Article published in:
The Role of Pragmatics in Cyclic Language ChangeEdited by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 21:2] 2020
► pp. 182–207
Functional expansions of temporal adverbs and discursive connectives
From Latin tum, tunc, dumque to Old Italian dunque
Chiara Fedriani | University of Genova
Piera Molinelli | University of Bergamo
This paper examines the synchronic competition and diachronic substitution of three Latin temporal expressions:
tum, tunc (‘at that time’, ‘then’), and later dumque (originally, ‘while-and’), and its Old
Italian outcome dunque (‘then’). Besides providing a new path of development and a new etymology for Italian
dunque, we describe in detail the steps by which these forms gradually replaced one another and examine the
factors at play in their renewal, showing that such forms all display a similar inference-driven functional expansion from
propositional to discourse-organizational meanings. However, their subsequent development led to a functional similarity that is
only partial, as is often the case in semantic–pragmatic cycles. While discussing the nature of this cycle, we focus on the
speaker’s role in this type of change, which in our view can be summarized in the speaker’s cyclical application of recurrent
functional principles: phonetic efficiency, analogy, and regularity in semantic change.
Keywords: discursive connectives, functional expansion, inference-driven change, Latin, Old Italian, temporal adverbs
Published online: 03 March 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00041.fed
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00041.fed
Sources
Sources
Brepolis: Brepolis Cross-Database Search tool, relaying the Brepolis Latin databases
Available online at: https://about.brepolis.net/cross-database-searchtool/
MGH: Monumenta Germaniae Historica
Available online at: http://www.dmgh.de/
TLFi
Trésor de la langue Française informatisé [‘Digitized Treasury of the French Language’]. Available online at: http://atilf.atilf.fr
ATILF – CNRS and Université de Lorraine
TLIO: Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini
Available online at: http://tlio.ovi.cnr.it/
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