Current trends in diachronic semantics and pragmatics / / edited by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen, Jacqueline Visconti.

• Superior document: Studies in Pragmatics,
• TeilnehmendeR: Mosegaard Hansen, Maj-Britt,; Visconti, Jacqueline,
• Place / Publishing House: Bingley, England : : Emerald,, 2009.; ©2009
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Studies in pragmatics.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (312 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

The focus of this volume is on semantic and pragmatic change, its causes and mechanisms. The papers gathered here offer both theoretical proposals of more general scope and in-depth studies of language-specific cases of meaning change in particular notional domains. The analyses include data from English, several Romance languages, German, Scandinavian languages, and Oceanic languages. Detailed case-studies covering central semantic domains, such as concession, evidentiality, intensification, modality, negation, scalarity, subjectivity, and temporality, allow the authors to test and refine current models of semantic change, by focusing, for instance, on the respective roles of speakers and hearers in the process and on the relationship between semantic and syntactic reanalysis. Key theoretical notions, such as presuppositions, paradigms, word order, and discourse status are revisited in a diachronic perspective to provide innovative accounts of causes and motivations for linguistic changes. A prominent theme is the evolution of procedural meanings of various kinds. Thus, several papers feature different types of pragmatic markers as their object of study, while others are concerned with items and constructions expressing modality, evidentiality, negation, and relational meanings. Closely related themes are: the interface between semantics and pragmatics/discourse, with figurative uses of language, rhetorical-argumentational strategies, discourse traditions, information structure, and the importance of dialogic contexts in change playing a salient role in several papers; the relationship between meaning change and processes such as grammaticalization, subjectification and pragmaticalization; and, the thorny issue of the categorization of linguistic items such as discourse markers or modal particles, evidentials or epistemic modals, to which the diachronic data are shown to contribute substantially. The volume will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in the fields of semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, grammaticalization, and historical linguistics.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material / Hansen Maj-Britt Mosegaard and Jacqueline Visconti -- Current Trends in Diachronic Semantics and Pragmatics / Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Jacqueline Visconti -- APO: Avoid Pragmatic Overload / Regine Eckardt -- Diachronic Pathways and Pragmatic Strategies: Different Types of Pragmatic Particles from a Diachronic Point of View / Ulrich Detges and Richard Waltereit -- Context Sensitive Changes: The Development of the Affirmative Markers godt ‘good’ and vel ‘well’ in Danish / Eva Skafte Jensen -- Procatalepsis and the Etymology of Hedging and Boosting Particles / Kate Beeching -- Central/Peripheral Functions of allora and ‘Overall Pragmatic Configuration’: A Diachronic Perspective / Carla Bazzanella and Johanna Miecznikowski -- The Importance of Paradigms in Grammaticalisation: Spanish Digressive Markers por cierto and a propósito / Maria Estellés -- The Multiple Origin of es que in Modern Spanish: Diachronic Evidence / Magdalena Romera -- From Aspect/Mood Marker to Discourse Particle: Reconstructing Syntactic and Semantic Change / Bethwyn Evans -- The Grammaticalization Channels of Evidentials and Modal Particles in German: Integration in Textual Structures as a Common Feature / Gabriele Diewald , Marijana Kresic and Elena Smirnova -- Evidentiality, Epistemicity, and their Diachronic Connections to Non-Factuality / Mario Squartini -- The Grammaticalization of Negative Reinforcers in Old and Middle French: A Discourse–Functional Approach / Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen -- A Roots Journey of a French Preposition / Silvia Adler and Maria Asnes -- The Grammaticalization of Privative Adjectives: The Case of Mere / Elke Gehweiler -- The Origin of Semantic Change in Discourse Tradition: A Case Study / Katerina Stathi.