The pragmatics of grammaticalisation

This paper aims to identify the role of pragmatics in grammaticalisation and to highlight the particular steps in the process of the conventionalisation of conversational implicatures on the basis of a historical pragmatic study concerning the grammaticalisation of the Catalan anar ‘to go’ + infinitive construction. It also provides some comparative considerations with similar constructions in other Romance languages. The corpus contains occurrences taken from medieval Catalan chronicles. In order to reconstruct the history of anar + infinitive, the paper also considers morphological facts and other Catalan medieval periphrases. The paper concludes that implicatures play a double role in semantic change. On the one hand, they can become part of the semantic meaning attached to a certain construction as a new semantic component. On the other hand, they can promote the salience of a certain semantic component within the semantic structure of a lexical item.