This volume and its companion one"Rethinking grammaticalization: New perspectives" offer a selection of papers from the "Third International Conference New Reflections on Grammaticalization," held at the University of Santiago de Compostela in July 2005. The overall aim of the book is to enrich our understanding of what grammaticalization entails via detailed case studies in combination with theoretical and methodological discussions. Some of the theoretical issues discussed in the sixteen articles included in the volume are the nature of grammaticalization and related processes such as anti-, re- and degrammaticalization, the relationship between grammaticalization and lexicalization, the role of frequency in grammaticalization and the interplay between information structure and grammaticalization. Other topics covered are the grammaticalization of composite predicates in English, the emergence of modal particles in German and particle clusters in Dutch and the grammaticalization of various modal auxiliaries in Spanish and in Swedish.

This volume contains a selection of papers on grammaticalization from a broad perspective. Some of the papers focus on basic concepts in grammaticalization research such as the concept of 'grammar' as the endpoint of grammaticalization processes, erosion, (uni)directionality, the relation between grammaticalization and constructions, subjectification, and the relation between grammaticalization and analogy. Other papers shed a critical light on grammaticalization as an explanatory parameter in language change. New case studies of micro-processes of grammaticalization complete the selection. The empirical evidence for (and against) grammaticalization comes from diverse domains: subject control, clitics, reciprocal markers, pronouns and agreement markers, gender markers, auxiliaries, aspectual categories, intensifying adjectives and determiners, and pragmatic markers. The languages covered include English and its varieties, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, French, Slavonic languages, and Turkish. The book will be valuable to scholars working on grammaticalization and language change as well as to those interested in individual languages.

Grammaticalization research has increasingly highlighted the notion of constructions in the last decade. In the wake of this heightened interest, efforts have been made in grammaticalization research to more precisely articulate the largely pretheoretical notion of construction in the theoretical framework of construction grammar. As such, grammaticalization research increasingly interacts and converges with the emerging field of diachronic construction grammar. This volume brings together articles that are situated at the intersection of grammaticalization research and diachronic construction grammar. All articles share an interest in integrating insights from grammaticalization research and construction grammar in order to advance our understanding of empirical cases of grammaticalization. Constructions at various levels of abstractness are investigated, both in well-documented languages, such as Ancient Greek, Latin, Spanish, German, Norwegian and English, and in less-described languages, such as Manchu and Mongolian.

Grammaticalization research looks back on a rich history, but recent empirical findings, as well as new insights from cognitive science and psycholinguistics, entice researchers to reassess and review what we know about the process. This book presents a detailed study of the grammaticalization of motion verbs in the Mayan languages. The focus lies on variation in the parallel grammaticalization of motion verbs into auxiliaries and directionals. It is demonstrated that the genetically related and areally close languages do not always grammaticalize source items in the same way - both from a formal and meaning perspective. The empirical findings suggest that traditional theories on grammaticalization do not capture the complex nature of the phenomenon entirely. Therefore, a Network Approach to grammaticalization is introduced which emphasizes a 'meaning-first' account. The approach seeks to combine the conceptual with the discourse-pragmatic while being firmly grounded in cognitive and psychological facts. New insights into the grammaticalization behavior of the world's languages are offered, while well-established notions and assumptions within the grammaticalization research paradigm are reviewed and challenged.

"Thoughts on grammaticalization" was first published in a working-paper version in 1982 and became very influential immediately, even though it was properly published only in 1995. Despite its modest title, the book can be read as an advanced introduction to grammaticalization, though its conception is very original. The present edition contains a number of corrections of the 1995 edition. After a short review of the history of research, the work introduces and delimits the concepts related to grammaticalization. It then provides extensive exemplification of grammaticalization phenomena in diverse languages, ordered by grammatical domains such as the verbal, pronominal and nominal sphere and clause level relations. The final chapter presents a theory of grammaticalization which is based on the autonomy of the linguistic sign with respect to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes. This is the basis of the structural parameters that constitute grammaticalization. They are operationalized to the point of rendering degrees of grammaticalization measurable.

The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics provides a state-of-the-art overview of the wide breadth of research in pragmatics. An introductory section outlines a brief history, the main issues and key approaches and perspectives in the field, followed by a thought-provoking introductory chapter on interdisciplinarity by Jacob L. Mey. A further thirty-eight chapters cover both traditional and newer areas of pragmatic research, divided into four sections: Methods and modalities Established fields Pragmatics across disciplines Applications of pragmatic research in today’s world. With accessible, refreshing descriptions and discussions, and with a look towards future directions, this Handbook is an essential resource for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in pragmatics within English language and linguistics and communication studies.

This volume, which emerged from a workshop at the "New Reflections on Grammaticalization 4" conference held at KU Leuven in July 2008, contains a collection of papers which investigate the relationship between synchronic gradience and the apparent gradualness of linguistic change, largely from the perspective of grammaticalization. In addition to versions of the papers presented at the workshop, the volume contains specially commissioned contributions, some of which offer commentaries on a subset of the other articles. The articles address a number of themes central to grammaticalization studies, such as the role of reanalysis and analogy in grammaticalization, the formal modelling of grammaticalization, and the relationship between formal and functional change, using data from a range of languages, and (in some cases) from particular electronic corpora. The volume will be of specific interest to historical linguists working on grammaticalization, and general linguists working on the interface between synchrony and diachrony.