Beyond Grammaticalization and Discourse Markers offers a comprehensive account of the most promising new directions in the vast field of grammaticalization studies. From major theoretical issues to hardly addressed experimental questions, this volume explores new ways to expand, refine or even challenge current ideas on grammaticalization. All contributions, written by leading experts in the fields of grammaticalization and discourse markers, explore issues such as: the impact of Construction Grammar into language change; cyclicity as a driving force of change; the importance of positions and discourse units as predictors of grammaticalization; a renewed way of thinking about philological considerations, or the role of Experimental Pragmatics for hypothesis checking.

This book is a comparative corpus-based study of discourse markers based on verbs of saying in English and French. Based on a wide comparable web corpus, the book investigates how discourse markers work in discourse, and compares their differences of position, scope and collocations both cross-linguistically and within single languages. The author positions this study within the wider epistemological background of the French-speaking ‘enunciative’ tradition and the English-speaking ‘pragmatic’ tradition, and it will be of particular interest to students and scholars of semantics, pragmatics and contrastive linguistics.

Discourse markers constitute an important part of linguistic communication, and research on this phenomenon has been a thriving field of study over the past three decades. However, a problem that has plagued this research is that these markers exhibit a number of structural characteristics that are hard to interpret based on existing methodologies, such as grammaticalization. This study argues that it is possible to explain such characteristics in a meaningful way. It presents a cross-linguistic survey of the development of discourse markers, their important role in communication, and their relation to the wider context of sociocultural behaviour, with the goal of explaining their similarities and differences across a typologically wide range of languages. By giving a clear definition of discourse markers, it aims to provide a guide for future research, making it essential reading for students and researchers in linguistics, and anyone interested in exploring this fascinating linguistic phenomenon.

The first handbook to survey and expand the burgeoning field of corpus pragmatics, the intersection of pragmatics and corpus linguistics.

This book explores the use of discourse markers - lexical items where drawing a distinction between propositional and non-propositional, syntactically-semantically integrated and discourse-pragmatic uses is especially relevant. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, descriptive and critical (CDA) perspectives, and manual annotation and automatized analyses, the author argues that Discourse Markers (DMs) cannot be effectively studied in isolation, but must instead be contextualised with reference to other discourse-pragmatic devices and their language and genre backgrounds. This book will be of interest to students and academics working in the fields of DM research and critical discourse studies, and will also appeal to scholars working in areas such as genre studies, second language acquisition (SLA), literary analysis, contemporary cinematography, Tolkien scholarship, and Bible studies.

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 present volume examines the usefulness of a particular set of concepts and processes of change studying their applicability to a range of linguistic changes in Spanish and Latin that cannot be easily or can only be partially accounted for within the framework of grammaticalization. Rather than challenging the insights of grammaticalization theory, the different contributions to this monograph demonstrate that exaptation, capitalization, refunctionalization and adfunctionalization, as well as changes motivated by rhetorical guidelines, constitute interesting and valuable notions that allow for a better understanding of specific language changes in Spanish and, by extension, of language change in general.