Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The English & Foreign Languages University, India

This volume has fifteen papers, which originated in a 2007 Workshop on Diachronic Semantics and Pragmatics, held in Montreal. The papers deal with general theoretical as well as language-specific issues.

In the introductory paper, ‘Current trends in diachronic semantics and pragmatics’, the editors summarize the individual contributions in the book and discuss how pragmatic factors influence semantic change and the conventionalization of conversational implicatures. In ‘APO: Avoid pragmatic overload’, Regine Eckardt discusses semantic change in English even, German fast ‘almost’ and selbst ‘even’, and Italian perfino ‘even’, due to pragmatic overload on the hearer, when confronted with a usage that makes accommodation impossible.

Ulrich Detges and Richard Waltereit trace the diachronic evolution of Spanish bien (a discourse marker) and French bien (a modal particle) in terms of distinct discourse pragmatic strategies. In ‘Context sensitive changes: The development of the affirmative markers godt ‘good’ and vel ‘well’ in Danish’,  Eva Skafte Jensen analyzes the evolution of Danish affirmative markers as an instance of the conventionalizing of conversational implicature. She posits that these markers developed due to word order and the semantic context.

Kate Beeching explains the evolution of particles like French quand même ‘after all’, English though, Scottish but, and German aber ‘but, at all’, from a concessive or adversative conjunction to a hedging and boosting particle in her article, ‘Procatalepsis and the etymology of hedging and boosting particles’. In ‘Central/peripheral functions of allora and “overall pragmatic configuration”: A diachronic perspective’, Carla Bazzanella and Johanna Miecznikowski trace the diachronic evolution of Italian allora ‘so, then’ from being a temporal adverb of simultaneity and consecution to becoming a discourse marker.

Maria Estellés discusses the role that paradigmatic relations have played in the grammaticalization of Spanish digressive markers por cierto ‘certainly’and a propósito ‘by the way’. Magdalena Romera’s ‘The multiple origin of es que in Modern Spanish: Diachronic evidence’, traces the diachronic development of Spanish es que ‘it is that’constructions, as it has come to be used as a function of elaboration and reinterpretation. Bethwyn Evans examines the evolution of the Marovo aspect/mood marker ma to a discourse connective particle in ‘From aspect/mood marker to discourse particle: Reconstructing syntactic and semantic change’. Gabriele Diewald, Marijana Kresic, and Elena Smirnova trace the diachronic evolution of German evidentials and modal particles to demonstrate that different particles may share the same channels in grammaticalization.

Mario Squartini, in ‘Evidentiality, epistemicity, and their diachronic connections to non-factuality’, discusses the diachronic correlations between evidentiality and epistemicity in several Romance language verb forms, including hearsay markers and conditionals. Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen suggests the diachronic evolution of the French negation ne…pas to have been largely governed by discourse-functional constraints in Janus-faced contexts in ‘The grammaticalization of negative reinforcers in Old and Middle French: A discourse-functional approach’. ‘A roots journey of a French preposition’ by Silvia Adler and Maria Asnes shows that the multiple readings of the French preposition jus qu’à ‘until’ does not involve any evolution from a concrete core to other abstract meanings.

Elke Gehweiler discusses the diachronic development of the English negative intensifier mere from a privative adjective due to a process of grammaticalization and subjectification. The final paper, ‘The origin of semantic change in discourse tradition: A case study’ by Katerina Stathi, discusses the role of discourse traditions or contexts in semantic and pragmatic change through the German construction gehören + participle II ‘persistence of’’.

This collection closely examines how meanings change by focusing on different aspects, such as the role of the speaker and listener and interactional factors. Altogether, each paper contributes to questioning many of the accepted theoretical positions and offers insightful analyses.