| Summary: | In this paper, I describe the arrival of ok (originally O.K., later OK, ok, okay) from the United States to Europe, focusing on the emergence and evolution of its French equivalent (ok, okay, oké). On the basis of a corpus study, relying mostly but not exclusively on literary texts, I show that it has taken ok approximately a century to cross the Atlantic Ocean, and a few more decades to become popular in Europe. In order to identify use-types of ok in French, I analyze its occurrences in the corpus (approximately 650), taking into account syntactic and semantic features. The results show that, from a diachronic perspective, French ok has a very unusual syntactic profile compared to typical Discourse Markers.
|
|---|