Deux marqueurs discursifs en diachronie: esp. en el fondo / fr. au fond

What is it about?

This paper analyses the development of the Spanish phrase 'en el fondo' and the French phrase 'au fond' as discourse markers (DM). Without excluding possible cognitive criteria in the evolution from propositional lexical meaning to procedural meaning, we try to formulate and validate hypothesis according to the semantic and pragmatic evolution of these phrases. The article aims at giving an answer to the following question: is there a significant influence from French to Spanish or can we speak of a parallel evolution in the two languages?

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