Article published in:
New Directions in Grammaticalization Research
Edited by Andrew D.M. Smith, Graeme Trousdale and Richard Waltereit
[Studies in Language Companion Series 166] 2015
► pp. 67–92

The lexicalization-grammaticalization-pragmaticalization interface

The case of Mainland Scandinavian jeg tror

| University of Antwerp

This paper reports on a corpus investigation of Mainland Scandinavian expressions meaning ‘I think’ and the lexicalization-grammaticalization-pragmaticalization interface. The discourse marker I think has been subsumed under lexicalization, grammaticalization and pragmaticalization. It can be conceived of as a formulaic token which is an argument in favor of lexicalization. It also has some prototypical properties of grammaticalization, but especially its optional character and syntactic freedom pose serious problems for a grammaticalization analysis. An account in terms of pragmaticalization is controversial because pragmaticalization is not a generally accepted type of language change in grammaticalization studies. I will argue that precisely the ‘problematic’ properties of I think provide good reasons to postulate a separate process of pragmaticalization for the rise of discourse markers.

Published online: 08 April 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.166.04bei
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