Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2001

The interpersonal pragmatic markers (now) look (here), look you, lookee, lookahere, and lookit are shown to be the result of originally free matrix clauses which become syntactically fixed, are reanalyzed as sentence adjuncts, and undergo internal coalescence, a process which began in the seventeenth century. Their development is considered an instance of grammaticalization exhibiting most, though not all, of the characteristics of the process. A new grammaticalization cline is proposed to account for the unidirectionality of the development.

The range of phenomena labelled as “metonymy” is so multifarious that it may seem impossible to reduce all these phenomena to a common semantic denominator. In accordance with many traditional and modern accounts in the fields of rhetoric and linguistics, this article reconstructs metonymy as a linguistic effect upon the content of a given form, based on a figure/ground effect along the contiguity relations within a given frame and generated by pragmatic processes. Thanks to these criteria, we are able to demonstrate the internal diversity as well as the fundamental unity of metonymy with respect to numerous aspects of language (innovation and conventionality, paradigmatic and syntagmatic dimension, linguistic subsystems like grammar, lexicon, etc., different levels of conceptual abstraction, concept and referent, speaker and hearer activities, principle of relevance) and to put metonymy in its right place by distinguishing it from linguistic effects based on other conceptual, especially taxonomic, relations and from other contiguity-based effects.

Metonymy has been studied for at least two thousand years by rhetoricians, for two hundred years by historical semanticists, and for about ten years by cognitive linguists. However, they all have neglected one peculiar aspect of metonymy: its serial nature. Metonymic chains are either synchronic lexicalised chains, as in the case of paper (material, product, contents) or diachronic chains, as in the case of lavatory (container, room, special room, container). The study of serial metonymy will allow us to challenge some old views on metaphor and metonymy and to probe into the cognitive significance of metonymy. We argue that if one of the cognitive prerequisites of language is the ability to infer the referential intentions of others, serial metonymy can be seen as one of the results of this ability in (linguistic) action.

Levinson (1995) attributes the counterfactual meanings derived from marked, periphrastic alternatives of the modal verb, could, to the presence of M-inferences related to the Gricean maxim of Manner. He accounts for the complementary nature of inferences associated with the two alternates, could and had the ability to (+ V) by the relative markedness of either expression. The present paper re-examines such claims on the basis that periphrastic modal alternates represent renewals in grammaticalisation cycles, and it is suggested instead that the Gricean second maxim of Quantity may be basic to both forms, could and had the ability to, as well as to another alternate, was/were able to (+V). A diachronic survey reveals that variation in the types of implicatures derived from such forms is due to the frequency of specific grammatical environments in which the forms are evolving, or have evolved historically.