Pragmatic Markers and Pragmaticalization

Download or read book Pragmatic Markers and Pragmaticalization written by Peter Lauwers and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this paper, we investigate the evolution from imperatives to discourse markers in Romance, with a corpus-based approach. We focus on the case of items coming from verbs meaning 'to look', in a semasiological perspective: Spanish and Catalan mira, Portuguese olha, Italian guarda, French regarde, Romanian uite. We show that they all share many uses, among which turn-taking, introduction of reported speech, hesitation phenomenon, topic-shifting and modalization, except for French regarde. We then establish (against Waltereit, 2002) that the development of these uses is the result of a process