Article published in:
The Role of Pragmatics in Cyclic Language Change
Edited 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

| University of Genova
| 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
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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