The grammaticalization of Indo-European Future Tenses

A panchronic approach

Riccardo Giomi

Prova integrada no programa de Doutoramento em Linguística da

Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

Orientadores:
Prof. Dr. Rui Pedro Ribeiro Marques
Prof. Dr. John Lachlan Mackenzie
Table of Contents

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………….……… 3
1. Grammaticalization…………………………………………………………………………………. 3
1.1. Basic notions…………………………………………………………………………………….... 3
1.1.1. Directionality…………………………………………………………………………………..... 4
1.1.2. A usage-based phenomenon………………………………………………………….................. 4
1.2. Heine (2002)……………………………………………………………………………………..... 5
1.3. The role of cognition…………………………………………………………………………….... 7
1.4. Grammaticalization and multifunctionality……………………………………………..................8
1.4.1. The panchronic perspective…………………………………………………………………....... 8
1.4.2. Semantic Maps………………………………………………………………………………….. 9
2. Functional Discourse Grammar…………........……………………………………………………... 10
2.1. The theory of Functional Discourse Grammar………………………………………..…………... 10
2.1.1. Basic notions and wider context………………………………………………………………… 10
2.1.2. The Grammatical Component……………………………………………………….………….. 14
2.1.2.1. General structure and implementation…………………………….………………………….. 14
2.1.2.2. Levels and layers……………………………………………….……………………………... 16
2.2. Grammaticalization and FDG…………………………………………………………………….. 20
2.2.1. Directionality……………………………………………………………………………………. 20
2.2.2. Usage-based nature of grammaticalization and multifunctionality…………………………….. 20
2.2.3. Grammaticalization and grammatical structure………………………………………………… 22
3. Defining the model……………………………………………………………………………...….. 23
3.1. Diachronic analysis: grammaticalization paths in FDG………………………………………..… 23
3.2. A panchronic perspective: from paths to maps…………………………………………………… 24
3.3. Synchronic analysis…………………………...………………………………………………….. 25
3.3.1. The corpus…………………………………..………………………………………………….. 25
3.3.1. Sources………………………………………………………………………………………….. 26
3.3.1.2. Part-of-Speech tagging………………………………………………………………………... 27
3.3.2. Toward a dynamic FDG………………………………………………………………………... 28
3.3.2.1. The Contextual Component………………………………………………………………….. 29
3.3.2.2. The Conceptual Component, extra-linguistic knowledge and the implementation of FDG…. 31
3.3.2.3. An integrated model of FDG………………………………………………………………... 34
3.3.3. The interaction of components in an FDG account of grammaticalization…………………. 39
3.3.3.1. Bridging contexts………………………………………………………………………………41
3.3.3.2. Switch contexts……………………………………………………………………………….. 46
3.3.3.3. Grammatical meaning…………………………………………………………………………50
3.3.3.4. Ambiguity……………………………………………………………………………………... 55
3.3.4. Summary…………………………………………………………………………………………57
4. The grammaticalization of Indo-European Future tenses…………………………………………... 58
4.1. Overview………………………………………………………………………………………….. 59
4.1.1. From lexical to grammatical…………………………………………………………………….. 61
4.1.1.1. Meaning: from lexeme to operator……………………………………………………………. 61
4.1.1.2. Form: from full verb to auxiliary………………………………………………………………65
4.1.2. The emergence of future tense………………………………………………………………….. 68
4.1.2.1. Meaning : from the Configurational Property to the Episode……………………………….... 68
4.1.2.2. Form: further steps in decategorialization and erosion……………………………………….. 75
4.2. From grammaticalization paths to Semantic Maps……………………………………………….. 76
4.2.1. A preliminary proposal…………………………………………………………………………. 76
4.2.2. The semantic development of English shall + V……………………………………………….. 79
4.2.2.1. Data analysis…………………………………………………………………………………... 79
4.2.2.2. Discussion and implications…………………………………………………………………... 82

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4.2.3. To future and beyond……………………………………………………………………………. 83
5. Synchronic analysis: applying the extended FDG model to corpus data…………………………… 89
5.1. A comparative analysis of Greek θα + non-past and Swedish ska + infinitive…………………… 89
5.1.1. Intention (intent fc)……………………………………………………………………...………. 90
5.1.2. Obligation (deo nec fc). ………………………………………………………………………….92
5.1.3. Event-oriented necessity (nec e)….………………………………………..……………………. 95
5.1.4. Future tense (fut ep)…. …………………………………………………………………………. 97
5.1.5. Past posterior (past ep: (post e) ep))….…………………………………………………………. 98
5.1.6. Epistemic proposition-oriented modality (epist p) and inferential evidentiality (infer p)……….100
5.1.7. Generic evidentiality (gen p)……………………………………………………………………. 105
5.1.8. Imperative Illocution (F: IMP (F)) and Hortative Illocution (F: HORT (F))…………………… 111
5.1.9. Mitigation (mit F: ILL (F))..…………………………………………………………………….. 114
5.1.10. Reportative evidentiality (rep C)………………………………………………………………. 118
5.2. Results and discussion…………………………………………………………………………….. 123
Abbreviations………………………………………..………………………………………………… 126
References……………………………………………...……………………………………………… 127

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Introduction

Two striking properties of natural languages are their variability and their capacity to deal with
ambiguity and polysemy. Variation is a universal fate of natural languages: these are “con-
demned” to vary across time, space, social groups, etc.; polysemy and ambiguity, far from be-
ing a problem for natural languages, are among their most powerful resources, and are crucial-
ly involved in the way languages vary through time. Adopting a panchronic approach (Heine,
Claudi and Hünnemeyer 1991), my PhD project aims to investigate one specific type of dia-
chronic change, that of grammaticalization, which is tightly interwoven with the multifunction-
ality of grammatical markers, manifesting itself in several synchronic patterns of ambiguity and
polysemy.
The analysis will be entirely focused on the grammaticalization of future tense markers in a
variety of Indo-European languages. The choice of this specific type of markers is due to their
strong cross-linguistic tendency to be highly multifunctional (see Dahl 2000, Bybee, Perkins
and Pagliuca 1991, 1994, Fleischman 1982, among others) and to their liability to relatively
rapid processes of grammaticalization, when compared with other types of markers (Bybee et
al. 1994). This situation, which is itself a clear indication of how strongly connected grammati-
calization and multifunctionality are, makes future markers a particularly suitable topic for
understanding these phenomena in a panchronic perspective. In addition, future markers are
one of the best-studied types of constructions in the grammaticalization literature, which will
be extremely helpful in face of the lack of extensive parallel diachronic corpora of the kind
available for synchronic analysis.
The present work offers both a description of the project and a tentative application of the
analytical tools to be used in the final dissertation. The text is structured as follows. In Chapter
1 I will outline the basic notions for the study of grammaticalization and briefly present the
main lines of research on the phenomenon (giving particular prominence to those which con-
tributed to inspire the analysis to be developed). Chapter 2 will introduce the theory of Func-
tional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008), on which the model of analysis
proposed in this work is mainly based, and single out the most relevant aspects of its own ap-
proach to grammaticalization. Chapter 3 is devoted to the elaboration of the model I will apply
in investigating the grammaticalization and multifunctionality of future tense forms. On the
basis of this model, Chapter 4 will provide an overview of the functional and formal evolution
of the grammatical constructions used to express future time reference in the 14 Indo-
European languages in my dataset. Finally, Chapter 5 constitutes a “case study” in which the
proposed model is applied in the analysis of the synchronic multifunctionality of two specific,
fully grammaticalized future markers (Swedish ska + INF and Greek θα + non-past).

1. Grammaticalization

1.1 Basic notions

The term grammaticalization was first used in 1912 by Meillet, who defined it as “attribution
du caractère grammatical à un mot jadis autonome”. Although since then much has been writ-

3
ten on grammaticalization – especially in the second half of the 20th century – some important
features of the phenomenon pointed out by Meillet are still maintained in virtually all contem-
porary work, having been found relevant by scholars who have studied grammaticalization
within several different theoretical frameworks. In particular, Meillet characterized grammati-
calization as a gradual and unidirectional process, as synthesized in the scale “mots principaux
> mots accessoires > mots grammaticaux”, and identified in “expressivité” and “usage” the two
“driving factors” (Lehmann 2002: 4) of such a process.

1.1.1 Directionality

Directionality has been proven to be a fundamental characteristic of grammaticalization from

both a formal and a functional point of view. Probably the best-known synthesis of the findings
on the formal evolution of grammaticalizing elements has been formulated by Hopper and
Traugott (1993: 7) in the (purportedly) universal cline “content item > grammatical word >
clitic > inflectional affix.” 1 This cline both reflects and synthesizes the main morphosyntactic
and phonological tendencies in grammaticalization: loss of syntactic freedom and scope, loss
of independence from other elements in the construction, loss of stress and phonological
weight (see Lehmann 2002: 110ff).
As for the acknowledged universal trends in functional change, the trend from concrete,
specific to abstract, general meaning (often referred to as “bleaching” or “desemanticization”)
has been noticed since the early days of grammaticalization studies and, within the initial
phase of grammaticalization, can be easily linked to the general semantic characteristics of
lexemes (+specific) as against grammatical elements (+abstract). In more recent years, and
particularly with the emergence of cognitively oriented work, another major tendency of
meaning change in grammaticalization has been seen in “subjectification”, by which construc-
tions come to express the “relationship to the speaker and the speaker’s beliefs and attitudes”
(Traugott 2010: 29).

1.1.2 A usage-based phenomenon

A crucial aspect of grammaticalization is its usage-based nature. This means that the ultimate
motivations of any instance of grammaticalization are to be sought in the way speakers actual-
ly employ linguistic expressions in the vivid, multifaceted reality of verbal communication, that
is, at any one moment, in a specific context and with a specific communicative goal in mind.
This idea – which, after all, is a logical consequence of the fundamental functionalist assump-
tion that language is shaped by the uses it is put to – is at the basis of pragmatic-oriented ac-
counts of meaning change in grammaticalization (and not only) such as Geis and Zwicky (1971),
Dahl (1985), Traugott (1989, 1995, 1999), Traugott and König (1991), Traugott and Dasher
(2002), Heine (2002). These take the conventionalization or “semanticization” of an inference
to be the main mechanism at work in grammaticalization: according to this view, constructions
first acquire new meanings by way of an inference which is only possible under very specific

1
Fuss (2005: 41) adds two further stages to this cline: … > phoneme > Ø. Anyway, ending in zero is but
an “ideal” tendency (see Heine and Kuteva 2002: 4-5).

4
situational and linguistic conditions and gradually come to be used in more and more contexts
as that former inference becomes more conventionalized.

1.2 Heine (2002)

In this perspective, it becomes crucial to characterize each of the stages into which a process
of grammaticalization can be broken down in terms of associated kinds of contexts, in which
the new meaning is assumed to be expressed through different communicative strategies.
Such models have been put forth by Diewald (2002) and Heine (2002). The latter’s taxonomy
of relevant types of context in grammaticalization will play a central role in the account pro-
posed here.
Heine defines a four-stage model in which the starting and ending points correspond re-
spectively to the initial situation, where the construction does not yet express the new mean-
ing, and to the full conventionalization of this meaning, which typically co-exists with the older
one(s) for a variable period of time. In between, two stages are recognized. The first step of
the process takes place in a “bridging” context in which the new (or “target”) meaning is fore-
grounded by means of an implicature 2 due to its greater contextual relevance compared to the
older (“source”) meaning: in this phase “an interpretation in terms of the source meaning can-
not be ruled out” on semantic grounds (Heine 2002: 84), that is, in Grice’s (1967) terms, this
meaning is (a part of) “what is said” by the construction, rather than of “what is meant” by the
speaker; at the same time, the new meaning – which may or may not proceed further on the
way to conventionalization – can always be blocked, for instance by adding, subtracting or re-
adjusting some linguistic material in the sentence. That is, the inference foregrounding that
meaning (an implicature) can always be cancelled.
This is no longer possible in the following stage – associated to what Heine calls a “switch”
context – which means that the new meaning is no longer achieved through pragmatic infer-
encing, but has become “part of [the] basic meaning” (Comrie 1985: 35) of the construction.
However, “meanings appearing in switch contexts have to be supported by a specific context
(or cluster of contexts)” (Heine 2002: 85), that is, cannot be expressed by the construction “by
itself”, but only in conjunction with one particular kind of context(s), which is in some way
incompatible with the older meaning. In other words the target meaning is not yet “fully”
grammatical, but undeniably shows a certain degree of conventionalization. Full conventionali-
zation is achieved when the construction starts occurring with the new meaning in new clus-
ters of contexts, including contexts in which it could only bear the older meaning in the previ-
ous stages.
Heine’s model is represented schematically in Table 1.

2
That is, an inference from the point of view of the addressee. However, the terms inference and impli-
cature will not be used as if these were “the two sides of the same coin” (Bybee et al. 1994: 285), since,
although the interpretation implied by the speaker always requires an inference on the part of the ad-
dressee, an inference is also required in interpreting other kinds of semantic and pragmatic relations
than implicature.

5
 Stage Context Resulting meaning

I Initial stage Unconstrained Source meaning

There is a specific context

Target meaning
II Bridging context giving rise to an inference in
foregrounded
favor of a new meaning

There is a new context

Source meaning
III Switch context which is incompatible with
backgrounded
the source meaning

The target meaning no

longer needs to be supported
IV Conventionalization by the context that gave rise Target meaning only
to it; it may be used in new
contexts

Table 1. A scenario of how a linguistic expression acquires a new grammatical meaning. (Heine
2002: 86)

Below is Heine’s (2002: 88) example of the change from the lexical meaning of volition to the
grammatical meaning of “proximative” (i.e. proximate future) in Swahili. Sentences (1a-c) cor-
respond to the progression from stages I to III, while full conventionalization of the proxima-
tive meaning cannot be said to have been reached yet, as taka3 does not occur with this sense
with human subjects (which, according to Heine, does happen in other languages). The glosses
are Heine’s.

