccalauréat; 2 = speakers who gained the
baccalauréat; 3 = speakers who have a university degree or
degrees).
Women appear to use quand même marginally more than
men, particularly in its relational form, and there is an interesting
class/sex configuration, in that the most highly educated men have
somewhat depressed rates of quand même usage. Figure 2 shows that this is particularly the case for
relational quand même. This difference between the most
educated men and women's usage is statistically significant
(p = .043).
When we come to compare data from the earlier Orléans Corpus
with the later Bristol Corpus in Figure 3, we
see that overall rates of quand même have increased
(p = .015) and that women appear to be in the vanguard of this
change with higher rates of usage in both corpora.
Figures 4, 5,
6, and 7, moreover,
reveal a potentially very interesting sex/class development. In the
Orléans Corpus (Figures 4 & 5), the less educated men have higher rates of
adversative quand même usage, whereas it is the most
educated women who use adversative quand même to the
greatest extent. Relational quand même is used equally by
all speakers, apart from the most educated men who eschew it. The
difference between the rates of the most educated men and the most
educated women does not, however, reach statistical significance. In the
Bristol Corpus (Figures 6 & 7), adversative quand même is
championed by women in the mid-educated group. Relational quand
même is also a form favored by both men and women in the
mid-educated groups (p = .01 in a comparison of education groups
1 and 2) and, although it appears to be favored by the most educated
women, it is eschewed by the most educated men (a difference that does
not, however, reach statistical significance).
In conclusion, we can say that adverbial quand même is
a form that is in progression. It occurs far more frequently in the spoken
than in the written language, a relational sense is overtaking an
adversative sense, and female and mid-educated speakers are in the
vanguard of this change. The most educated men, for whom quand
même may be a stigmatized form, appear to eschew relational
quand même.
If relational quand même is, indeed, a form that is
spreading, this would seem to corroborate Labov's assertions
concerning the pivotal role of the lower-middle class “early
adopters” in the propagation of language change. Moreover, according
to Labov's (1990) Principle II, in the
majority of linguistic changes, women use a higher frequency of the
incoming forms than men. Women have reputedly a “clear advantage
over men in terms of their sociolinguistic competence” (Chambers, 1995:132) and this might go some way in
explaining their relative ease in adopting the new form–function
configuration. Labov (2001:366) addressed the
question of what he calls the “Gender Paradox,” whereby women
seem to be more conservative than men, using more standard variants, but
are also more progressive than men, because they adopt new variants more
quickly. Labov suggested as a resolution of this apparent contradiction
that: “Women deviate less than men from linguistic norms when the
deviations are overtly proscribed, but more than men when the deviations
are not proscribed.”
The use of hedging particles such as quand même would
most certainly be proscribed in formal written language, and excessive use
of them in the spoken language might well be frowned upon. However,
because of women's slightly greater cerebral propensity towards
“empathizing” (see Baron-Cohen,
2003), they are more likely to employ quand même in
a pragmatic and relational manner. Sex and social class play a fundamental
role in the perceived “respectability” (overt prestige) of a
form and in promoting its wider-spread use throughout the population.
Women give a form overt prestige. Milroy and Milroy (e.g., Milroy & Milroy, 1997; Milroy
et al., 1994) argued that it is misleading to say that women favor
prestige forms. The cause and effect are, in fact, the reverse. The forms
that women use become overtly prestigious in the community. These forms
(possibly attached to a different function) are then adopted in a change
“from below” by both men and women. In the case of a
pragmaticalizing form, recruited for relational purposes, women are likely
to be in the vanguard in both innovation and propagation, for these
reasons.
Summary
Quand même is currently polysemous or multifunctional.
