| Summary: | This article examines the emergence of the adverb cependant “however” and its various meaning changes, from the temporal meaning “meanwhile” in Old French to the modern concessive meaning. We also examine the grammaticalization of the preposition pendant “while”, and show that this discourse marker’s evolution follows a semantic chain which has already been shown to appear in various cases of grammaticalization : the evolution from time (or concomitance) to concession, through inferred opposition. The concessive meaning appears at the beginning of the 15th century alongside the temporal meaning, and becomes dominant in the course of the 16th century.
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