(1) a. a- na- taka ku- ni- ita

he- PRES- want INF- me- call
‘he wants to call me’

b. a- na- taka ku- fa

he- PRES- want INF- die
(i) ‘he wants to die’,
(ii) ‘he is about to die’

c. M- ti u- na- taka ku- anguka

C3- tree C3- PRES- PROX INF- fall
‘the tree is about to fall’

3
Although Heine (2002) does not mention the issue, according to Heine and Reh (1984: 131) and Heine
(2003: 580) the Swahili future marker -ta- diachronically derives from the verb taka: this suggests that
proximative aspect (or immediate future) may represent a stage on one of the possible pathways to
“simple” future, the last step in meaning change being accompanied by formal reduction of the marker.
On the cross-linguistic plausibility of such a semantic development, see the discussion of immediate
futures in Bybee et al. (1994: 271-273).

6
Although the mechanism of the conventionalization of an inference is quite a well-established
finding from pragmatically oriented research into grammaticalization, it is not fully clear in
Heine’s example why “he wants to die” should imply “he is about to die”, except, perhaps, in
very specific contexts. It thus seems that the notion of bridging context must be the object of
further refinement and additional definition before being applied in our data analysis. This
matter will be dealt with in Section 3.3.3, where a model for synchronic data analysis is defined
in detail.

1.3 The role of cognition

Related to the context-pragmatic approach to grammaticalization introduced in 1.1.2, which

has in Heine one of its main exponents, is the cognitivist approach. In a sense, the latter aims
to go beyond the former, as it assumes that, since contextual reasoning involves linguistic
knowledge as well as other epistemological modules and cognitive properties of human be-
ings, the ultimate motivation for any possible instance of functional change can only be
properly understood by making reference to general cognitive/perceptual schemata and
mechanisms. As Bybee puts it,

[…] all the component processes that lead to the development of new grammatical
constructions come out of language use in context and they involve cognitive skills
and strategies that are also used in non-linguistic tasks. (2003: 159)

The perspective afforded by studies of grammaticalization is one of grammar ever

evolving through the natural everyday process of language use; it views language as
part of our general perceptual, neuromotor and cognitive experience. (Bybee 2010:
105)

One major principle in this line of research is that meaning change takes place thanks to
the transfer of the conceptual image-schema entrenched in the meaning of a grammaticalizing
construction into a different experiential domain. This transfer happens by such cognitive pro-
cesses as metaphor and metonymy (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Heine, Claudi and Hünne-
meyer 1991, Langacker 1993, 1999, Bybee et al. 1994, among others) and is often motivated
by the same need for clarity and expressivity that was already noticed by Meillet. According to
Heine, Claudi and Hünnemeyer, this need lies at the basis of the equally well-known tendency
towards development from more concrete to more abstract meaning:

One of the main claims made here is that underlying grammaticalization there is a
specific cognitive principle [...]. By means of this principle, concrete concepts are
employed to understand, explain or describe less concrete phenomena. In this way,
clearly delineated and/or clearly structured entities are recruited to conceptualize
less clearly delineated or structured entities, non-physical experiences are under-
stood in terms of physical experiences, time in terms of space, cause in terms of

7
 time, or abstract relations in terms of kinetic processes or spatial relations, etc.
(Heine, Claudi and Hünnemeyer 1991 [1988]:150; cf. also Bybee et al. 1994: 300)

The subjectification hypothesis mentioned in 1.1.1 above also situatesitself within the cogni-
tive-oriented tradition, having come to occupy a central position within this particular field as
regards the study of grammaticalization (see Traugott 1982, 1999, 2003, Langacker 2000,
2006, 2011). The tendency toward subjectification is also described as acquisition of more and
more abstract features: in this sense, the expression of the speaker’s propositional or interper-
sonal attitudes is more subjective than the “objective” description of such characteristics of
States-of-Affairs as (e.g.) location in time or space or the attitudes of human participants.

1.4 Grammaticalization and multifunctionality

1.4.1 The panchronic perspective

One important merit of the cognitive approach is that of having drawn attention to the rela-
tion between grammaticalization and the synchronic multifunctionality of grammatical con-
structions. The idea is that the patterns of multifunctionality observed in the synchronic usage
of markers are a by-product of the diachronic grammaticalization paths those markers have
gone (or rather, are going) through in the course of their development. In this line of reason-
ing, grammaticalization is presented by Heine, Claudi and Hünnemeyer (1991: 261) as “a pan-
chronic process that presents both a diachronic perspective (…) and a synchronic perspective
(…).”

Any gram develops according to some strictly determined rules codified in func-
tional paths; particularly, it acquires new values that correspond to subsequent
stages on a given trajectory. Thus, meanings that are synchronically provided by a
gram reflect such well ordered unidirectional and successive diachronic stages.
Consequently, it should be possible to match all functions offered by a gram with
phases determined for a particular path; we should be able to order and represent
synchronic values of a formation as a linear progression. Conversely, a gram cannot
convey meanings that are incompatible with the diachronic path that it follows. This
signifies that every grammatical formation at a given moment is a synchronic mani-
festation of a diachronic development that is consistent with predetermined uni-
versal paths. (Andrason 2010: 18-19)

In coherence with the cognitivist point of view, Heine, Claudi and Hünnemeyer claim that both
the diachronic change and the synchronic usage of grammatical markers must of necessity be
consistent with those universal paths because these are themselves one of the many manifes-
tations of the general schemata which govern human cognition, applying well beyond the do-
main of language. It should be noted, however, that the panchronic dimension of grammatical-
ization is also convincingly accounted for in later work by Heine himself (2002: 94-96), now
from a fundamentally context-pragmatic perspective, as he shows that, synchronically, one

8
and the same marker can occur with a given meaning in more than one (and potentially all) of
the context-stages described in his model.

1.4.2 Semantic Maps

The panchronic dimension of grammaticalization is nicely captured in the framework of Se-

mantic Maps, although this is neither the perspective from which Semantic Maps were origi-
nally conceived, nor the goal of most practitioners of the model. In fact, Semantic Maps are
first and foremost

[…]a way to visualize regular relationships between two or more meanings or

grammatical functions of one and the same linguistic form. (Narrog and van der
Auwera 2012: 320)

Or, as Haspelmath puts it,

[...] a method for describing and illuminating the patterns of multifunctionality of

grammatical morphemes that does not imply a commitment to a particular choice
among monosemic and polysemic analyses. (Haspelmath 2003: 213) 4

Just as universal grammaticalization paths result from generalizations based on the evolution
of individual forms, semantic maps “crucially rely on cross-linguistic comparison” (Haspelmath
2003: 213), typically involving the use of “a language sample of a certain size” (Narrog and van
der Auwera 2012: 320). Within grammaticalization studies, the existence of important parallels
between grammaticalization paths and synchronic patterns of multifunctionality is remarked
upon by Bybee et al. (1994), on whose universal paths is based van der Auwera and Plungian’s
(1998) semantic map of modality (see Figure 1 below). This constitutes the first example – to
my knowledge – of a map based on diachronic rather than synchronic data. Obviously, in a
panchronic perspective both are valid methodologies, and the most significant conclusions are
liable to be suggested precisely by comparing the results of both the synchronic and the dia-
chronic analysis. In this perspective, a well-designed semantic map always embeds two claims:

(i) Synchronic: Polysemous forms cover adjacent nodes (i.e. nodes linked by a line
or arrow);
(ii) Diachronic: A linguistic form may extend its range of functions on the map in any
direction, but not against the direction of an arrow. (Haspelmath 2004: 24).

4
The distinction between monosemy and polysemy can be formulated as follows: a multifunctional
linguistic expression is monosemous when one (or more) of its meanings can be always explained as a
function of another, more “basic” meaning plus the surrounding linguistic and situational context; it is
polysemous when there are cases in which this is not possible. Thus, meanings occurring in bridging
contexts are instances of monosemy, while we can probably already speak of polysemy for meanings
appearing in switch contexts.

9
Figure 1. Semantic map of modality (van der Auwera and Plungian 1998: 98)

2. Functional Discourse Grammar

2.1. The theory of Functional Discourse Grammar

2.1.1. Basic notions and wider context

Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008) evolved from Simon Dik’s
Functional Grammar (Dik 1978, 1997a-b). Its aim is to provide realistic and comprehensive
descriptions of linguistic phenomena: realistic in the sense that a basic assumption in FDG is
that “a model of grammar will be more effective the more its organization resembles language
processing in the individual” (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 1-2); comprehensive because
FDG does not focus on one particular level of linguistic analysis (it is not, for example, a seman-
tic or a syntactic theory) but models the description of natural languages in terms of four inter-
related and hierarchically organized grammatical levels.
To these basic concerns with psychological adequacy and descriptive completeness corre-
spond two claims which Hengeveld and Mackenzie state as follows:

Psycholinguistic studies (e.g. Levelt 1989) clearly show that language production is a
top-down process, which starts with intentions and ends with the articulation of the
actual linguistic expression. […] FDG is a theory about grammar, but one that tries to

10
 reflect psycholinguistic evidence in its basic architecture […]. (Hengeveld and Mac-
kenzie 2008: 2)

FDG takes the functional approach to language to its logical extreme: within the top-
down organization of the grammar, pragmatics governs semantics, pragmatics and
semantics govern morphosyntax, and pragmatics, semantics, and morphosyntax gov-
ern phonology. (ibid.: 13)

Both these claims are visibly embodied in the overall organization of FDG, as presented in Fig-
ure 2. A third crucial aspect of the theory is immediately evident in this representation: FDG
does not conceive grammar “in isolation”, as a perfectly autonomous and self-sufficient sys-
tem, but models it as “one component of an overall theory of verbal interaction” (Hengeveld
and Mackenzie 2008: 25).

Figure 2: General layout of FDG (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 13).

11
In keeping with the centrality of psycholinguistic evidence for the design of the grammar, lan-
guage production is assumed to be triggered by communicative intentions: these are not part
of the grammar itself but reflect the speaker’s “desire to communicate linguistically” and are
“modelled as taking place in the Conceptual Component. This is the impulse that drives the
‘motor’ of the grammar.” (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 38). The Grammatical Component,
triggered by a communicative intention, works down to a full phonological representation (in
ways to be illustrated shortly), which in turn serves as the trigger for Articulation to produce
the material, acoustically perceivable Output of the process of language production.
As noted above, the Grammatical Component does not work in isolation but is integrated
into a wider theory of verbal interaction: this means not only that the grammar must neces-
sarily be triggered by a pre-linguistic communicative intention but also that, throughout
grammatical processing, the operations performed in generating abstract linguistic representa-
tions must receive inputs from the information relevant to those aspects of the ongoing com-
municative situation that are “relevant to the distinctions that are required in the language
being used” (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 10). This is why the Grammatical Component is
flanked by a Contextual Component in the diagram above. The information contained in this
component is necessarily language-specific – since so are the distinctions operated by the
Grammatical Component – and can be of two types. First, the Contextual Component must
contain a certain amount of situational information concerning the time and place of the ongo-
ing interaction in order to allow for temporal and spatial deixis as well as information concern-
ing the speech participants (and individuals/entities of the real world more in general) in order
to allow the grammar to select the appropriate markers for categories such as (e.g.) gender,
number or politeness.5 Secondly, the Contextual Component must store those aspects of lin-
guistic utterances which are “relevant to the form that subsequent utterances may take”
(ibid.), which allows for such linguistic phenomena as anaphora, temporal chaining, mainte-
nance/change of discourse topics and priming: it is for this reason that the Contextual Compo-
nent receives separate input from each level within the Grammatical Component. FDG’s ap-
proach to matters of context has been termed a “conservative” one by Butler (2008a: 238-
239), in the sense that Hengeveld and Mackenzie show no commitment to “a truly functional
explanation of why we use particular forms of utterance”. This would undoubtedly be true if
we assumed that a functionalist view of language implied “denying the cognitive reality of
linguistic structure and seeing linguistic form as an ephemeral manifestation of the language
user’s attempt to achieve his/her communicative purposes” (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008:
26). However, this is not the position adopted by FDG, since, as will become clear in the next
section, the model “occupies a position halfway between radically functional and radically

5
This is illustrated by Hengeveld and Mackenzie through the analysis of the Spanish sentence ¡Que
pálida estás!. The adjective pálid-a takes the feminine singular form because in this language (as in Por-
tuguese) the sex of human referents must obligatorily be reflected in the corresponding nouns and ad-
jectives: thus, the sex of the addressee (and of human referents in general) must be recorded in the
Contextual Component in the analysis of Spanish nominal words, while this is not necessary for (e.g.)
English, which operates no gender distinction in the same area of grammar. On the other hand, the
second person singular inflection of the copula est-ás is licensed not only by the fact that the referent of
the unexpressed subject coincides with the (singular) addressee, but also by the existence of a familiar
relationship between the speech participants: were it not so, the verb would have been inflected in the
third person to mark politeness. The information concerning the social relation between speech partici-
pants must thus find its way into the Contextual Component in the analysis of Spanish second person
forms, while, again, this will not be a relevant contextual category for English.

