Who says it better? Et même and pour ne pas dire in contrast

Abstract

This paper deals with the semantic and pragmatic values of two operators, et même et pour ne pas dire, from a contrastive point of view, highlighting the differences and the convergences of their usage in order to ultimately understand what is the contribution of the operator’s saying and/or the concomitant preterition to semantic description. Within the general framework of arguments’ accrual (both items are actually found in structures such as P(x) operators (y), in which y has an argumentative strength that is higher than that of x), these two operators can be easily interchanged in most utterances of the corpus. Looking into the reasons why this permutation is often blocked allows to fine-tune the analysis of their divergences. It is, thus, explained that the differences in how the viewpoints of the polyphonic structure of these two items are organised, their potential ability to implement a non-prototypical argumentative scale, or even the requirement to say things differently, are some of the values that distinguish them.