Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen. Photo by University of Manchester

Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen's research falls within the areas of semantics and pragmatics, from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective, with French as primary empirical domain. Her research interests include grammaticalization and meaning change, verbal interaction and discourse, functional and cognitive linguistics, including, but not limited to, (diachronic) construction grammar.

About the seminar

Title

"A typology of linear and non-linear forms of pragmaticalization (and how they differ from grammaticalization)"

Zoom

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Abstract

In this paper I address the diachronic evolution of pragmatic markers, with a focus on what I call linear vs non-linear forms of pragmaticalization.

The rise of pragmatic markers has been an increasingly popular research topic for more than three decades. The pathway that has hitherto been most frequently attested involves linguistic items or constructions that originally have truth-conditional meaning and belong to « core » grammar, but which more or less gradually evolve non-truth-conditional, more (inter)subjective, uses that lie outside « core » grammar. This form of evolution is widely assumed to be regular, unidirectional, and thus fundamentally linear in nature. Saliently, the study of such cases been used to argue for a redefinition of the notion of grammaticalization.

The literature has, however, reported examples of markers that appear to have taken more complex, non-linear, paths at the semantic-pragmatic and/or the syntactic level. These types of cases have been/are the focus of two international research networks of which I was/am the PI : the British Academy-funded « Cyclicity in Semantic-Pragmatic Change : from Latin to Romance » (2017-18) and the AHRC-funded «The Role of Pragmatics in Cyclic Language Change» (2021-23).

In my talk, I argue that because pragmatic markers may evolve along a variety of non-linear – including but not limited to cyclical – paths, it is unhelpful to subsume the rise of pragmatic markers under the concept of grammaticalization. Instead, in order to arrive at a descriptively adequate account, it is more useful to draw on a distinction between grammaticalization, pragmaticalization and lexicalization. 

I propose a typology of forms of pragmaticalization, which – besides what I have called “linear” pragmaticalization above – include four non-linear forms. The typology is based on attested patterns of evolution prominently involving interaction between, on the one hand, two levels of meaning (what I call the Content Level and the Context Level), and on the other hand, two levels of grammar (Micro-Syntax and Macro-Syntax). 

Examples will be adduced from Romance languages.

Contact

Welcome to contact us if you have questions about our seminars.
If you need a sign language interpreter, please let us know in advance.

Anna Sjöberg, PhD student
anna.sjoberg@ling.su.se

Carla Wikse Barrow, PhD student
carla.w.barrow@ling.su.se