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.