12
formal approaches to grammatical analysis” (ibid). In this sense, Hengeveld and Mackenzie’s
conception of the Contextual Component is perfectly coherent with the very purport of the
theory, which is not to model the countless aspects of the extra-linguistic world which may
happen to influence the form of particular utterances but to provide testable descriptions of
the systematic distinctions which shape the build-up of grammatical structures in individual
languages; at the same time, FDG aims to show how these distinctions represent different
strategies by which the speakers of different languages may pursue their communicative in-
tentions, which do “not arise in a vacuum, but in a multifaceted communicative context” (ibid.:
9). Here, I will not go any further into exploring the interaction between the Grammatical and
the Contextual Components, as much more will be said on the matter in Section 3.3.2.
Two important remarks are in order before moving on to describe the workings of FDG’s
Grammatical Component. In the first place, it is essential to understand that FDG, despite its
explicit focus on language production, is not a model of the speaker but a general theory of
grammar:

[…] although the presentation of the FDG model will focus on the generation of ut-
terances, the model could in principle be turned on its head to account for the pars-
ing of utterances. It is clear that listeners analyse phonetic input into phonological
representations, which are subsequently grouped into morphosyntactic constituents,
from which meaningful representations are then constructed. (Hengeveld and Mac-
kenzie 2008: 2)

In Section 3.3, the theoretical and analytical neutrality of the model between the speaker’s
and the addressee’s perspectives will turn out to be crucial for the possibility of elaborating an
all-encompassing FDG theory of grammaticalization.
Another important caveat Hengeveld and Mackenzie insist on at several points is that the
intricate intertwining of relations between components and grammatical levels represented in
Figure 2 is not to be understood as a realistic image of the real-time processes taking place in
the speaker’s brain during the production of utterances: rather, the picture aims at represent-
ing “the sequence of steps that the analyst must take in understanding and laying bare the
nature of a particular [linguistic] phenomenon” (ibid.). As the authors point out, there is unde-
niably a “seductive analogy between the architecture of FDG and the processes of speech pro-
duction” and, generally speaking, there will also arguably be an infinitesimal time delay be-
tween the activation of subsequent levels, since the elaboration of linguistic units of each level
depends on the information supplied by the preceding one(s). But it should be clear that the
squares, ovals and arrows in the picture are purely theoretical constructs, which have no rela-
tion whatsoever with the neural circuits activated in language processing or the paths followed
by electric impulses in performing the operations required for the production of utterances.
The meaning of diagrammatic representations such as Figure 2 is properly captured by Connol-
ly’s (fc) definition in terms of “general flow of information around the model”: in this sense,
the patterns highlighted in Figure 2 must be conceived as dependency relations between dis-
tinct levels of linguistic analysis, with each level contributing the elements necessary to the
build-up of the subsequent level(s). The task of the grammarian is precisely to reconstruct the
ways in which this inter-level and inter-component flow of information is implemented and to
unveil the language-specific rules which regulate its organization into discrete linguistic units at

13
individual levels. The next section offers a brief presentation of the way these goals are ap-
proached by FDG.

2.1.2. The Grammatical Component

2.1.2.1. General structure and implementation

As mentioned above, the top-down organization of the Grammatical Component is largely

inspired by psycholinguistic research. For FDG, the grammar is hierarchically structured in such
a way that the communicative actions and representations of the world performed and ex-
pressed by linguistic utterances are translated into abstract formal structures, which serve as
the input for the Articulator. It is in this sense that pragmatics 6 and semantics are said to gov-
ern morphosyntax and phonology. The former are dealt with at the Interpersonal and Repre-
sentational Levels respectively, the latter at the Morphosyntactic and Phonological Levels re-
spectively. The grammatical operation responsible for generating interpersonal and semantic
representations is called Formulation; its outputs form the input for Encoding, whose task is to
generate morphosyntactic and phonological structures. FDG is thus configured as a “function-
to-form” model of grammar in “positing a range of functions flowing from the Speaker’s com-
municative intentions” to formal expression, through a set of interpersonal and semantic rep-
resentations (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 39). At the same time, it is inspired by a “form-
oriented” principle in that it in provides, “for each language analysed, an account of only those
interpersonal and representational phenomena which are reflected in morphosyntactic or
phonological form” (ibid). In elaborating their respective linguistic representations, each oper-
ation makes use of its own, language-specific “primitives” (represented within squares on the
left-hand side of the Grammatical Component in Figure 2). These are the “building blocks” of
the grammar, constituting the inventory of basic units, categorial distinctions and combinatory
possibilities available at each level in a given language.
Formulation is activated by the communicative intention developed in the Conceptual
Component, which, as pointed out by Butler (2008b: 10), comprises both “conceptual proper”
(i.e. ideational) and “affective/interactional” aspects. Hengeveld and Mackenzie (2008: 8) note
that “this distinction correlates nicely with the two aspects of formulation to be distinguished
within the Grammatical Component”, i.e. the Interpersonal and the Representational Levels.
The Interpersonal Level is where the communicative actions performed by means of formal
linguistic units are analyzed and represented: it is at this level that all matters concerning the
strategic communicative choices made by the speaker, such as information packaging and the
linguistic coding of intersubjectivity, are captured. The Representational Level deals with se-
mantics, a notion of which FDG makes a very restrictive use, presenting it as “limited to the
ways in which language relates to the extra-linguistic world” (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008:
128). Although this is not acknowledged explicitly by the designers of FDG, it is arguably be-

6
In FDG, the term “pragmatics” essentially relates to the Interpersonal Level. Since what is commonly
referred to as “Gricean pragmatics” is also highly relevant to the present work, in the next chapters I will
use the term “interpersonal” to refer to all aspects of grammar which are dealt with at the Interpersonal
Level of FDG (see below) and reserve “pragmatic” to all issues related to inferences, implicatures, con-
textual relevance and the like, which are not explicitly modelled by FDG.

14
cause both interactive and ideational material is assumed to be already contained in the pre-
linguistic communicative intention that Formulation, unlike Encoding, is not split into two
suboperations but is regarded as a single operation (cf. O’Neill (fc) for a different position).
Nonetheless, as far as the grammar proper is concerned, semantics is governed by pragmatics
in the sense that the linguistic units used at the Representational Level to designate extra-
linguistic entities or properties are inserted in fulfillment of the precise communicative strate-
gies which are being performed by the speaker and which the grammar organizes into the
Interpersonal Level. For instance, a phrase such as a dog in A dog barks will be analyzed at the
Interpersonal Level as an instruction to the addressee to construe a concept, while the Repre-
sentational Level specifies this concept as a first-order (i.e. concrete) entity of the type ‘dog’ by
inserting the appropriate lexeme (cf. Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 114).
The way in which both pragmatics and semantics govern morphosyntax can be illustrated
through contrasting the structural properties of assertions and questions in English. While the
clause-initial position is occupied by the subject in assertions, in questions a copula or auxiliary
verb occurs in that position. From the functional point of view, the difference between the
declarative and interrogative version of the same sentence is purely interpersonal. In semantic
terms, there is no difference whatsoever between (e.g.) The dogs are barking and Are the dogs
barking?, in the sense that the extra-linguistic situation which is being designated is exactly the
same in both cases: abstracting away from further specifications (such as those concerning
tense and aspect) there is a property ‘bark’ which is predicated of a plural referent of the type
‘dog’. This semantic configuration is reflected at the Morphosyntactic Level, for instance, in the
insertion of the morpheme -s in the word dogs and in the absence of third person singular
marking on the finite verb, which depend on the presence of a plural operator on the predi-
cate’s argument at the Representational Level. On the other hand the selection of the mor-
phosyntactic template is wholly determined by the type of illocution specified at the Interper-
sonal Level. The latter is an example of how pragmatics can influence morphosyntax in such a
way that semantics is not affected in any sense. Similarly, Portuguese yes/no questions, which
are only distinguished from assertions by means of a different intonational pattern, are an
example of how pragmatics directly governs phonology, since not only the semantic represen-
tation but also the morphosyntactic structure is exactly the same in (e.g.) Os cães estão a
ladrar and Os cães estão a ladrar? (“The dogs are barking”/“Are the dogs barking?”).
The sense in which morphosyntax governs phonology is less obvious than it may seem. In
fact, Phonological Encoding not only receives its input from the Morphosyntactic Level but
also, to as significant extent, from the Formulation Levels, as is often the case (for instance)
with abstract interpersonal features such as illocution. In addition, “[t]he input from the Mor-
phosyntactic Level already contains a considerable amount of phonological specification”
(Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 424), which “applies to those items introduced at the Mor-
phosyntactic Level whose phonological form is not subject to further internal processes. One
of the tasks of the Phonological Level is therefore to take the phonological material introduced
at the three previous levels and to integrate it into a phonological structure” (ibid.: 288). How-
ever, there also is a sense in which Phonological Encoding actually translates a given morpho-
syntactic configuration into a structured sequence of phonemes, which are drawn from an
inventory of language-specific phonological primitives. Hengeveld and Mackenzie (2008: 289)
illustrate this by means of the English pronoun he, which is only inserted in its final phonemic
form at the Phonological Level. This is because the form of the pronoun depends on a series of

15
factors concerning all the superordinate levels: on the one hand, the Morphosyntactic Level
selects a placeholder which encodes interpersonal features such as identifiability and non-
identity with either the speaker or the addressee and representational ones such as the
human nature and singular number of the referent; on the other, it assigns to this placeholder
the syntactic function Subject and its position in the respective clause, in response to the
semantic function borne by the corresponding referent at the Representational Level and/or
to the presence of an operator “perspective” at the Interpersonal Level – which determines
the selection of an active or passive morphosyntactic template, when relevant (see Keizer, fc).
But the Morphosyntactic Level does not have the means to determine the final form of the
pronoun: this can only be generated by Phonological Encoding, which translates the composite
morphosyntactic input described above into the phonemic representation /hɪ/ or /hi:/
(depending on the absence/presence of a Focus or Contrastive pragmatic function at the
Interpersonal Level, which is passed on directly from that level to Phonological Encoding). It is
this final phonological segment which is sent away to Articulation to produce the material,
acoustically perceivable Output.

2.1.2.2. Levels and layers

The four grammatical levels share

a hierarchically ordered layered organization and are displayed as a layered struc-

ture. In its maximal form the general structure of layers within levels is as follows:

(π v1: [head (v1)Φ]: [σ (v1) Φ]) Φ

Here v1 represents the variable of the relevant layer, which is restricted by a (possi-
bly complex) head that takes the variable as its argument, and may be further re-
stricted by a modifier σ that takes the variable as its argument. The layer may be
specified by an operator π and carry a function Φ. Heads and modifiers represent
lexical strategies, while operators and functions represent grammatical strategies.
(Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 14)

It should be added that heads are not necessarily occupied by specific lexemes, but may be
“abstract”, in which case they will only receive expression at subsequent levels, or “complex”,
in which case they are constructed configurationally, i.e. as a combination of units which is
structured on the basis of the frames or templates provided by the inventories of primitives
available to Formulation and Encoding. An example of abstract head is the illocutionary value
of English The dogs are barking/Are the dogs barking?, which is expressed morphosyntactically
as described above; but the head of the Illocution layer can also be filled by lexemes such as
(e.g.) congratulations, which in this case will be inserted directly at the Interpersonal Level.
Similarly, personal pronouns are analyzed at the Interpersonal Level as acts (or rather Subacts,
see below) of Reference which have an abstract head (the final form is only inserted at a sub-
sequent level, as explained above) and are specified by operators such as [± identifiable]; per-
sonal pronouns can be contrasted with proper names, which do not undergo any further rep-

16
resentational, morphosyntactic or phonological process, and are thus regarded as lexemes
which are inserted in the head of a Referential Subact at the Interpersonal Level.
Each level contains its own layers, which are language-specific in the sense that the
grammar of any particular language may or may not make use of all layers: what FDG assumes
to be universal about layers is their maximal internal structure (as represented above) as well
as their hierarchical organization within each grammatical level. In turn, as we have seen, the
four levels are arranged in the top-down modular architecture of the Grammatical Compo-
nent, which is also regarded as universal. The grammar of each individual language thus repre-
sents a unique, ‘emic’ instantiation of one overall, ‘etic’ model. At the same time, by not postu-
lating any universal functional category or expression rule, the model aims to be flexible
enough to allow for the innumerous structural configurations which are found at individual
levels of analysis in the languages of the world, as well as for different inter-level mapping
strategies between linguistic units and categories belonging to different levels. This typological
orientation is one of the distinctive features of FDG.
Let us now briefly outline the general organization of each level, starting with the Inter-
personal Level. Abstracting away from operators and modifiers, its maximal structure is as
follows (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 15):

(M1: [(A1: [(F1) (P1)S (P1)A (C1: [(T1){Φ} . . (T1+n) {Φ} (R1) {Φ} ... (R1+n) {Φ}] (C1) {Φ})] (A1) … (A1+n) {Φ}] (M1))

The Move (M) is “an autonomous contribution to an ongoing interaction”. Its defining charac-
teristic is that it “can provoke a reaction on the part of the addressee (an answer to a question,
an objection to a point of argument, etc.) and that reaction must itself take the form of a
Move” (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 50). In this sense, the units of the lower layers are not
autonomous units of discourse precisely because they do not have such a perlocutionary ef-
fect, but may at best provoke backchannels, i.e. “a response which encourages the Speaker to
continue”. The latter is a characteristic of Discourse Acts (A), which are defined as “the small-
est identifiable units of communicative behaviour. In contrast to the higher-order units called
Moves they do not necessarily further the communication in terms of approaching a conversa-
tional goal” (Kroon 1995: 65, cited in Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 60).
Each Discourse Act minimally contains positions for the Illocution (F) and for the Speaker
(P)S (where “P” stands for “Participant”). 7 Whenever a Move serves to exchange information or
to influence the interlocutor’s behavior, (at least one of) the Discourse Act(s) in its head will
also provide positions for the Addressee (P)A and for a Communicated Content (C). The Com-
municated Content “contains the totality of what the Speaker wishes to evoke in his/her
communication with the Addressee. In actional terms it […] corresponds to the choices the
Speaker makes in order to evoke a picture of the external world s/he wants to talk about”
(Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 87). Importantly, this means that it is only the Communicat-
ed Content which will be mapped onto a semantic representation, while the higher layers are
purely interactional (i.e. they do not correspond to any element of the real-world representa-
tion expressed by the speech act). It is thus at this layer that the alignment between interper-

7
Think of spontaneous expressive speech acts such as Ouch!, which do not presuppose the presence of
an interlocutor (not even “fictionally”) and arguably do not evoke any representation of the extra-
linguistic world. Such expressions must however be modeled in the Grammatical Component, since they
take highly conventional forms and vary systematically from language to language.

