The Evolution of Temporal Adverbs into Discourse Markers: Grammaticalization or Pragmaticalization? The Case of Romanian atunci “then” and apoi “afterwards”

Abstract

This chapter aims to provide an overview of the evolution and development of temporal adverbs into discourse markers, specifically the changes Romanian temporal adverbs atunci “then” and apoi “afterwards” have undergone. It seeks to comparatively describe their pragmatic functions as a pragmatic marker and to identify the senses underlying these functions in informal and formal conversation. Special attention will be paid to the complete pragmaticalization of apoi versus the partial pragmaticalization of atunci, a systematic and progressive variation and change as a result of either internal factors (e.g., semantic reanalysis) or external factors (e.g., language contact). These changes will be explored using Romanian older texts from the sixteenth century until the nineteenth century along with the Corpus of Spoken Romanian (IVLR). Discourse markers have been described from different perspectives: in terms of parameters of grammaticalization, grammaticalized parentheticals, and less commonly in terms of pragmaticalization, a well-known process of language change. The goal of this chapter is to discuss the latter position as a process separate from that of grammaticalization. The selected data will provide arguments in support of this approach, meant to reinforce the distinction between the two phenomena that have yielded a large body of research in the past couple of decades.

I would like to express my special thanks of gratitude to Professor Elly van Gelderen (Arizona State University), who supplied very useful comments on earlier versions of this text. I am equally grateful to the wonderful audience that attended and/or presented at the 3rd Workshop Language Change in Indo-European, organized during the 6th Naxos Summer School (July 2021), and the Workshop Pragmatic Variation across Time and Space, organized during the 21st International Conference of the Department of Linguistics (University of Bucharest, November 2021). I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments. I am indebted to Professor Nikolaos Lavidas (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens) for his support and encouragement. I would also like to thank Alexandru Vlad for valuable comments on the translations from Old Romanian into English.