"Invoking Scalarity: The Development of IN FACT"


We identify and analyze the discourse contexts in which the adverbial _in
fact_ was recruited in the history of English to pragmatic marker status.
As a pragmatic marker it invokes scalarity in two domains: that of
epistemic sentence adverb (in fact2, IPAdv) , and that of rhetorical
discourse marker (in fact 3, DM). The particular analysis of _in fact_
leads to the formulation of general hypotheses about how scalar meanings
emerge from non-scalar sources, and also about the diachronic relationships
among scalar polysemies of the same lexeme.