17
sonal and representational units start. Note that the four units within the head of the Dis-
course Act are enclosed together within square brackets: this is the way in which FDG repre-
sents configurational (i.e. non-hierarchical) relations between linguistic units, i.e. relations in
which none of the units involved is contained within another one. The relation between Illocu-
tion, Participants and Communicated Content is comparable to that between a predicate and
its arguments (ibid.: 70), which together form a single predication – or, in this case, a single
unit of communicative behavior.
A Communicated Content can be made up by any number of Subacts of Reference (R)
and/or Ascription (T). The former is “an attempt by the Speaker to evoke a referent”, i.e. an
instruction to the addressee to either construe or retrieve the concept corresponding to an
entity (ibid.: 88): this definition very transparently illustrates the difference between reference,
which is an actional (thus, interpersonal) matter, and designation, which has to do with se-
mantics, in the sense that it merely establishes the relation between a linguistic sign and an
entity of the extra-linguistic world (and is therefore only relevant to the Representational Lev-
el). Similarly, a Subact of Ascription instructs the addressee to evoke a property, which may be
ascribed to a Referential Subact or “simply ascribed”, in which case it will yield a zero-place
predication frame at the Representational Level (as in It’s raining). Generally speaking, Ascrip-
tive and Referential Subacts tend to correspond to predicates and arguments respectively at
the Representational Level.
The Representational Level is organized as follows (adapted from Hengeveld and Macken-
zie (2008: 15):

(p1: [(ep1: [(e1: [(fc1: [(f2)n (x1)Φ … (x1+n)Φ] (f1)) … (f1+n) (e1)Φ]) … (e1+n){Φ}] (ep1)) … (ep1+n){Φ}] (p1))

The highest layer of this level is the Propositional Content (p). Propositional Contents are de-
fined as “mental constructs that do not exist in space or time but rather exist in the minds of
those entertaining them” (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 144). This is evident in the fact that
they can be characterized “in terms of propositional attitudes (certainty, doubt, disbelief)
and/or in terms of their source or origin (shared common knowledge, sensory evidence, infer-
ence)” and can occur as the complement of verbs such as think, believe, say, hope, etc.
A proposition will typically contain one or more predication(s), which may be organized
into “thematically coherent sets of States-of-Affairs” showing “unity or continuity of Time (t),
Location (l), and Individuals (x)” (ibid.: 157), that is Episodes (ep), or constituted by a single
Event (e), that is, by one State-of-Affairs. Episodes and Events are complex entities of the real
world, in the sense that they can be located in time or space and “be said to ‘(not) occur’,
‘(not) happen’, or ‘(not) be the case”, etc. (ibid.: 166).
The configurational head of an Event is occupied by a Configurational Property (fc), i.e. by
an abstract predication frame constituted by the predicate and its arguments together and
divested of any kind of “situatedness” in relation to the real world (which concerns the predi-
cation layers) and of any characterization in terms of the speaker’s attitudes (which concern
either the Propositional Content or the Interpersonal Level). Grammatical categories such as
modality, tense and aspect apply at the four layers seen so far. 8 Below the Configurational

8
Subjective modality can be expressed by operators or modifiers at the (p) layer, while objective and
c
participant-internal modality will apply at the predication layers ((ep) and (e)) and at the (f ) layer re-

18
Property layer, the organization of representational units ceases to be hierarchical, i.e., the
lower layers stand in an equipollence relation (just like Illocution, Participants and Communi-
cated Content(s) within a Discourse Act and Subacts within a Communicated Content). A Con-
figurational Property always contains at least one Lexical Property (f), which may function as a
predicate, selecting and assigning semantic functions (such as Actor or Undergoer) to its argu-
ment(s). The latter can be units of any type, such as Individuals (x), but also expressions of
Time (t) (e.g. three o’clock), Location (l) (e.g. my room) or units of a superordinate layer (e.g. a
Propositional Content such as idea or an Event such as party). Units functioning as arguments
at the Representational Level generally correspond to Subacts of Reference and are restricted
by a further Lexical Property, unless the corresponding Subact is already specified by a lexeme
or a bundle of abstract features at the Interpersonal Level (as in the case of proper names and
personal pronouns respectively) and unless the head of the representational unit in question is
itself expressed configurationally, i.e. by a combination of other units (as in I will read what
you read, where the head of the unit (x1) what you read is occupied by an Event ‘read (you)
(x1)’, with its own temporal specification, predicate and arguments – see Hengeveld and Mac-
kenzie 2008: 241).
The terminology adopted for the Encoding levels is somewhat more familiar than that
FDG uses for the Formulation levels. Therefore, I will not go into detail in explaining the nature
and properties of each layer of the Morphosyntactic and Phonological Levels but will limit my-
self to presenting their general structure – also because very few of the notions concerning
these two levels will be directly relevant for the discussion to be developed in this work. The
organization of the Morphosyntactic Level is as follows (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 17):

(Le1: [(Xw1) (Xp1) (Cl1: [(Xw2) (Xp2: [(Xw3) (Xp3) (Cl3)] (Xp2)){Φ} (Cl2){Φ}] (Cl2))] (Le1))

The maximal unit of the Morphosyntactic Level is the Linguistic Expression (Le). Any autono-
mous morphosyntactic unit constitutes a Linguistic Expression and is “seen as consisting of
Clauses; in turn, each Clause may consist of one or more Words, one or more Phrases and, as
an instance of recursion, one or more Clauses; each Phrase can similarly consist of one or more
Words, one or more Phrases and one or more Clauses (the two last-mentioned again involving
recursion). The Word will also have its internal structure, namely as a series of morphemes (or
placeholders for morphemes)” (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 292). Furthermore, mor-
phemes, intended as the bound, minimal constituents of the Word layer, are divided into
Stems and Affixes. As is standard in syntactic models, Words (and, when relevant, morphemes)
will always belong to one – and only one – of a limited set of classes (Verbal, Nominal, Adver-
bial, etc.), and, accordingly, Phrases are distinguished on the basis of the class of the Word
heading them. However, again, it is not the case that all natural languages distinguish all the
theoretically possible classes of morphosyntactic units.
The units available in a given language are combined on the basis of the templates pro-
vided by the inventory of morphosyntactic primitives specific to that language, which constrain
the combinatory possibilities of individual units and their positional arrangement within the
Linguistic Expression, the Clause and so on. The classes of units and, most of all, the available
templates vary enormously across languages, depending in the first place on the typological

spectively; deictic tense applies at the (ep) layer and relative tense at the (e) layer; quantificational as-
c
pect applies at the (e) layer, while phasal aspect is relevant at the (f ) layer.

19
characteristic of each individual language. One important thing to note about the Morphosyn-
tactic Level is that “not all Linguistic Expressions contain a Clause” (Hengeveld and Mackenzie
2008: 292): that is to say, FDG does not regard expressions consisting of a single Word or
Phrase as “elliptical” but as “full and complete contributions to the discourse.” For instance, a
holophrastic answer such as (What are you eating?) A donut will not be regarded as a reduced
form of the clause I am eating a donut but as a full-fledged, complete Linguistic Expression
consisting of a single Noun Phrase (see Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 4, 293).
Finally, the Phonological Level is structured as follows (adapted from Hengeveld and Mac-
kenzie 2008: 428):

(U1: [(IP1: [(PP1: [(PW1: [F1: [(S1)N] (F1)) (PW1 ))] (PP1))] (IP1))] (U1))

At this level, the maximal unit is called Utterance (U). As with the Linguistic Expression at the
Morphosyntactic Level, any autonomous and complete phonological unit represents an Utter-
ance, so that we can say that whenever there is a Linguistic Expression, this will be translated
into an Utterance by Phonological Encoding. Utterances can contain one or more Intonational
Phrases (IP), which in turn contains one or more Phonological Phrases (PP), which contains one
or more Words (PW). Note that the correspondence of Phonological Phrases and Words with
Phrases and Words of the Morphosyntactic Level is far from automatic and must be assessed
for each language individually. As is quite obvious, the correspondence between morphosyn-
tactic and phonological units largely depends on the typological characteristic of the language
at stake (for instance, the more a language is synthetic, the more its Morphosyntactic Words
will tend to correspond to more than one Phonological Word, see Hengeveld and Mackenzie
2008: 444). Phonological Words ultimately consist of Syllables (S), although, in stress languages
only, “Syllables group into Feet, where the Foot is a layer intermediate between the Syllable
and the Phonological Word, such that each Foot has one strong Syllable and a number of
weaker Syllables” (ibid.: 452). Again, there is possibility of recursion within both Words and
Feet (F). The Phonological Level is similar to the other levels in permitting the “non-
instantiation of any of the layers”, and particularly to the Morphosyntactic Level in permitting
“recursion of any of the layers”; at the same time, FDG takes a more “fluid view of the hierar-
chy within the Phonological Level” than it does with the other levels, in the sense that, alt-
hough it does assume a basic hierarchy of phonological units, it also admits the possibility of
“addition of further layers in any one language” (ibid.: 428).

2.2. Grammaticalization and FDG

2.2.1. Directionality

Within the framework of F(D)G, accounts of grammaticalization have been proposed in which
the unidirectional nature of the process is represented from both the functional and the for-
mal points of view. Keizer (2007) has shown that the four “interrelated mechanisms” of dia-
chronic change involved in grammaticalization (pragmatic extension, semantic bleaching, mor-
phosyntactic decategorialization and “erosion”, see Heine and Kuteva 2007: 33-ff.) cover all of
the four grammatical levels distinguished in FDG. This suggests that the theory’s formalism

20
provides the means of proposing a full representation of grammaticalization processes: con-
tent change can be represented at the Interpersonal and Representational Levels, while formal
change can be represented at the Morphosyntactic and Phonological Levels. According to
Hengeveld (1989, 2011), diachronic change affecting TAM expressions invariably implies a
widening in semantic scope, which in FDG terms means that once a former lexeme has come
to function as an RL or IL operator, it can only move on from a lower to a higher layer (or level,
see Hengeveld and Wanders 2007). This idea has been confirmed by a number of studies (see
Olbertz 1993, Boland 2006, Souza 2009, among others). However, it should be noted that this
only appears to be true of the Formulation levels, while the formal evolution typically accom-
panying advanced grammaticalization processes (at least in mainly fusional and agglutinating
languages) suggests that diachronic change should be represented at the Encoding levels of
FDG as a movement from larger to smaller units. For instance, Hopper and Traugott’s cline
“content item > grammatical word > clitic > inflectional affix” can be reformulated at the Mor-
phosyntactic Level of FDG as Xp > Gw > Affix.9

2.2.2 Usage-based nature of grammaticalization and multifunctionality

The usage-based nature of grammaticalization and the role of pragmatic inferencing can also
be adequately accommodated within the model of FDG, as this conceives grammar as one of
the modules that make up a more general theory of verbal communication. The other compo-
nents of this theory are the Output, the Conceptual and the Contextual Components. While
the first deals with the neuromotor, articulatory aspects of language, the Conceptual and Con-
textual Components deal with pre-linguistic communicative intentions and with the relevance
of contextual information for the grammatical choices made by the speaker, respectively. It is
precisely in the context of this interaction between separate Components (especially between
the Grammatical, the Contextual and the Conceptual ones) that the usage-based nature of
grammaticalization finds its place within the model.
Moreover, given the enormous importance of contextual inferencing for explaining the
synchronic multifunctionality of grammatical markers, an accurate description of the interac-
tion between components should also allow consistent representations of the communicative
mechanisms through which one or another meaning of a given marker emerges under differ-
ent conditions. What is lacking in FDG as regards this point is an explicit, comprehensive ac-
count of the multifunctionality of linguistic expressions. However, grammaticalization paths
have already been formulated in FDG terms by several scholars (see Boland 2006, Hengeveld
2010, among others), and we have seen that these paths should in principle also provide a
realistic representation of synchronic patterns of multifunctionality. Such representations will
be much more informative if they can incorporate a precise characterization of each mean-
ing/stage relative to the general structure of grammar (see below) and if they can be merged
into a larger map based on data from a variety of languages.

9
On the relevance of clitics as a separate stage of grammaticalization, see Keizer (2007: 47).

21
 2.2.3 Grammaticalization and grammatical structure

There also is another sense in which FDG can be said to capture the panchronic dimension of
grammaticalization. If grammaticalization clines can be coherently represented at all levels of
grammatical analysis, this means that the diachronic evolution of grammatical markers reflects
the same general linguistic structure as is also observable synchronically across the languages
of the world. This is of the greatest importance for the analysis proposed here, as it gives FDG
accounts a decisive advantage over most functionally oriented theories of language change.
These, as we have seen, generally explain grammaticalization and multifunctionality patterns
as being directly rooted in the cognitive endowment of human beings, to the extent that many
talk about a “cognitive-functional” tradition in the field of grammaticalization studies (e.g.
McClelland and Bybee 2007, Cuyckens, Vandelanotte and Davidse 2010): if, instead, those
same universal patterns can be clearly anchored to general grammatical structure, this would
provide evidence for the existence of grammar-internal constraints on the possible diachronic
and synchronic patterns, that is, would provide a grammatical, and not only a cognitive expla-
nation of these phenomena. In other words, the proposal is that such patterns are not only
compatible with the most general mechanisms of human cognition but are systematically and
predictably shaped by a precisely defined underlying grammatical hierarchy. It may of course
be reasonably argued that this underlying structure is itself one of the many manifestations of
more general cognitive schemata, as maintained by cognitive linguistics: nonetheless, the
analysis will show that diachronic change is ruled by forces which are not always easily ac-
counted for on purely cognitive grounds, but which appear much more regular and systematic
when looked at with the grammatical hierarchy postulated by FDG in mind.
The first problem with “purely” cognitive accounts of language change is a theoretical
one. If the main mechanism at work in language change is the metaphorical or metonymical
transfer (or “mapping”) of an image-schema from one conceptual domain to another, the fact
that this transfer always takes place in one direction (concrete > abstract or less subjective >
more subjective) cannot be taken as a sufficient explanation of language change: from the
point of view of cognition, this tendency is itself the (epi)phenomenon to be explained. If in-
stead we assume that language change is first and foremost constrained by underlying gram-
matical structure, the fact that the unidirectionality of change is clearly traceable with respect
to this structure is both a powerful explanation for diachronic change and an important valida-
tion for the grammatical structure proposed within the model of analysis. In other words, what
is an explanation for the grammarian is a question for the cognitive scientist, and after all it
could not be otherwise, as language is but one among the many cognitive faculties of human
beings.
Secondly, not all instances of functional change can uncontroversially be said to involve
subjectification and/or the passage from a more concrete to a more abstract meaning. To give
an example, one case in point is the development of reportative evidential out of proposition-
oriented epistemic markers, since it is not clear whether the former category should be seen
as more subjective than the latter, and it also seems unlikely to be characterized as more ab-
stract. On the other hand, such a development is not at all problematic for FDG, involving a
passage from the Representational to the Interpersonal Level, and thus matching Hengeveld’s
proposal about the upward directionality of functional change.

