Volume 49, Issue 2 - Grammaticalization, Pragmaticalization, and (Inter)subjectification: Methodological Issues in the Study of Discourse Markers

This article provides a critical assessment of previous claims that complement-taking mental predicates (CTMPs) like I think, I suppose , etc. are instances of grammaticalization. In so doing, it calls attention to the main problems one encounters when applying commonly agreed-upon grammaticalization criteria to CTMPs. It is demonstrated that the syntactic mobility of CTMPs is crucial to their decategorialization while being at odds with the parameter of positional fixation. In addition, CTMPs' ability to occur both in adverb-like, parenthetical positions, and in verb-like, clause-initial position, suggests that their decategorialization is incomplete. The possibility to reactivate productive verbal properties in expressions that display a high degree of formulaicity is explained in terms of grammatical persistence. Another challenge facing the grammaticalization of CTMPs is the existence of variation in terms of tense, aspect and modality. The aforementioned obstacles are documented by present-day spoken British English corpus data. It is argued that, rather than regarding them as pragmaticalized or lexicalized as has alternatively been suggested, CTMPs should be approached from the usage-based perspective of constructional grammaticalization, which is concerned with the grammaticalization of schematic constructions that are part of a wider taxonomy rather than being isolated sequences.

This article examines two case studies of cognate expressions in English and in French, which have developed partly in the same and partly in different directions. One case is the pair actually: actuellement , the other is the set in fact: en fait/de fait/au fait . Monolingual research on their present-day meanings and the study of their translation paradigms bring to light semantic and pragmatic overlap as well as differences between the members of each set. The study also looks at their historical development and compares the stages the expressions have gone through in the two languages concerned. The diachronic data indicate partially parallel paths of development, with salient divergences in some cases. The empirical crosslinguistic diachronic study of these two sets has a mainly theoretical aim, i.e., to contribute to a further understanding of the processes of grammaticalization. Building on existing debates on the issue of the rise of discourse markers and the extent to which they instantiate cases of grammaticalization, the article considers the following questions anew in the light of the results of the empirical data: (i) How can we explain that words with the same origin develop pragmatic functions in one language but not in the other, or that they do so at a much later stage? (ii) Does the case for a unidirectional development towards (inter)subjectification stand if we consider the two case studies? (iii) Which criteria for classifying the two cases as examples of grammaticalization are fulfilled? While the case for crosslinguistic synchronic research on discourse markers has been argued in previous studies (see e.g., Aijmer and Simon-Vandenbergen, Linguistics 41: 1123–1161, 2003, Pragmatic markers in contrast (Studies in Pragmatics 2), Elsevier, 2006; Aijmer et al., Pragmatic markers in translation: A methodological proposal, Elsevier, 2006), and the usefulness of a panchronic crosslinguistic approach of discourse markers has also been recently shown (see especially Hansen and Strudsholm, Linguistics 46: 471–505, 2008), the present article lends further supports to this thesis by showing that it is through comparison of partially parallel processes that the complex issues of actuation of a change and motivation for change become more transparent. Further, the formal differences of the sources of each set at hand as well as the present-day syntactic and pragmatic behavior of the different members favor an approach to lexical and grammatical categories as nondiscrete and point to the need for a revision of the traditional conceptualization of grammar and grammatical classes.

The article discusses definitions of grammaticalization, pragmaticalization and (inter)subjectification in order to clarify the relations between these terms. While grammaticalization is defined as a functionally motivated, complex type of language change, (inter)subjectification is shown to be a specific type of semantic change. Pragmaticalization, finally, is argued to represent a subclass of grammaticalization, which displays essential core features of grammaticalization processes, but is distinguished from other subtypes of grammaticalization processes by specific characteristic traits (concerning function and domain as well as syntactic integration). This is demonstrated by a survey of the diachronic development of several modal particles in German (among them aber, eben, ruhig ). The more general theoretical stance taken here is that the notion of grammar and hence grammaticalization has to be conceived broad enough in order to encompass this type of discourse functions.

This paper presents an analysis of the evolution of the French preverbal expression à propos (‘by the way’ in Modern French). First I discuss the possibility of analyzing it as a discourse marker. Basing the analysis on Fraser's approach (Journal of Pragmatics 14: 383–395, 1990, Journal of pragmatics 31: 931–952, 1999), I show that à propos falls within the definition of discourse markers, displaying their main characteristics. More specifically it serves to reinforce, or even create, discourse coherence. Secondly I give an account of the historical development of the expression and of the emergence of its pragmatic uses. I argue that it is closely related to the evolution of à ce propos (and to a lesser extent to that of à propos de ), and hypothesize that à propos has progressively replaced à ce propos in certain contexts, while also developing in contexts of more abrupt discourse shift. I finally address the issue of the interpretation of à propos as a case of grammaticalization, and show that there are sufficiently convincing arguments to justify its being analyzed as such. I also discuss the relevance of introducing the notion of pragmaticalization, and argue for this being a mere subclass of grammaticalization, though pertaining more specifically to the pragmatic area.

This article argues that it is frequency and usage effects, arising in particular contexts and constructions, that lead to the emergence of new semantic and syntactic properties in expressions that become discourse markers (DMs). These changes, it is argued, are comparable to those that take place in the development of other grammaticalizing linguistic items. DMs are taken to be sentence adverbials that express discourse-relational predications. Data from the histories of two English DMs, ‘instead’ and ‘rather’, are examined. These contrastive DMs are often interchangeable in present-day English but have very different origins, ‘instead’ deriving from the phrase ‘in (the) stead of NP’, and ‘rather’ from the comparative VP-adverb rather, meaning ‘sooner’ or ‘faster’. In each of the two cases, there is seen to be increased type frequency (with context expansion) and reanalysis (wider scope). The diachronic evidence supports the idea that the reanalysis resulted from wider interpretation, not from prior change in word order. As DMs, both ‘instead’ and ‘rather’ become associated with high informational salience. Both undergo functional split, leading to new polysemies. Insofar as the newer, DM senses are closer to the grammatical end of the lexical-grammatical cline, the expressions can be said to have grammaticalized. There is no evidence that any qualitatively special changes are involved in the emergence of the DM uses, compared with the developments of the other polysemies of the expressions.

In this article, we focus on the diachronic development of causal connectives and investigate whether subjectification occurs. We present the results of ongoing and previous corpus-based analyses of the diachronic development of Dutch want and omdat , and French car and parce que , all four causal connectives roughly meaning ‘because’. In addition, we try to show that “grammaticalization studies can gain from the systematic and principled use of large computerized corpora and the methods which have been developed within corpus linguistics” (Lindquist and Mair, Corpus approaches to grammaticalization in English, John Benjamins, 2004: x). That's why we have combined two historical and two comparative corpus methods to chart the diachronic development of these four causals. Our study reveals that subjectification is not an integral part of the diachronic development of these causals: subjectification does occur in the rise of these connectives, but in the later stages of their development only parce que undergoes subjectification. Our analyses show that the four methods all have their own merits and limitations, but they are most effective when combined.