The Evolution of Pragmatic Markers in English: Pathways of Change

Description

Based on a rich set of historical data, this book traces the development of pragmatic markers in English, from hwaet in Old English and whilom in Middle English to whatever and I'm just saying in present-day English. Laurel J. Brinton carefully maps the syntactic origins and development of these forms, and critically examines postulated unilineal pathways, such as from adverb to conjunction to discourse marker, or from main clause to parenthetical. The book sets case studies within a larger examination of the development of pragmatic markers as instances of grammaticalization or pragmaticalization. The characteristics of pragmatic markers - as primarily oral, syntactically optional, sentence-external, grammatically indeterminate elements - are revised in the context of scholarship on pragmatic markers over the last thirty or more years.

Laurel J. Brinton is Professor of English Language at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She is co-author of several books, including Lexicalization and Language Change (Cambridge, 2005, with Elizabeth Closs Traugott), The Comment Clause in English: Syntactic Origins and Pragmatic Development (Cambridge, 2008) and The English Language: A Linguistic History 3rd ed. (2016, with Leslie K. Arnovick). She served as co-editor of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics and is currently co-editor of English Language and Linguistics.