In the spoken language, and in written language that reflects it, weight
appears to be shifting from a propositional to a relational (bleached)
form. It is hoped that further data collection and ongoing exploration of
the role of quand même in everyday conversation may
continue to test the hypothesis that quand même itself is
undergoing a gradual pragmaticalization, as its underlying
“apologetic” semantic core makes it eminently vulnerable to
recruitment as a hedging particle and that its strong concessive or
adversative sense is gradually being transferred to other lexical items,
such as pourtant. The process is a long and slow one and, as
Hopper and Traugott (1993:95) pointed out, there
is no guarantee that it will ever reach its logical conclusion:
Changes do not have to occur. They do not have to go to
completion, they do not have to move all the way along a cline
[…] the outcome of grammaticalization is quite often a
ragged and incomplete subsystem that is not evidently moving in some
identifiable direction.
In an attempt to find regularity in the pragmatico-semantic changes
apparently undergone by quand même, I return, in my
conclusion, to notions of social integration and politeness.
CONCLUSION
This article attempts to draw attention to the role of hedging
particles as a means of mediating politeness, as much through social
indexation, which such markers may confer, as through their face-enhancing
properties. It aims to demonstrate that the overwhelmingly ubiquitous
considerations of politeness in everyday interaction may lead to a rise in
the distributional frequency of particular invited inferences. In the case
of quand même, it is a rise in the frequency of the
relational sense and a corresponding decrease in the adversative sense.
Haspelmath (1999:1062) argued that the semantic
bleaching or generalization, so often observed in the development from a
lexical to a functional category, does not seem to be a consequence of
routinization, but a prerequisite for it: “Semantic generalization
or bleaching is usually a prerequisite for use in a basic discourse
function, that is, for the increase in frequency that triggers the other
changes.”
This process seems to have been particularly well-illustrated in the
grammaticalization and pragmaticalization of quand même, as
it developed from a form that was solely concessive and conjunctival in
the 18th century and whose frequency of occurrence as an adverb rose in
the 19th century. As quand même adverbialized, it was
increasingly employed as a relational hedging particle, and though this
usage coexists with its canonical adversative one, the conjunctival usage
has all but disappeared, even in more formal styles of writing. It is my
contention that at the far right of the trajectory of semantic change, the
combined insights from politeness theory (Brown &
Levinson, 1987; Eelen, 2001), Milroyan
notions of social networks (e.g., Milroy, 2002),
sociolinguistic notions of salience (e.g., Kerswill
& Williams, 2002), Heine, Claudi, and Hünnemeyer's
(1991) ground-breaking ideas on the conceptual
network of grammaticalization and the role of routinization, coupled with
Traugott and Dasher's (2002) Invited
Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change, can shed considerable light on the
processes of innovation and propagation. Each approach underlines the
primacy of human cognition and human sociability as the motor of change.
What happens in terms of grammaticalization, phonetic reduction, and
coalescence may well follow internal structural constraints. The
underlying motor for change is, however, pragmatico-semantic, cognitive
(see Sweetser, 1990:1–22), possibly ludic,
and motivated by considerations of face and social standing. If, as
Haspelmath argued, lexical items must lose their specific semantic content
and generalize to be used in a basic discourse function (for on-line
editing or, indeed, polite hedging), this process is explicable by
reference to Traugott and Dasher's (2002)
pragmatic notion of Invited Inferencing. As polite formulae are very
frequent in everyday interaction, routinization quickly confirms a newly
recruited hedging particle, which loses its original pragmatic salience in
the manner commonly observed in grammaticalization. So, it seems that, in
certain cases, politeness theory may help explicate innovation. It may
also help to explain propagation, in that human society is apt to splinter
into various identity groups, and, like phonological features,
“bleached” hedging particles can be markers of social
identity. It is at this point that factors relating to social indexation
will play their role in the promotion, or demotion, of particular
linguistic forms in the utterances of particular speakers in particular
circumstances. In this sense, politeness theory can throw light on
propagation, for it is social indexation (having to do with the
maintenance of power and distance) that underlies the now well-known
relationship between synchronic and diachronic variation. At the
non-truth-conditional, procedural, scope-over-discourse, and
intersubjective far right of the spectrum of semantic change, politeness
theory, with its dual conceptualization having to do with conflict
avoidance (sociability) and social indexation, provides a bridge linking
pragmatics and sociolinguistics.
