The meanings of comme:: a historical perspective (14th-16th centuries)

Among function words which can have many meanings depending on the context, comme is one of the most polysemic in Modem French, even when it is only studied in its subordinate role in complex sentences. Imbs considered that it was unequalled in the variety of its different uses. The study of comme from a diachronic point of view has been facilitated by the computerization of huge corpuses, which allow a better understanding of its polysemy. It is thus possible to discover the stages by which the word has passed and to identify apparently heterogeneous meanings, which are actually coherent, when taking their progressive construction into consideration.