22
3. Defining the model

3.1. Diachronic analysis: grammaticalization paths in FDG

In this work, while the synchronic analysis of contemporary languages will be entirely conduct-
ed on parallel corpora, as mentioned in the introduction, the diachronic analysis will not be
based on corpus data but will essentially rely on the existing literature. This methodological
choice is dictated by the absence of parallel diachronic corpora of a sufficient size for the great
majority of the languages under analysis.
The diachronic analysis will mainly consist in formulating a hypothesis about the historical
evolution of each single marker on the basis of the data and investigations in the literature. I
have pointed out above that a major reason for choosing FDG as the main theoretical tool to
be applied in this dissertation is its ability to show how the historical evolution of linguistic
expressions relates to general linguistic structure at all levels of grammatical analysis. Although
in this introductory chapter I will only focus on functional change (that is, on change at the
Interpersonal and Representational Levels), in studying concrete cases of grammaticalization
equal attention will be drawn to both the functional and the formal aspects of the process. As
in any comprehensive theory of grammaticalization, it is also vital that the so-called “co-
evolution” of form and meaning (Bybee et al. 1994: 19-21) is properly investigated and under-
stood.
As far as the Interpersonal and Representational Levels are concerned, our main working
hypothesis will be that the unidirectionality of grammaticalization consists in a gradual pro-
gression in scope from lower to higher layers or levels. One good example is the evolution as a
future marker of the Modern English will + V, which originally derives from a lexical verb mean-
ing ‘to want, wish’. This is presented in FDG terms by Hengeveld (2011, following Bybee et al.
1991):

(2) Grammaticalization of English will + V (adapted from Hengeveld 2011)

configurational property > state-of-affairs > episode > propositional content
participant-oriented relative tense absolute inferential evidentiality
modality (π fc) (π e) tense (π ep) (π p)

An example of grammaticalization entirely concerning the Interpersonal Level is that of sort-of,

which Hengeveld (2010, drawing on Hengeveld and Wanders 2007) summarizes as follows: 10

(3) Grammaticalization of English sort-of (adapted from Hengeveld 2010)

Referential Subact > Ascriptive Subact > Communicated Content
approximation (Π R) approximation (Π T) approximation (Π C)

A grammaticalization path expressed in FDG terms will only differ from a traditional one in
carrying an indication of the layer at which the marker functions at each stage, as has been
done here for will + V and sort-of. Note that, while in the evolution of will + V the progression

10
But cf. Keizer (2007: 45-47) on the question whether to assign a grammatical or lexical status to this
construction.

23
in scope is constantly accompanied by a change in the very function of the construction, sort-
of maintains its meaning of approximation as it passes from lower to higher layers. Such a de-
velopment is not attested in the literature for Indo-European future markers, which, on the
contrary, often show an impressive functional variability on both the diachronic and the syn-
chronic axes.
It is also not uncommon for constructions functioning at the Representational Level to
acquire interpersonal meanings in the course of grammaticalization. One often cited case is
that of temporal adverbials and connectives evolving into discourse markers (for an FDG analy-
sis see Souza 2009 on já and aí in Brazilian Portuguese), but this is also a common kind of de-
velopment for TAM markers in general and for future markers in particular. As for the latter,
the most often found shift from RL to IL is probably the rise of imperatives out of future mark-
ers (Bybee et al. 1994: 273), but other interpersonal meanings that certainly developed out of
a future tense use – either directly or through a proposition-oriented stage – are also docu-
mented in the literature, as well as in our synchronic corpus. Some examples are concession,
mitigation, reportative evidentiality and mirativity.

3.2. A panchronic perspective: from paths to maps

Since grammaticalization paths are expected to reflect synchronic multifunctionality as well,

for each construction a certain number of successive (that is, adjacent) stages on the path
should correspond to as many alternative uses of the construction in one and the same syn-
chronic cut. Accordingly, among the meanings/stages illustrated above, at least absolute tense
and inference are often cited for will + V in contemporary English; conversely, all three func-
tions of sort-of are still abundantly attested. However, as regards the synchronic multifunc-
tionality of grammatical markers, the whole picture is often much more complex than is re-
flected by most published grammaticalization paths. This is because these paths only keep
track of those evolutionary stages that are relevant for the diachronic evolution of the con-
struction: that is to say, grammaticalization paths only represent fully grammaticalized mean-
ings out of which new uses have developed, which, in turn, reached full conventionalization
and gave rise to new meanings (and so on until the present). But in the reality of synchronic
usage, other uses often co-exist with fully conventionalized ones, occurring in what Heine
(2002) terms bridging and switch contexts. For instance, for will + V, a comprehensive account
of multifunctionality should also include at least imperative, mitigated declarative (as in “This
will be all for today”), mitigated directive (as in “Will you pass me the salt?”) and “gnomic” or
gnomic-like uses (as in “He will make that mistake all the time, won't he?”), despite the fact
that not all of these uses have reached the same stage of conventionalization and probably
none of them is at the basis of new developments. In addition, it is sometimes noted that a
sense of volition can be recognized in many instances of will + V with first person subject. The
retention of the latter meaning is problematic for the cline in (1), because it violates the re-
quirement that all the functions a construction may serve at one and the same synchronic
stage should occupy a continuous area on the grammaticalization path.
Such intricate situations call for a close look at both diachronic and synchronic data and
may suggest specific adjustments of the construction-specific and universal grammaticalization
paths proposed in the literature. So, for each language and marker, the largest possible se-

24
mantic map will be designed, drawing upon both diachronic and synchronic data; these maps
will then be compared and, if found consistent with each other, merged together in one uni-
fied map, which should cover a pretty wide functional area with future tense as its center. In
accordance with the principles of the Semantic Maps model, the prediction is that the distribu-
tion of the various functions on the map will largely constrain the diachronic and synchronic
patterns to be found for future markers in the languages of the world. At the same time, the
representation of each meaning/stage as an element of FDG will show how such constraints on
the (im)possible patterns are directly imposed by general grammatical structure (see 2.2.3). On
the other hand, if any infringement of the expected configurations (such as the existence of
volition meanings for English will + V) should turn out to occur with some systematicity, this
will inevitably require a refinement of the model of analysis itself.

3.3. Synchronic analysis

3.3.1. The corpus

In order to obtain a fine-grained description of the synchronic multifunctionality of future

markers in the Indo-European family, a large parallel corpus comprising 14 languages has been
compiled. The languages in the sample, listed by family (and ordered from West to East), are
the following:

• Romance: Portuguese, Italian, Romanian;

• Germanic: English, Dutch, German, Swedish;
• Slavic: Polish, Serbian, Russian, Bulgarian;
• Albanian;
• Greek;
• Baltic: Lithuanian. 11

The choice of parallel corpora is motivated by the necessity of studying the behavior of the
observed constructions in their larger context, which, for languages the author does not speak
at all, has been made possible by the availability of translations of each relevant chunk of text
into several languages, some of which the author can read and understand without the help of
grammars and dictionaries. This will allow us to set down accurate descriptions of the linguistic
and situational contexts in which the various meanings of a construction emerge; in turn, this
should make it possible to identify and categorize the factors that are relevant for each mean-
ing. On this basis, and following Heine (2002), all the functions of the constructions under
analysis will be classified as fully grammatical – i.e. conventionalized – or, otherwise, as be-
longing to either a bridging context or a switch context phase.
It goes without saying that such an investigation requires a corpus which covers a
significant variety of communicative contexts, so that (uses of) constructions which are typical

11
The languages of the easternmost Indo-European branches (Indo-Aryan, Iranic and Armenian) had to
be excluded for practical reasons, namely the scarcity of available aligned data and the difficulty of
computational treatment, due to the writing systems of these languages.

25
of different sociolinguistic varieties will not be neglected by the analysis. For this reason, the
corpus is divided into three sections:

• literary fiction;
• movie subtitles;
• journalistic, institutional and academic texts.

3.3.1.1. Sources

The two main sources of parallel data are the Parasol 12 and Intercorp 13 online corpora, two
impressively large and user-friendly resources comprising aligned translations of a variety of
fictional works for all the languages in the sample (except Albanian), in varying proportions.
Both Parasol and Intercorp include POS-tagging for a large part of the respective corpora,
which are searchable with the CQL (Corpus Query Language) query syntax. The narrative texts
in these two resources (partly drawn from the ASPAC corpus) 14 offer a wide range of linguistic
registers and styles and, what is most important, a great variety of different communicative
situations. Nonetheless, as noted above, an analysis such as that proposed in this dissertation
must necessarily be conducted on data from other sources as well.
The movie subtitles section, extracted from the OPUS database 15 (Tiedemann 2012), is in-
serted into the corpus with the objective of studying the use of future tense markers in a type
of text which is typically much closer to everyday spoken language than is common in literary
work. In this respect, the subtitles corpus made available by the OPUS project is by far the
largest and the most adequate resource available to my knowledge, providing a considerable
amount of aligned parallel data for all of the 14 languages in the sample.
Finally, the journalistic, institutional and academic texts section will provide a database
for the analysis of formal/high-register varieties of the languages in the sample. This section is
divided into three sub-sections for both theoretical and practical reasons. On the one hand,
although journalistic, institutional and academic texts can all generally be ascribed to a formal
linguistic register, the stylistic features which are characteristic of each genre may be signifi-
cantly different (depending on the language), revealing context-specific uses of the construc-
tions under analysis as well as remarkable quantitative contrasts concerning the frequency
with which these are employed. On the other hand, the inclusion of different types of texts in
representation of high-register varieties was made necessary by the unavailability (or insuffi-
cient size) of genre-specific corpora for some languages. For instance, no parallel journalistic
data were found for Swedish, which, however, is compensated for by the very large number of

12
Jointly developed by Ruprecht von Wandefels (University of Bern) and Roland Meyer (University of
Regensburg) and available at http://parasol.unibe.ch/ (on request).
13
Developed at the Charles University of Prague with the support of the Institute of the Czech National
Corpus and available at http://www.korpus.cz/Intercorp/ (on request).
14
Developed at the University of Amsterdam (http://www.uva.nl/over-de-
uva/organisatie/medewerkers/content/b/a/a.a.barentsen/a.a.barentsen.html) and kindly made availa-
ble to me by Adrian Barentsen.
15
Freely available at http://www.opus.lingfil.uu.se/.

26
academic essays (aligned with English) contained in the Oslo Multilingual Corpus; 16 similarly,
the scarcity of institutional texts for Serbian and Albanian is abundantly compensated for by
the Setimes corpus, an extremely large parallel corpus of newspapers articles (aligned with
English) which is made available by OPUS and also includes the other languages of the Balkan
area in the sample (viz. Greek, Romanian and Bulgarian). For the remaining languages (except
Lithuanian), parallel journalistic data are provided by the Presseurop and the Syndicate corpo-
ra, which are part of Intercorp. Data from institutional texts are provided by the United Nations
General Assembly Resolutions corpus 17 for Russian and by the Europarl corpus 18 (containing
full transcription of the proceedings of the European Parliament) for the languages of the Eu-
ropean Union. The latter corpus is also contained in Intercorp.

3.3.1.2. Part-Of-Speech-tagging

POS-tagging of the sub-corpora which have not already been tagged by the developers is in
order for the four Slavic languages in the sample, as well as for German and Lithuanian. The
tagging process is in progress and is being performed with several different NLP tools, which
will be duly acknowledged in the final dissertation.
Polish and Russian express the future of perfective verbs by means of an inflectional form
which formally belongs to the paradigm of the present (while the future of imperfective verbs
is a periphrastic construction): as a consequence, identifying all of the relevant verbal forms by
means of manual queries based on word endings would slow down the process enormously,
since this would imply having to look at all the imperfective present forms as well (which do
not have future meanings). The same holds for Bulgarian, because, although this language
generally uses a periphrastic future marker for both perfective and imperfective verbs in main
clauses, the morphological present of perfective verbs is frequently used to express the future
in subordinate clauses. Serbian is in a rather similar position, but unfortunately, no sufficiently
accurate tagger seems to be available for this language. It will thus be unavoidable to use
manual queries for Serbian.
As regards Lithuanian, which has an inflectional future tense, the need for POS-tagging is
mainly due to the circumstance that the 3rd person (both singular and plural) of the future
paradigm ends in -s or -š (depending on the final segment of the verb stem), which are ex-
tremely common terminations for Lithuanian words in general: again, this would make manual
queries extremely time-consuming, and thus ineffective. The other languages in the sample
which have an inflectional future are Portuguese and Italian: in these languages, however, the
future endings can very seldom be confused with other word-type terminations, so that using
manual queries does not cause any significant time loss (actually, much more time would be
needed to perform POS-tagging than having the texts tagged would save). Manual queries can
also be felicitously used for the so-called periphrastic future (ir + infinitive) in Portuguese.
All the remaining languages have periphrastic futures, which makes manual queries based
on the auxiliary or particle employed in the construction perfectly feasible. The only exception

16
Developed at the University of Oslo (http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/services/omc/) and kindly
made available to me by Hilde Hasselgård.
17
Freely available at http://www.uncorpora.org/.
18
Freely available at http://www.statm.org/europarl/.

