From Prism to Pipeline: Divergent Interpretive Paths of Just and Still

This paper examines two highly frequent yet relatively undercompared expressions in everyday English: just and still. Existing research has often analyzed just as a focus marker, minimizer, hedge, or scalar restriction marker, while still has commonly been examined in relation to temporal persistence, continuation, or concessive marking. These approaches offer important insights into their semantic and pragmatic functions, but they have paid comparatively less attention to how the two expressions may organize different interpretive pathways during meaning formation. Drawing on a small-scale observational dataset from naturally occurring Reddit discourse (20 just cases and 20 still cases), this paper proposes a preliminary distinction. In emotionally charged and self-disclosive contexts, just often compresses multiple private reasons, emotions, experiences, and internal lines of reasoning into a more unified outward expression, while leaving much of its intermediate interpretive path less explicitly articulated. By contrast, still more often marks the continued presence of a state that would normally be expected to fade following the passage of time, relational closure, shifting social expectations, or changing external conditions, thereby making that lingering state more readily perceptible to others. To describe this contrast, the paper introduces two provisional structural models: prism-like compression for just and channel persistence for still. Rather than proposing a comprehensive lexical theory, this paper aims to show that superficially similar emotional expressions may emerge through different interpretive paths, and that seemingly minor lexical items may systematically participate in the compression, visibility, and continuation of interpretive processes.