Seulement et ses usages scalaires

This article is about the meaning of the French adverb seulement and focuses on various uses which constitute challenges to traditional analyses : seulement in rhetorical questions and seulement which loses its restrictive meaning when associated with a temporal argument. It is argued that these various uses can be accounted for in a unified way, if one subtitutes to a two dimensional analysis, based on the distinction between assertion and presupposition, a three dimensional analysis, considering also implicatures triggered by the adverb. We claim that seulement, when it is associated with A in the sentence P (A), conveys three different types of contents : a negative one (no more than A is P), which corresponds to the assertive part, a positive one (at least A is P), which corresponds to the presuppositional part, and a scalar one (A is low on a contextually relevant scale), which is responsible for semantic and pragmatic effects such as the bias in questions and the evaluative or modal flavour in certain assertions. The article also shows that the associate of seulement may be a constituent or a word, but also a functional category such as the illocutionary force or the tense phrase.