27
is German: for this language, as for Lithuanian, using manual queries is highly undesirable due
to contingent factors – namely, that the same auxiliary which is used to form the future tense
in combination with infinitival complements (werden) is also employed in the passive construc-
tion, where it combines with a participial form. Moreover, the 1st and 3rd persons plural of
werden are identical to the infinitive of the same verb, which is not used as a future auxiliary,
but does occur in passive and copula constructions.

3.3.2. Toward a dynamic FDG

As anticipated in 2.2.2, the FDG analysis will be developed in the context of the interaction of
components, that is, of what Hengeveld and Mackenzie (2008: 2) term the “dynamic imple-
mentation” of the model (see also Hengeveld 2004: 367, ff.). This requires that each of the
stages relevant to the process of grammaticalization is re-defined in terms of this interaction.
In particular, our model must be able to explain the grammatical and inferential mechanisms
which are involved in – and typical of – each stage, as well as to provide coherent representa-
tions of these different communicative strategies. Section 3.3.3 will be dedicated to these
tasks. But before we can do this, we need to illustrate our account of the interaction between
the four components in some detail, in order to describe how the general “flow of information
around the model” (Connolly, fc) takes place in a dynamic implementation of FDG. The differ-
ences between bridging contexts, switch contexts and grammatical meaning, in fact, can be
ultimately reduced to the role that each component plays in this “flow” at each occurrence of
the construction.
FDG is fundamentally a theory of grammar, so that its main concern is to provide accurate
descriptions of the formal structures found in natural languages and to explain these in terms
of the interplay of four distinct, but interrelated, levels of analysis. As noted in 2.1.2.2, the
grammar of any individual language is regarded as a different and unique instantiation of one
overall theoretical model. This is assumed to be universal in what concerns its general archi-
tecture, which is modular and hierarchical; but, at the same time, FDG allows, at all four levels,
individual languages either to make use of or to make no use of any specific type of unit,a
measure that is designed to render the model flexible enough to account for the amazing vari-
ability of functional and formal strategies adopted by the languages of the world. This quest
for typological adequacy is one of the defining characteristics of FDG. But the theory also cru-
cially attempts to achieve maximal cognitive and pragmatic adequacy: this is why the Gram-
matical Component is not studied in isolation, but is conceived of as one of four independent
but indissolubly interrelated modules, which together make up a wider theory of verbal inter-
action (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 1-12). These four modules, the components, dynami-
cally work together in a division of labor of considerable complexity, whose effectiveness
models the successful transfer of information between speech participants (which is the goal
and the essence of any verbal interaction).
We saw in Chapter 1 that contextual reasoning plays a crucial role in the multifunctionali-
ty (and thus in the grammaticalization) of grammatical constructions, to the extent that it does
not seem possible to develop a comprehensive account of these phenomena without an ade-
quate treatment of certain types of inferential processes. We have also noted that FDG seems
to offer a particularly adequate framework for understanding the usage-based nature of

28
grammaticalization and multifunctionality, precisely because pragmatic inferencing and con-
text-induced reinterpretation could, at least in principle, be successfully accommodated within
the modular architecture of the model. However, although the model is designed to describe
the functioning of grammar in its greater context, most aspects of the interaction between
grammar, cognition and context of the exchange are deliberately excluded from FDG’s view of
the relation between components. The reason for this is precisely that the theory is basically
concerned with grammatical structure, so that, from its perspective, only those aspects of this
interaction need to be modeled which “have systematic effects upon the operations within the
grammar” (Hengeveld and Mackenzie, fc). This means that all those communicative devices
that go under the name of implicature in the pragmatics literature do not find any place within
FDG, neither do the various types of situational and long-term information which may in par-
ticular circumstances be relevant for pragmatic inferencing. It is thus clear that, if we want to
adequately describe the role that is played by context-induced reinterpretation within an FDG
theory of grammaticalization, the dynamic relation between the components must be reinter-
preted in a somewhat broader fashion than is maintained in the current model. The question,
then, is whether this can be done without doing violence to the very nature of the theory.

3.3.2.1. The Contextual Component

The Contextual Component of FDG includes those elements of the immediate speech situation
that can be shown to “interact with the Grammatical Component in a restricted and principled
manner” (Hengeveld and Mackenzie, fc). Since each (variety of a) language has its own unique
grammar, it follows that the information belonging in the Contextual Component can only be
seen as language-specific (see 2.1.1). Thus, for instance, if a language distinguishes gender as
an overt grammatical category, the sex of animate referents 19 must be regarded as a relevant
contextual category for that language and thus be recorded in the relative Contextual Compo-
nent: otherwise, it would be impossible to explain why certain linguistic elements (most com-
monly NPs) systematically take different forms depending on whether the evoked individual is
a male or a female. By contrast, if in a language the sex of animate referents has no conse-
quence whatsoever for the formal structure of the utterance, recording that information in the
Contextual Component would be an unnecessary – and thus undesirable – complication, while
adding nothing to the explanatory power of the model.
Within the Contextual Component, Hengeveld and Mackenzie (2008) acknowledge a basic
distinction between the long-term, extra-linguistic information relevant to the ongoing speech
situation, and the linguistically encoded information which is received at each speech turn
from the Grammatical Component. The latter represents the contribution of each single utter-
ance to the joint creation of a common ground by the speech participants. In Connolly’s (2007)
terms, these two types of contextual information constitute the situational and the discoursal
context, respectively. Both situational and discoursal information can influence the operations
performed within the Grammatical Component. An example of how long-term, situational
information can be relevant for the grammatical operation of Formulation is the one given
above, since gender distinctions are specified at the Individuals layer of the Representational

19
Or whatever natural characteristic the gender distinction is based on in that language.

29
Level; that linguistic information is also stored in the Contextual Component is visible, for in-
stance, in such grammatical phenomena as anaphora and weak pronominal forms, where the
use of a certain form is only made possible by the fact that its referent has been evoked in the
immediately preceding discourse. In addition, the fact that anaphoric reference can be made
to elements from any one of the grammatical levels distinguished in FDG strongly suggests that
information from each level is stored separately in the Contextual Component (see Hengeveld
and Mackenzie 2008: 5; fc).
In Hengeveld and Mackenzie (fc), situational information – roughly corresponding to Con-
nolly’s “narrower situational context” – is defined as “a language-specific selection of those
details of the speech situation that have relevance for Formulation”. Its organization is as fol-
lows:

Situational information
(a) Speech situation: participants, utterance time, utterance place;
(b) Physical world: perceivable and inferable entities, such as individuals,
events, properties, etc.

In Hengeveld and Mackenzie’s (fc) classification of contextual categories, each element of situ-
ational information corresponds to a variable of either the Interpersonal or the Representa-
tional Level and is represented in exactly the same way as the corresponding linguistic unit.
This explicit association has the advantage of allowing a unified treatment of situational and
linguistically expressed information, since in this way the Grammatical Component can be ex-
plicitly anchored to the Contextual Component through co-indexation of grammatically encod-
ed and contextual information. It should be clear, however, that this is only done for practical
reasons: strictly speaking, any bit of situational information is a non-linguistic mental represen-
tation of an aspect of the extra-linguistic world and as such different in nature from the linguis-
tic unit that is used to evoke it. Nonetheless, any information (be it linguistically expressed or
not) basically consists of semantic and/or interpersonal content, and can therefore be repre-
sented using the formalism of FDG. In what follows, I will make use of this conventional nota-
tion for situational information, thus treating it just as if it were linguistic in nature.
It should be noted, however, that even if we restrict our analysis to the contextual catego-
ries that are relevant for overt, systematic grammatical realizations, the distinction between
situational and discoursal information may not tell the whole story. In fact, Hengeveld and
Mackenzie (fc) themselves mention “perceived and inferable entities” (my emphasis) in their
presentation of situational information, and other authors who have written on the Contextual
Component of FDG have also pointed out the importance of inferred information, noting that
inferences can be drawn upon both discoursal and situational information (Connolly 2007, fc,
Cornish 2009, fc). I myself have tried to show elsewhere (Giomi, fc) that certain uses of deictic
and anaphoric expressions cannot be understood in terms of the interaction of components
unless we admit the possibility that a certain amount of inferred information is recorded in the
Contextual Component. As a matter of fact, most uses of demonstratives and personal pro-
nouns are only licensed if the referent is contextually salient for both speech participants (see
Hengeveld and Mackenzie, fc), that is, if a corresponding specification is present in the Contex-
tual Component. As an example, consider the demonstrative pronoun that in (4):

(4) Do you remember when Jim came to my house? Now, that was embarrassing.

30
Suppose that the demonstrative here does not refer to Jim’s visit itself but rather to something
which happened during this visit, say, the event of Jim being impolite to some other guest. In
that case, the referent of the demonstrative is retrieved by the hearer through an inference
based on his memory of the event designated in the preceding sentence (i.e. in the discoursal
context). The evocation of Jim’s visit to the speaker’s house makes a number of other referents
available, among which the most likely to be assigned the property embarrassing is retrieved,
allowing the specification of the variable corresponding to the morphosyntactic unit that at
the Representational Level. Co-indexation of this representational unit with the intended ref-
erent is only possible if a representation of that entity is present in the Contextual Component:
as noted above, such a representation can only be said to access the Contextual Component by
means of an inference, as the entity in question is neither present in the situational context
nor has it been explicitly mentioned in the preceding discourse (on this point, see Cornish
2009, 2013).
However, it would not be correct to assume that all the possible referents which are
made available as the speaker utters the first sentence automatically access the Contextual
Component. This would imply that all the personal memories associated with the evoked
event in the speaker’s mind are simultaneously in her focus of attention and also that exactly
the same memories are equally evoked and focused on by the addressee. Such an assumption
is not only unsustainable from a psychological point of view, but is also radically incompatible
with a dialogic model such as the one proposed here, whereby the Contextual Component is
conceived of as “an implicit common ground” which is shared and co-constructed by the two
speech participants as the exchange unfolds (cf. Mackenzie 2012, fc). In this kind of model,
only the information which can be shown to be (or become) contextually salient for both dial-
ogists finds its way into the Contextual Component. The question then arises as to where the
relevant information comes from and how exactly it is brought into play by the inferential pro-
cess at work in cases like (4) above.

3.3.2.2. The Conceptual Component, extra-linguistic knowledge and the implementation

of FDG

The Conceptual Component is defined by Hengeveld and Mackenzie (2008: 7) as

[…] the driving force behind the Grammatical Component as a whole. It is here that
is represented the ideational and interactive material presupposed by each piece of
discourse under analysis and the various communicative Moves and Discourse Acts
that it contains.

The “ideational and interactive material” the authors talk about relates to representational
and interpersonal linguistic material respectively, which is dealt with at Formulation. As ex-
plained in 2.1, the conceptual material is passed to the Grammatical Component, which trans-
lates it into linguistic representation; this, in turn, is passed to the Output Component for Ar-
ticulation.

31
 Thus, in (4), the speaker’s mental representation of the event designated by the demon-
strative in the second sentence must first be evoked in the Conceptual Component, which, in
Chafe’s (1987: 25) terms, means that this is an active referent for the speaker. Accordingly, for
Hengeveld and Mackenzie (fc), activation is a matter for the Conceptual Component. The con-
ceptual representation of the event is then passed to Formulation, which creates a linguistic
variable corresponding to that representation and specifies it as an (e) unit, that is, as a State-
of-Affairs, in response to the communicative intention to designate that event. But the fact
that this unit is encoded as a demonstrative pronoun indicates that the intended referent is
not only assumed to be identifiable by the addressee (as is the case with any determinate NP,
see Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 36, 113-ff.), but is also assumed to be represented in (or
at least inferable from) the common ground relevant to the ongoing exchange: 20 that is to say,
by using a demonstrative, the speaker is signaling to the addressee that she assumes a certain
referent to be as readily accessible for the latter as it is for herself. In fact, it is precisely the
function of the preceding sentence (“Do you remember when Jim came to my house?”) to
bring a precise (set of) referent(s) into the addressee’s focus of consciousness. In other words,
the first sentence functions as an “instruction” to the addressee to activate episodic memory
of a shared past experience; the demonstrative in the second sentence is then used as an indi-
cation to create an empty variable in the grammatical representation and to look for an ap-
propriate specification of that variable in the information available in the Contextual Compo-
nent.
It is at this point that the inferential mechanism required for interpreting the demonstra-
tive pronoun comes into play: as soon as the whole utterance has been parsed by the address-
ee and the empty variable is assigned the property embarrassing, an adequate referent for
that variable is sought in the Contextual Component; what is found in the Contextual Compo-
nent is an indication (in the preceding discourse) to retrieve a (semi-)active referent from epi-
sodic memory. In this way, the mental representation of the relevant event is brought from
episodic memory into the Contextual Component (by inference) and passed to the Grammati-
cal Component, which can now specify it as an (e) (or possibly (ep)) variable in underlying rep-
resentation. Likewise, as noted above, in language production the mental representation of
the event/episode must access the Contextual Component in order for the grammar to treat it
as given and contextually salient at the time of speech, which is done by selecting a demon-
strative. This mechanism parallels the inference through which the relevant non-linguistic rep-
resentation accesses the Contextual Component in language comprehension: both processes
require the activation of episodic memory and end with the creation of a variable in the Con-
textual Component, thus they do not directly involve the operations performed by the Gram-
matical Component. But this does not mean that these extra-grammatical, inferential process-
es have no consequences for the grammar itself: as we have seen, a full semantic representa-
tion of the utterance cannot be developed by either Formulation or Interpretation until those
processes have been executed. Such processes should therefore be explicitly modeled in a
satisfactory account of the dynamic implementation of FDG. A tentative representation of this
analysis is given in Figure 3, where the process described above is presented from the point of
view of the speaker. For the sake of simplicity, only the linguistic elements corresponding to
the inferable information evoked by the demonstrative are represented within the
20
The only use of demonstratives which seems to escape this generalization is the so-called “recogni-
tional” use (see Himmelmann 1996 and Diessel 1999).

