This book examines the historical development of discourse and pragmatic markers across the Romance languages. Based on extensive data from several languages, distinguished scholars examine issues relevant to grammaticalization, pragmaticalization, and the interface between grammar and discourse.

This book examines the historical development of discourse and pragmatic markers across the Romance languages. These markers serve to indicate the organization of the discourse, the speaker's relationship with the interlocutor, and the speaker's stance with regard to the information expressed. Their relevance is in assisting interpretation, despite the fact that they have little or no propositional content. In this book, distinguished scholars from different theoretical backgrounds analyse the different classes of discourse and pragmatic markers found in Latin and the Romance languages and explore both their diachronic development and their synchronic properties. Following an introduction and overview of the development of these markers, the book is divided into two parts: the first part investigates pragmatic markers developed from verbs, such as Latin quaeso, Romanian ma rog, and Spanish o sea; the second looks at adverbs as discourse markers, such as French déjà and Italian già, Romanian atunci and Portuguese aliás. Chapters address a variety of theoretical issues such as the cyclic nature of functional developments, the nature of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, semantic change, and the emergence of new pragmatic values. The arguments presented also have consequences for any analysis of the interfaces between grammar, discourse, and interaction.

This book offers new perspectives into the description of the form, meaning and function of Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles in a number of different languages, along with new methods for identifying their ‘prototypical’ instances in situated language contexts, often based on cross-linguistic comparisons. The papers collected in this volume also discuss different factors at play in processes of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, which include contact-induced change and pragmatic borrowing, socio-interactional functional pressures and sociopragmatic indexicalities, constraints of cognitive processing, together with regularities in semantic change. Putting the traditional issues concerning the status, delimitation and categorization of Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles somewhat off the stage, the eighteen articles collected in this volume deal instead with general questions concerning the development and use of such procedural elements, explored from different approaches, both formal and functional, and from a variety of perspectives – including corpus-based, sociolinguistic, and contrastive perspectives – and offering language-specific synchronic and diachronic studies.

The Romance languages and dialects constitute a treasure trove of linguistic data of profound interest and significance. Data from the Romance languages have contributed extensively to our current empirical and theoretical understanding of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics. Written by a team of world-renowned scholars, this Handbook explores what we can learn about linguistics from the study of Romance languages, and how the body of comparative and historical data taken from them can be applied to linguistic study. It also offers insights into the diatopic and diachronic variation exhibited by the Romance family of languages, of a kind unparalleled for any other Western languages. By asking what Romance languages can do for linguistics, this Handbook is essential reading for all linguists interested in the insights that a knowledge of the Romance evidence can provide for general issues in linguistic theory.

The present volume is dedicated to the phenomenon of pragmaticalization in the context of the theory of grammaticalization. While, in recent decades, the growing interest in the analysis of pragmatic phenomena within grammaticalization research was triggered, amongst others, by studies in the field of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in language, we still lack a model for a broad understanding of how changes on the discourse level come about and face a lack of information which provides a conclusive theoretical framework to systematically record the emergence of an entire layer of discourse units in language. The book is one of the first comprehensive collections contributed to the topic of pragmaticalization, and includes empirical studies on a wide range of languages from diachronic and synchronic perspectives. Aiming to refine our understanding of pragmatic shifts which can be observed by several linguistic units, the contributions discuss such issues as pros and cons of the concept of pragmaticalization, the parameters of pragmaticalization, the emergence of discourse markers and constructions with various pragmatic functions, pathways of change, including the influence of language contact.

This study investigates the properties of a set of Italian adverbs (among others: pure ‘also’, solo ‘only’, un po’ ‘a bit’) that, in specific contexts of use, modify the speech acts in which they appear. On the one hand, these elements specify the way in which a speech act should be interpreted with reference to the specific interactional context, modifying its illocutionary force. On the other hand, they index presupposed/inferred meanings active in the common ground of the interaction, integrating the speech act in the common ground. These functions closely resemble those of the elements that, especially in the German linguistic tradition, are called modal particles. Drawing on original data from Italian – both from the standard language and regional varieties – the goal of the study is to describe the synchronic features of these elements and to explain the emergence of the modal uses. For this purpose, it jointly employs theoretical notions of pragmatics (speech act theory, inferences in interaction), models of language change (reanalysis and conventionalization) and the descriptive tools of sociolinguistic approaches. Through the presentation of four case studies, integrating corpus and questionnaire data, the present work gives a thorough analysis of the modal functions and the contexts of use of the adverbs under investigation: it explores their role at the semantics/pragmatics interface, it discusses their place in a layered model of grammar and it examines their distribution across different language varieties.

Cerea, madamin, andoma bin? Less than a century ago, this was one of the most frequent greetings heard in Piedmont, a region in northwest Italy. Today, however, Piedmontese is severely endangered. This volume presents the first widely accessible and comprehensive grammatical description of the contemporary koine, covering its phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics and typology, and drawing examples from both oral and written sources. Data on the history of the language and the local dialects and notes on revitalization efforts are also included.

This book aims to address a gap in the existing literature on the relationship between vagueness and ambiguity, as well as on their differences and similarities, both in synchrony and diachrony, and taking into consideration their relation to language use. The book is divided into two parts, which address specific and broader research questions from different perspectives. The former part examines the differences between ambiguity and vagueness from a bird-eye perspective, with a particular focus on their respective functions and roles in language change. It also presents innovative linguistic resources and tools for the study of these phenomena. The second part contains case studies on vagueness and ambiguity in language change and use. It considers different strategies and languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Medieval Latin, and Old Italian. The readership for this volume is broad, encompassing scholars in a range of disciplines, including pragmatics, spoken discourse, conversation analysis, discourse genres (political, commercial, notarial discourse), corpus studies, language change, pragmaticalization, and language typology.

This book examines Latin word order, and in particular the relative ordering of i) lexical verbs and direct objects (OV vs VO) and ii) auxiliaries and non-finite verbs (VAux vs AuxV). In Latin these elements can freely be ordered with respect to each other, whereas the present-day Romance languages only allow for the head-initial orders VO and AuxV. Lieven Danckaert offers a detailed, corpus-based description of these two word order alternations, focusing on their diachronic development in the period from c. 200 BC until 600 AD. The corpus data reveal that some received wisdom needs to be reconsidered: there is in fact no evidence for any major increase in productivity of the order VO during the eight centuries under investigation, and the order AuxV only becomes more frequent in clauses with a modal verb and an infinitive, not in clauses with a BE-auxiliary and a past participle. The book also explores a more fundamental question about Latin syntax, namely whether or not the language is configurational, in the sense that a phrase structure grammar (with 'higher-order constituents' such as verb phrases) is needed to describe and analyse Latin word order patterns. Four pieces of evidence are presented that suggest that Latin is indeed a fully configurational language, despite its high degree of word order flexibility. Specifically, it is shown that there is ample evidence for the existence of a verb phrase constituent. The book thus contributes to the ongoing debate regarding the status of configurationality as a language universal.

This is an in-depth analysis of discourse markers in Sicily that sheds light on what discourse-pragmatic functions they perform, how they evolve historically, and what their social value is in the bilingual speech community.