What is it about?
This article presents the outlines of a unified account of the various discourse functions of the Latin particle 'iam', a partial equivalent of English 'already'. We propose a composite 'basic meaning' for iam in terms of three features, which may, but need not all be relevant in each single instance: polarity, phasality, and (counter-presuppositional) focality. Furthermore, we claim that iam may not only have scope over single utterance constituents but also over relations between two constituents or states of affairs. The analysis proposed accounts for the differences between the various usages of this particle, while it also explains the connections between them. It enables us, furthermore, to include two usages of iam which have generally been overlooked, viz. its use as marker of positive polarity and its use as a mere focus-marker. This latter usage receives most of our attention in this paper.