32
 Conceptual Component
event 1= Jim was impolite to guest X

Inferable information
Formulation
Grammatical Component

Contextual Component
(ei) = event 1

IL: (AI: … (+id RI) … (AI))

Situational
information
RL: (pi: … (dist 1ei) … (pi))

Discoursal
Encoding information

Output Component

Figure 3: The interaction of components in the production of Now that was embarrassing!

Grammatical Component (in red). 21 The [+identifiable] operator on (RI) triggers a definite NP at
the Morphosyntactic Level, while the operators “dist” and “1” on the corresponding State-of-
Affairs (ei) reflect the proximate/distal and singular/plural oppositions observable in the para-
digm of English demonstratives (this-these / that-those). All these elements together trigger
the use of the singular distal pronoun that at the Morphosyntactic Level. As for the infor-
mation within the Contextual Component, I follow Hengeveld and Mackenzie (fc) in represent-
ing it with the same formalism as is used for grammatical representations, which allows co-
indexation between elements of the two components. Inferable information is represented
within a dashed box, indicating that this information comes from outside the system (namely,
in this case, from episodic memory), entering the Contextual Component by means of a pro-
cess that is distinct from both direct perception and explicit linguistic evocation (which are
responsible for situational and discoursal information, respectively). It is precisely for this rea-
son that inferred information is represented separately from both of these sources (while in

21
In FDG, the interpersonal variable (R) stands for a Referential Subact, i.e. the communicative act of
evoking a referent, no matter what its ontological nature. The representational variable (ei) designates a
State-of-Affairs, thus specifying what kind of referent is evoked by (RI).

33
other FDG accounts of context, such as Cornish 2009, inferred information is incorporated into
the Discourse).
It is also important to note that, in comprehension, the discounting of referents already pre-
sent in the Contextual Component and the selection of a more appropriate referent from epi-
sodic memory are not determined by linguistic factors: there is nothing in the utterance or in
the pre-existing contextual information which actually prevents the addressee from interpret-
ing the demonstrative as designating the event of Jim visiting the speaker’s house, which is the
last referent of the (ep) type inserted in the Contextual Component and would thus represent
the most obvious candidate (in principle) to be understood as the referent of that. Here, the
interpretation of the pronoun requires probabilistic reasoning and implies general extra-
linguistic knowledge as well as a meta-linguistic evaluation of the likelihood that a certain ref-
erent is defined as “embarrassing” by the speaker (which, in turn, involves a stochastic model
of the other’s mind). What this entails is that the multi-component linguistic system postulated
by FDG is necessarily integrated into a wider model of human reasoning (see 3.3.2.3 below),
with information being sent back and forth between the linguistic and the non-linguistic mod-
ules whenever this is needed for the production and interpretation of utterances. It is not a
task for the linguist to try and elaborate such a general epistemological model in any detail:
what is central here is that, when inferencing is required for the Grammatical Component to
develop complete and well-formed linguistic structures, it is always the extra-grammatical
linguistic components (the Contextual and, in some cases, the Conceptual Component) which
function as an interface between the grammar and the general inferential system. It should be
added that in deictic and anaphoric reference (of any kind) a mental representation of the
intended referent must be evoked in the Conceptual Component of both interactants, being
retrieved from either long-term (episodic or encyclopedic) or short-term (contextual)
knowledge: this is necessary because it is always the Conceptual Component which provides
Formulation and Interpretation with the means of associating the meaningful linguistic primi-
tives used in both operations with the corresponding ideational and interactive mental con-
structs (which are conceptual, and not linguistic, in nature). On the other hand, we will see in
3.3.3.1 that not all the inferential processes which may be relevant for the dynamic implemen-
tation of FDG necessarily require that the inferred information is represented in the Conceptu-
al Component.

3.3.2.3. An integrated model of FDG

As pointed out by Hengeveld and Mackenzie themselves, it should be borne in mind that rep-
resentations such as Figure 3 are a simplification of the actual dialogic process, because the
role of the addressee is, so to say, “bypassed” in the picture:

The various levels of representation within the grammar feed into the Contextual
Component, thus enabling subsequent reference to the various kinds of entity rele-
vant at each of these levels once they are introduced into the discourse. [...] Note
that the representation of these feeding relations [...] is a simplification when
looked at from the perspective of the language user. In order to create a contextual
specification, the Addressee has to reconstruct all the levels of representation with-

34
 in the grammar on the basis of the actual output of that grammar, i.e. the phonetic
utterance. Since in this book we restrict ourselves to the perspective of language
production and concentrate on the Grammatical Component, we abstract away
from this complication by provisionally assuming direct feeding relationships be-
tween the [speaker’s, RG] Grammatical Component and the Contextual Compo-
nent. (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 14)

In Giomi (fc) I propose an addressee-oriented version of FDG in which the operations corre-
sponding to Formulation and Encoding are named Interpretation and Decoding, respectively.
This model is integrated with the standard-FDG speaker-oriented one in an attempt to provide
a full description of the “life cycle” of utterances in dialogue, from their conception in the Con-
ceptual Component of the speaker to their ultimate updating effect on the Conceptual Com-
ponent of the addressee.
The addressee-oriented model is presented in Figure 4. The grammar is fed by the Input
Component, which perceives sound waves and transmits these to the brain in the form of elec-
tric impulses, through the acoustic nerve; at this point, a phonetic representation (the Input) is
generated, which in turn is passed to the Grammatical Component to start Phonological De-
coding. Phonological and morphosyntactic representations are passed to Interpretation to
reconstruct their semantic and interpersonal content. Note, however, that Interpretation is
also fed by the Conceptual Component, which is necessary for linking the linguistic material it
handles to the corresponding ideational and interactive conceptual material (see 3.3.2.2). This
is not to suggest that conceptual information should itself be integrated into the grammatical
representation: it simply follows from the observation that one cannot use or interpret a cer-
tain lexeme, operator or frame properly if one fails to conceive the related notion or to associ-
ate it with the corresponding linguistic item. In other words, such a thing as “purely linguistic”
meaning is hardly conceivable: the grammatical distinctions operated at Formulation and In-
terpretation are only meaningful (and their existence is only justified) insofar as they reflect
the conceptual distinctions which are linguistically relevant to the community of speakers of a
language; 22 this entails that, each time that a given semantic or interpersonal primitive is used
(either in production or in comprehension), the corresponding mental construct is necessarily
evoked in the Conceptual Component.23
On the other hand, the Conceptual Component is not assumed to be directly fed by the
grammar, but only by the Contextual Component, once the grammatical representations gen-
erated by Decoding and Interpretation are integrated into the discoursal context. 24 Claiming

22
Without prejudice to the fact that individual speakers have their own, personal understanding of
those conceptual and psychological constructs and of the associated linguistic items.
23
This seems to be also suggested by O’Neill (fc) as he postulates a direct “connection between
concepts and primitives”.
There is also another sense in which the Conceptual Component may be said to feed Interpretation, and
that is by developing certain expectations about the speaker’s communicative intention, which may
happen to influence Interpretation in many ways.
24
Partially drawing on Cornish (2009), in Giomi (fc) the discoursal context is divided into Discourse and
Text: the Discourse hosts the semantic and interpersonal representations developed by Interpretation,
while the formal (morphosyntactic and phonological) structures developed by Decoding are incorpo-
rated into the Text.

35
 Conceptual Component

Grammatical Component
Contextual Component

Interpretation

Decoding

Transmission

Input Component

Figure 4: An addressee-oriented FDG model.

the contrary would mean disregarding the role of the Contextual Component “as a companion
to the Grammatical Component, collaborating with it to achieve contextually appropriate out-
puts” (Hengeveld and Mackenzie, fc): it is these “contextually appropriate outputs” (and not
the underlying representations of the parsed utterance themselves) which actually update the
state of information of the addressee, allowing him to reconstruct the original communicative
intention of the speaker. In other words, if we accept that linguistic expressions only mean
what they mean in context, it seems logical to conclude that the semantic and interpersonal
representations developed by the addressee’s Grammatical Component are only translated
into full-fledged conceptual representations by entering (and being appropriately integrated
within) the relevant context. 25
Note finally that Decoding, contrary to Interpretation, does not receive a separate input
from the Contextual Component: the reasons for this will not be illustrated in detail here, as

25
As for the morphosyntactic and phonological structures in the Text, it is possible that these only actu-
ally update the addressee’s state of information in case they trigger some metalinguistic consideration.

36
this is not strictly necessary for the purposes of this section. Suffice it to say here that any con-
tribution the Contextual Component may provide to the development of grammatical repre-
sentations in language comprehension necessarily consists of some kind of information, i.e., it
always concerns meaningful elements; the Morphosyntactic and the Phonological Levels, con-
versely, do not deal in any sense with the meaning of the structures they process, which is
solely a matter for Interpretation. Therefore, to correctly parse the input-utterance, Decoding
only needs to have at its disposal all of the Phonological and Morphosyntactic primitives con-
tained in that utterance.
Let us now see how this addressee-oriented model can be integrated with its speaker-
oriented counterpart. In the passage reported in the beginning of this section, Hengeveld and
Mackenzie state that “[i]n order to create a contextual specification, the Addressee has to
reconstruct all the levels of representation within the grammar”. This view of the role of the
addressee in the creation of a common ground is perfectly in line with the approach defended
here: if the Contextual Component is seen as a shared mental construct which is jointly (and
cooperatively) created by the two dialogists as the exchange unfolds, it follows that the dis-
course fragment contributed by every new utterance can only access the Contextual Compo-
nent once the utterance has been processed by both dialogists. Put simply, this is tantamount
to saying that no update is brought about in the common ground if the speaker’s utterance is
not perceived and understood by the addressee. Obvious as it may seem, this consideration
has important consequences for the construction of a model of dialogue, as it entails that,
strictly speaking, no contextual specification is created as Formulation and Encoding develop
the respective structures: this can only happen once those structures are reconstructed by
Decoding and Interpretation within the addressee’s grammar. A dynamic model of FDG in
which language processing by both speech participants is represented should thus look as in
Figure 5 below.
Note that, similarly to Figure 3, inferable/inferred information is represented within the
Contextual Component in a dashed box. Again, this is meant to account for those cases in
which some information that is neither directly perceived, nor has been linguistically expressed
in the preceding discourse is incorporated in the common ground in the course of the ex-
change (as when a new referent is referred to by the speaker as if it were contextually given
and salient). This is indeed necessary if we want to keep our model psychologically plausible
when looked at from the point of view of the speaker. For instance, by treating as contextually
salient a piece of information which she assumes to be easily inferable for the addressee, the
speaker is indicating that that piece of information is already present in what she considers to
be the shared background relevant to the conversation at the moment she is speaking; in this
sense, by making reference to that specific piece of information, the speaker is “asking” the
addressee to validate what she assumes to be the status of the Contextual Component at that
very moment (at the same time as the new utterance conveys yet more information to be
added to the discoursal context). At the same time, I suggest that only the unexpressed infor-
mation which is directly relevant for the production and parsing of an utterance (licensing the
use of a given grammatical or lexical item and providing the addressee with the clues to inter-
pret it) needs to be represented inside the Contextual Component in the grammatical analysis
of that utterance.

37
Figure 5: Integrated model of FDG.

As pointed out above, the proposal to include inferred information in the Contextual Compo-
nent – and to explicitly model the extra-grammatical processes by which that information is
brought into play – implies rethinking the dynamic relation between the components of FDG in
a broader sense than is commonly assumed in the standard model. We have already seen that
this modification of the model can be necessary for understanding grammatical processes such
as the selection and interpretation of deictics and anaphora; in the next section this perspec-
tive will be taken a step further in order to account for inferential pragmatic processes such as
those involved in the early phases of meaning change in grammaticalization. In a sense, pre-
disposing FDG to capture this kind of phenomena seems to be a logical consequence of
Hengeveld and Mackenzie’s (2008: 6) own definition of the theory, according to which FDG is
to be conceived of “as the Grammatical Component of a wider theory of verbal interaction”: it
is only in the context of such a wider (and necessarily more complex) theory that the pragmat-
ic processes relevant to grammaticalization can be properly understood and formalized.
It should be clear, however, that the proposal here is not to simply replace Hengeveld and
Mackenzie’s “narrow” conception of the extra-grammatical components by a broader one,
designed to account for all the possible inferences speech participants may draw on the basis

38
of what is said in the course of the exchange. Most inferences are, by definition, highly subjec-
tive and absolutely unpredictable, to the extent that they “cannot be dealt with in a linguistic
model, but would require its integration into a much wider, probabilistic model of the human
mind” (Hengeveld and Mackenzie, fc). Inferences of this kind, which include what Grice called
particularized conversational implicatures, are far beyond the scope of this dissertation: here,
the investigation will be limited to the inferential processes that play a role in that very specific
phenomenon which is the multifunctionality – and thus the grammaticalization process – of
grammatical markers. Of course, this is only possible if such processes, despite their undenia-
ble complexity, can be coherently and systematically explained by an extended model of FDG:
proving that this is indeed possible is one of the major goals of the synchronic data analysis to
be developed in this dissertation. The analysis will also show that a revised, “broadened” con-
ception of the dynamic implementation of FDG is perfectly compatible with the standard one,
provided that the domains of linguistic analysis to which these two versions of the model
should be applied are kept clearly distinguished: in those cases in which the interaction of
components has to be invoked to motivate obligatory grammatical distinctions (as in the selec-
tion and interpretation of a demonstrative pronoun in (4) above), we must restrict ourselves to
a narrow conception of this interaction; but this is no longer sufficient when we turn to usage-
based pragmatic phenomena that, from a synchronic point of view, do not directly affect the
operations performed by the Grammatical Component.

