Referring to the discourse itself is a feature of natural languages that could be considered as a metalinguistic feature in a broad sense and manifests itself in many ways such as approximation, exemplification, qualification of the enunciation. This metalinguistic dimension is often indicated by what is called metadiscursive expressions. These are expressions of different nature, such as genre, on va dire, je veux dire, c’est une manière de parler, pour ainsi dire, si vous voyez ce que je veux dire, comme dirait X, să spunem așa, cam, aș spune, ca să spun așa, cum (ar) spune X etc. Labelled as boucles réflexives, gloses énonciatives or marqueurs de modalisation autonymique, marqueurs de glose, marqueurs de reformulation, marqueurs d’approximation or opérateurs d’approximation, these expressions are a matter of questioning about the relation between lexicon, grammar and discourse.

This project proposes a diachronic approach of the metalinguistic markers in French and Romanian. The research will examine the emergence of this class and the mechanisms underlying it, which account for the processes of grammaticalization / pragmaticalization or others. The implementation of the project will be carried out by achieving the following specific objectives: identifying the elements of the class in both languages, according to a multilayered approach (delimitation in relation to other classes, degrees of fixation/lexicalization, sub-categories); describing the different configurations of the markers in question and the comparison between the two chosen languages: simple words, phrastic costructions; comparing the metalinguistic markers in the two languages through an analysis of the translations from one language to another; reconstructing the evolution and emergence stages of the selected markers. The research relies on existing oral and written corpora and databases in the two languages, but will also contribute to gathering new data.