Includes bibliographical references.

Preliminary Material / Corinne Rossari , Claudia Ricci and Adriana Spiridon -- Introduction / Corinne Rossari , Claudia Ricci and Adriana Spiridon -- Word Order from Latin to French: A Case of Grammaticalization (from Pragmatics to Syntactics) or of Typological Coherence? / Christiane Marchello-Nizia -- Auxiliaries and Grammaticalization: A Case Study of Germanic and Slavonic Languages / Béatrice Lamiroy and Ana Drobnjaković -- From the Confession of Ignorance to the Indefi nite: What Impact for a Theory of Grammaticalization? / Marie-José Béguelin -- The Approximators French Comme, Italian Come, Portuguese Como and Spanish Como from a Grammaticalization Perspective / Wiltrud Mihatsch -- The Spanish Discourse Marker Por Cierto: A Non-Standard Case of Grammaticalization / Maria Estellés Arguedas -- The Polysemy of Devoir: A Contrastive and Diachronic Analysis / Corinne Rossari , Corina Cojocariu , Claudia Ricci and Adriana Spiridon -- On the Diachrony of “Reinforced” Negation in French and Italian / Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Jacqueline Visconti -- Nominal Utterances with Lexical Repetition: Effects of Grammaticalization? / Angela Ferrari -- The Use of Anti- in Contemporary French: A Case of Degrammaticalization? / Franziska Heyna.

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The studies collected in this volume deal with pragmatic factors involved in the evolution of grammatical or lexical forms or in the emergence of complex syntactic structures in various languages (Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian and Spanish). They are set against the theoretical framework of grammaticalization. The main methodological tools are cross-linguistic contrastive analysis and diachronic perspective. The two main issues that emerge from these studies are the place of pragmatic factors in language change (input, output or setting/frame of the process) and the existence or otherwise of a prevailing mechanism for explaining change phenomena.