A just amazing marker in French: “Juste”

Abstract Juste belongs to those words (justement, limite, grave, côté, question, niveau…) that today one cannot do without, both in everyday conversation and in the media! After pointing out that juste, from the Latin justus, is a transcategorial unit par excellence, as it can be an adjective, a noun, or an adverb, this article deals with its recent adverbial use, identified orally in the early 2000s, officially registered in Le Petit Robert de la Langue Française in 2014. I propose that juste is a metalinguistic marker which creates double modalisation: it has scope both over an element X which can be an extreme (non-gradable) adjective, a non-gradable noun phrase (verb phrase or prepositional phrase), and over the utterance act. This recent adverbial use of juste is analysed in the following configurations: (1) juste and extreme adjectives (extreme adjectives formed by the suffix -issime, and extreme adjectives formed by the private prefix -in); (2) juste and non-gradable sequences [pas + gradable adjectives]; (3) juste and two non-gradable sequences ([très / trop + gradable adjectives]; [super / hyper / ultra / supra / mega / giga + gradable adjectives]); (4) juste and non-gradable [noun / verb / prepositional] phrases.