Abstract
This article submits a philological and Discourse-based approach to deverbal units. Applied to French language, the study examines to what extent ant-forms (such as suivant, concernant and durant) appear in contemporary linguistic uses as units with a variable verbal consistency. The purpose of the paper consists in demonstrating how the specific features of this category meet a scalar phenomenon, depending on the fact that these elements occur respectively as gerunds, present participles, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, or operators. After a brief introduction, the article exposes the outlines of the Dik's functional approach and exemplifies the scalarity trough the cases of partant and disant. The discussion touches upon some borderline cases, and the conclusion puts forward four assumptions for an application of the scalarity hypothesis (SH) in other perspectives.