Cyclic phenomena in the evolution of pragmatic markers. Examples from Romance.

The paper is programmatic, seeking to explore a recently discovered phenomenon in domain of meaning change, viz. the fact that the evolution of pragmatic markers may take the form of repeated cycles (or perhaps more accurately, spirals) of very similar developments across several diachronic stages (Hansen 2014, Ghezzi & Molinelli 2014). Following a brief discussion of similarities and possible relations between this type of development and the well-known cycles of grammaticalization, such as the negative cycle (Jespersen 1917), I propose a distinction between two broad types of semantic/pragmatic cycles, corresponding to the two basic perspectives from which linguistic meaning may be studied, semasiology vs onomasiology. Each of these two types is in turn illustrated by two specific case studies concerning the evolution of pragmatic markers from Latin to various Romance languages (French, Catalan, Italian). I conclude that the existence of semantic/pragmatic cycles supports the applicability of the Uniformitarian Principle (Labov 1994) in the study of diachronic meaning change, and call for further research on a range of questions relating to the nature, as well as to the descriptive and theoretical importance, of semantic/pragmatic cycles.