Clines and Trajectories: Grammaticalization and Pragmaticalization in Romance

Dear Colleagues,

From its first conception in the 19th century to its formal articulation starting in the 1980s and 1990s, grammaticalization has taken centre stage in conversation around diachronic language change.

In the early 20th century, it was recognized that a process could be identified in diachronic language change through which an autonomous word evolved into grammatical elements (Meillet, 1921), suggesting implicitly that language change is directional. Specifically, the predominantly observed path sees a lexical item (a free word) gradually weakening phonetically (erosion), semantically (bleaching) and syntactically (loss of independence), and becoming an inflectional affix (a morpheme). This generalization is captured by Givón’s (1971: 413) famous observation that ‘today’s morphology is yesterday’s syntax’.

Since its introduction in the 20th century, grammaticalization has proved one of the most successful research paradigms, continuing to engage scholars and extend its empirical object of inquiry to cover a great variety of languages and language families and its theoretical horizons cover to patterns of change.

Much work on grammaticalization theory in the second half of the 20th century focused on identifying recurring directional paths of change, so-called ‘grammaticalization clines’, sequences of sequential and ordered steps that capture the gradual nature of change and are found to hold across languages. Underpinning the validity of such clines is the recognition that ‘forms tend to undergo the same kinds of changes’ (Hopper and Traugott, 2003: 6).

Directionality expressed in the form of step-by-step change is one of the core tenets of grammaticalization theory as it developed in the second half of the 20th century, and it is the basis for the notion of ‘grammaticalization clines’. A grammaticalization cline is a staged, directional pathway that describes how a linguistic expression typically moves from lexical, autonomous uses toward increasingly grammatical, dependent, and often morphologically reduced forms. A cline links semantic/pragmatic change (bleaching and subjectification) with formal change (phonetic erosion, loss of syntactic mobility, and fusion/affixation) and can be recognized as the underlying ‘skeleton’ in recurring clines, such as the following:

• Demonstrative → definite article;
• Full pronoun → weak/unstressed pronoun → clitic → loss / zero or affixal residue
• Lexical verb → auxiliary → tense/aspect marker → affixal residue;
• Negation cline.

More recent is the recognition of a similar process of change, ‘pragmaticalization’, whereby a linguistic form, rather than contributing to propositional content or morphosyntactic structure, develops a primary discourse-pragmatic or interactional function, typically operating at the level of speaker–hearer management (e.g., stance, turn-taking, politeness, and discourse organization). In pragmaticalization, the outcome displays semantic bleaching accompanied by the development of procedural meaning (instructions for interpretation), a general decrease in syntactic integration, and a widening of scope, from clause-internal to discourse-level. Typical outputs include discourse markers, pragmatic particles, stance markers, interactional signals, and parenthetical expressions. There are differing views in the literature as to the status of ‘pragmaticalization’ with respect to ‘grammaticalization’: some (e.g., Diewald, 2011) see them as separate but parallel processes, while others (e.g., Traugott, 1988 and later works) argue that the two partially overlap.

Unlike in grammaticalization, pragmaticalization clines often involve movement away from syntax toward discourse autonomy, and they are all based on the fundamental shift from a lexical word or phrase to discourse/a pragmatic marker. Recurrent pragmaticalization clines that have been observed so far are as follows:

• Lexical word (verb/adverb/noun) → parenthetical/loosely attached use → discourse marker/pragmatic particle;
• Full clause → reduced parenthetical clause → fixed pragmatic marker;
• Manner/time/degree adverb → sentence adverb → discourse marker;
• Modal predicate → epistemic marker → pragmatic hedge.

Against this background, this Special Issue has as its focus a discussion of clines/trajectories regarding the creation of both grammatical and pragmatic structure, specifically from the perspective of the Romance languages, with a view to contributing thought-provoking additions to the debate that exists around ‘clines’ and their cross-linguistic validity. Examples of issues that can be addressed include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. What is the nature of these tendencies?
2. Are they the result of quantitative or qualitative factors, or both, or neither?
3. At what level can they be considered to ‘exist’ (e.g., cognitive, social, structural, …)?
4. Are any of them language—or language family—specific?
5. Can any of the pragmaticalization clines already identified be claimed to have cross-linguistic validity?
6. Are pragmaticalization clines fundamentally different from grammaticalization ones, and, if so, in what ways?
7. Is there a canon that can be identified in either path of development?

Such discussion can be framed within analyses informed by different theoretical persuasions and offer evidence that supports or disagrees with the notion of ‘cline’. Varied contributions are welcome; the fundamental requirement is that they all be rooted in empirical and/or comparative evidence.

Language change, in the guises of both grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, continues to attract great interest, both in the form of empirical and more theoretically-oriented contributions (witness relatively recent volumes such as Heine and Kuteva’s 2002 World lexicon of Grammaticalization; the exploration of the effects of cross-linguistic and areal variation on grammaticalization in the two-volume work by Bisang and Malchokov, 2020; the directional nature inherent of cyclical change in grammar and discourse, capturing the loss of an element and its renewal by another one, object of Mosegaard Hansen and Waltereit 2025, just to mention a few). With this Special Issue, we wish to bring the focus firmly back on the clines and trajectories themselves as they were first formulated in the 1980s.

We hope that the content of this Special Issue will usefully supplement the existing literature by offering a deeper understanding of the nature and modus operandi of clines and trajectories, both of a grammatical or pragmatic nature, their interaction, and any specific language—or language family—tendencies.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400-600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editors (sandra.paoli@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk; micennam@unina.it; russi@austin.utexas.edu) or to the Languages Editorial Office (languages@mdpi.com), with ‘Languages Special Issue’ in the title. Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purpose of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

Suggested Completion Schedule

Abstract Submission Deadline: 15th October 2026

Notification of Abstract Acceptance: 15th November 2026

Full Manuscript Deadline: 31st May 2027

References

Bisang, W. and Malchukov, A. 2020. Grammaticalization Scenarios from Europe and Asia, Volume 1. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Bisang, W. and Malchukov, A. 2020. Grammaticalization Scenarios from Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific, Volume 2. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Diewald, G. 2011. Pragmaticalization (defined) as grammaticalization of discourse functions. Linguistics. 49:2, pp. 365–390.

Givón, T. 1971. Historical syntax and synchronic morphology. In Chicago Linguistic Society Proceedings; The Chicago Linguistic Society: Chicago, IL, USA. Volume 7, pp. 394–415.

Hopper, P. and Traugott, E.C. 2003. Grammaticalization, 2^nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Heine, B. and Kuteva, T. 2002. World Lexicon of grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Meillet, A. 1921. L’évolution Des Formes Grammaticales. Linguistique Historique et Linguistique Générale. Paris: Honoré Champion.

Mosegaard Hansen, M.-B. and Waltereit, R. 2025. Cyclic Change in Grammar and Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Traugott, E. C. 1988. Pragmatic Strengthening and Grammaticalization. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, pp. 406–416.

Dr. Sandra Paoli
Prof. Michela Cennamo
Prof. Dr. Cinzia Russi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Languages is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• grammaticalization
• pragmaticalization
• Romance languages
• clines/trajectories
• tendencies