3.3.3. The interaction of components in an FDG account of grammaticalization

We have seen in 1.1.2 that an important line of research in grammaticalization studies is what
Heine (2003) refers to as “the context model”. In this tradition, the conventionalization of an
inference is seen as the major force behind grammaticalization, motivating meaning change,
which in turn triggers formal change.
According to Heine (2002), the process of conventionalization can be broken down into a
sequence of stages, each of which is characterized by a different relation between the emerg-
ing meaning and the context in which it occurs. In the first critical phase, the bridging context,
the new meaning results from an inference based on the interaction between the source
meaning and some element of the (linguistic and/or situational) context. In the following
phase, that of switch contexts, the new meaning is no longer inferred (it cannot be cancelled),
but the context still plays a fundamental role. Finally, as the new meaning achieves full con-
ventionalization, the contextual constraints observable in the previous phases are much loos-
ened, resulting in what is commonly referred to as “context generalization” (see Heine and
Kuteva 2002: 2). In the next sections, we will see how these separate stages and the different
processes at work in each of them relate to the model proposed in 3.3.2.3. But before ap-
proaching this matter, an important remark must be made regarding Heine’s (2002) use of the
term context.
Despite the centrality of context for his model of grammaticalization, Heine does not de-
vote many words to explaining what exactly he means by this notion. However, it is clear from
the discussion of the examples presented that Heine uses the term in an extremely broad
sense, comprising linguistic aspects of the utterance as well as background contextual and
conceptual information. The features most often invoked in Heine’s analysis are the type of

39
subject and the type of predicate which are typically found in collocation with the grammati-
calizing construction in each phase: in particular, the presence or absence of a human partici-
pant is relevant in two of the three cases studied by Heine, as it is crucial for determining the
opposition between bridging and switch contexts in the grammaticalization of both the Swahili
proximative aspect and the !Xun (a Northern Khoisan language) passive marker (Heine 2002:
89-90).
In addition, for Swahili taka (originally meaning ‘want’), typical bridging contexts involve
verbs for which an interpretation in terms of volition is possible but generally unlikely, such as
’die’, ‘fall down’ or ‘break a body-part’. Similarly, for the !Xun passive marker, which developed
out of a former reflexive particle, bridging contexts are characterized by a small set of transi-
tive verbs involving a human participant which may still be interpreted as Actor and Undergoer
simultaneously (as in a reflexive construction) but is more likely to be understood as Undergo-
er only, because “the contextual frame makes it clear that this participant is unable to control
the event”. Note that such requirements do not only impinge on merely linguistic aspects of
predicates (the quantitative and qualitative restrictions they impose on their argument); they
also imply a considerable amount of contextual reasoning, whereby short-term contextual
information (the “contextual frame”, in Heine’s terms) interacts with inherent characteristics
of the conceptualizations associated to those predicates. It is the result of this interaction
which makes one interpretation “more likely” than the other in bridging contexts.
In another example, illustrating the evolution of German dabei from a temporal into a
concessive connective, bridging contexts are distinguished from switch contexts on the basis of
the temporal relation existing between the two clauses linked by dabei, which Heine (2002:
94) refers to as “the same time-span constraint” (see 3.3.3.3 below). Since this relation is ex-
pressed by the temporal inflection and adverbials in the two clauses, it can be argued that
what is relevant here is an aspect of the co-text, that is, a linguistic factor. Another linguistic
factor, but of a different – namely, syntactic – nature distinguishes the initial situation, in
which dabei can only receive a temporal interpretation, from bridging, switch and convention-
alization contexts, where the concessive meaning is progressively foregrounded and the posi-
tion of dabei in the clause becomes fixed.
In the approach followed here, such indeterminacy about the types of factors relevant in
each stage of the evolution of a construction cannot be admitted. Since our model aims to
explain the multifunctionality of constructions as the result of processes taking place in the
interplay between a Grammatical, a Contextual and a Conceptual Component, a sharp distinc-
tion must necessarily be drawn between the linguistic, contextual and conceptual elements
which play a role in each single case of multifunctionality. Moreover, several subtypes of lin-
guistic and contextual constraints should be distinguished according to the inner structure of
the Grammatical and the Contextual Components respectively. As for the internal functioning
of the Conceptual Component, this is not a matter which can be properly dealt with in a strictly
linguistic study such as the present one. Thus, rather than trying to model the processes at
work inside the Conceptual Component, I will limit myself to indicate which of the information
that is relevant in each case is conceptual in nature.

40
 3.3.3.1 Bridging contexts

Since FDG is only concerned with the formal representation of the grammatical categories
which are overtly realized in a given language, meanings occurring in bridging contexts, which
arise by inference, cannot be characterized as operators in underlying grammatical representa-
tion. Such uses of English will + V as intention, imperative and mitigated directive, for instance,
seem to belong to this evolutionary stage and therefore these meanings will not be character-
ized as FDG operators in the semantic map concerning this particular English construction.
However, this does not mean that such functions should not find their place in our synopsis of
the multifunctionality of future tense markers.
As far as the analysis of single examples is concerned, meanings arising by inference can-
not be represented within the Grammatical Component, where the construction must be ana-
lyzed as the morphosyntactic encoding of the representational operator corresponding to the
“source” meaning. The proposal is that, in an extended FDG model, meanings emerging in
bridging contexts should be conceived of as “the contextually appropriate output” of an infer-
ential process taking place in the dynamic interplay between the Grammatical, the Conceptual
and the Contextual Components. The target meaning should thus be represented inside the
Contextual Component, leaving the grammatical representation of the utterance unmodified.
Put simply, the speaker decides (in the Conceptual Component) to imply something by saying
something else, that is, she leaves the addressee with the tasks of (i) parsing the utterance (in
the Grammatical Component) and (ii) reconstructing the intended interpretation of the marker
by incorporating its conventional meaning with the information already existing in the Contex-
tual Component (and, if necessary, with other linguistically encoded and/or conceptual infor-
mation).
Differently from the conceptual information presupposed by the use of an indexical pro-
noun in (4) above, which must be assumed to access the Contextual Component “before” the
speaker can treat it as given and contextually salient, the meaning implied in a bridging context
constitutes new information. This means that, at the time the speaker utters the sentence, this
information is not present in the Contextual Component, but only in the speaker’s Conceptual
Component. However, it is precisely this implied information, and not the linguistically encod-
ed one (i.e. the source meaning), which represents the actual contribution of the utterance to
the common ground. It is for this reason that the target meaning should be recorded in the
Contextual Component.
The process by means of which the target meaning is achieved involves at least the
Grammatical and the Contextual Components. As noted in 3.3.2.1, information from the
Grammatical Component is passed to the Contextual Component and incorporated into the
discoursal context: what distinguishes the mechanism at work in bridging contexts from more
explicit, “straightforward” communicative strategies is that, with the latter, the process ends
with the incorporation of grammatically encoded information into the discourse; in bridging
contexts, by contrast, incorporation into the discourse of the grammatical, “literal” meaning of
the relevant construction is accompanied by context-induced reinterpretation (that is, by an
inference). This further process does not affect the grammatical representation, but should

41
itself be represented inside the Contextual Component, where the grammatical meaning of
the construction comes to interact with the pre-existing contextual information. 26
Consider for instance the following sentence, where the future marker will + V is used in
an indirect directive speech act:

(5) You will eat all of your soup.

In (5), an imperative meaning emerges as a function of the source meaning of future tense plus
the situational context, requiring a specific contextual condition: the communicative situation
in which the exchange takes place must be one in which the speaker has authority over the
addressee (or, at least, is allowed to act as if this was the case). The imperative interpretation
results from a conversational implicature, as is evident in the fact that it can be easily can-
celled: this is shown in (6), where only the future meaning remains available:

(6) You will eat all of your soup: you won’t be able to resist!

As pointed out above, the inference in (5) is only possible in a situation in which the speaker is
entitled to give orders to the addressee. This is shown by the fact that, if the sentence is ut-
tered in a different context (e.g. at a formal business lunch), an imperative interpretation is
necessarily ruled out. This means that, in conceptualizing an indirect speech act, the speaker
relies on the addressee’s competent use of the information available in the common ground,
namely, the existence of an informal and/or asymmetric power relationship between the par-
ticipants. In terms of our model, the decision to express an order through an indirect speech
act is taken in the Conceptual Component, and is only possible because an appropriate specifi-
cation of the relevant socio-cultural variable (the mutual social relationship between the dialo-
gists) is present in the Contextual Component. The Grammatical Component then generates a
declarative Discourse Act containing a future tense operator (at the Episode layer of the Rep-
resentational Level) and triggers the articulator, which produces the utterance. Note that an-
other necessary condition for the Discourse Act to be interpreted as an indirect directive
speech act is that the participant to whom the order to perform the action is directed should
coincide with (or at least include) the addressee, that is, that the corresponding Subact of Ref-
erence is specified as [+A]. Schematically, the process can be represented as in Figure 6 below.
The addressee perceives and processes the utterance, reconstructing the four grammati-
cal levels as formulated and encoded by the speaker (also relying on contextual information
where relevant, as in the interpretation of the indexicals you and your and of the absolute
tense operator will + V).27 As soon as a full grammatical representation of each linguistic unit in

26
Again, it should be clear that this is just the simplest possibility, as conceptual information and certain
linguistic aspects of the utterance can also come into play in this phase of the process.
27
As noted by Hengeveld and Mackenzie (2008, fc), a representation of the speech participants must be
present in the situational context in order to allow co-indexation with speaker-related and addressee-
related linguistic elements. Similarly, the time of speech must be recorded in the Contextual Component
to allow absolute location in time (see 2.1.1). These elements are not included in Figures 3, 6 and 7-8
below, where only those aspects of the interaction between components which are relevant for the
processes under analysis are represented.

42
 Conceptual Component
Produce an indirect directive speech act

Formulation Situational information

Grammatical Component

Contextual Component
(a) Informal relationship
and/or
IL: (AI:[(F: DECL (F))…(CI:[…(RI:[-S,+A]) (b) S has authority over A
...] (CI))] (AI))

RL: (pi: (fut epi) … (pi))

Encoding

Articulation
Figure 5: xxxxxx
Output Component

Figure 6: The interaction of components in the production of You will eat all of your soup.

the utterance is developed, this representation is incorporated as such into the Contextual
Component: it is here that context-induced reinterpretation of the future marker takes place.
The grammatical and contextual elements which induce the inferential reinterpretation of the
future tense operator are of course the same as those the speaker relied on in conceptualizing
an indirect speech act, i.e. the [+A] feature in the head of (R) and the mutual social relationship
between the dialogists. This interpretive process can be represented as follows.

43
 Conceptual Component

Discoursal information
IL: (AI:[(F: DECL (F))…(CI:[…(RI:
[-S,+A]) ...] (CI))] (AI))

Grammatical Component
IL: (AI:(ILLI: DECL (ILLI)): … (AI))
Contextual Component

RL: (pi: (fut ep ei) … (pi))

RL: (pi: (fut epi) … (pi))

Inferred information

IL: (AI:(ILLI: IMP (ILLI)): … (AI)) Interpretation

Situational information:
(a) Informal relationship and/or
Decoding
(b) S has authority over A

Transmission

Input Component

Figure 7: The interaction of components in the interpretation of You will eat all of your soup.

Differently from cases of deixis or anaphora such as (4) above, here there is probably no rea-
son to assume that the inferred information (i.e. the target meaning) is represented in the
hearer’s Conceptual Component, 28 because this information does not directly correspond to
any unit of the Interpretation levels. Rather, in bridging contexts, grammatically encoded in-
formation interacts with the relevant contextual information in the process of context-induced
reinterpretation of the construction, which is entirely performed inside the Contextual Com-

28
This would be the case if one allowed for a very broad conception of the Conceptual Component, in
which the latter always mediates between the wider inferential system, on the one hand, and the
Grammatical and Contextual Components, on the other (cf. Connolly 2007, fc). However, this would
imply that the Conceptual Component is not only non-grammatical, but also partly non-linguistic in na-
ture, being itself a part of the general inferential model. This topic will not be investigated here, since, as
noted in 3.3.2.2, it is far beyond the scope of this dissertation (and of FDG in general) to describe the
inferential processing of concepts before these have entered the linguistic system.

44
ponent. Also note that the target meaning, which is the outcome of this inferential process, is
represented in the Contextual Component with the same formalism as is used for underlying
grammatical representations. As with situational information and inferable entities(see
3.3.2.1-3.3.2.2), it should be clear that this is but a conventional notation, which is only adopt-
ed for the sake of simplicity, since the target meaning, being achieved by inference, is not
grammatical in nature.
At this point, one may wonder what distinguishes the process described above from other
types of inference, which, similarly, do not affect the Grammatical Component in any sense
and which also crucially need to be supported by the information available in the common
ground. This takes us to the question of the criteria to be followed in deciding whether a cer-
tain meaning is associated to a bridging context stage in a given language.
First of all, we must be sure that a certain meaning actually results from an inference and
is not a part of the conventional semantics of the construction. Unfortunately, when one is
confronted with real data from languages one does not speak, there is no possibility of apply-
ing tests consisting in the manipulation of utterances, such as the cancellation of an implica-
ture. However, the use of large parallel corpora does offer means to distinguish grammatical
meanings of constructions from context-specific, inferential ones. Recall that, according to
(Heine 2002: 89), in bridging contexts the source meaning “cannot be entirely ruled out”, even
though the target meaning is foregrounded as a more contextually relevant interpretation; on
the other hand, fully conventionalized meanings typically occur in a variety of contexts. Thus, if
a given meaning of a construction (let us call this A) occurs exclusively in contexts in which
another meaning (B) also seems to provide an admissible – although, possibly, less plausible –
interpretation, this will count as an indication that A derives from B by means of a context-
based inference; this indication becomes strong evidence if, differently from A, the supposed
source meaning B can be shown to occur in other contexts too, where it may give rise to other
inferences, different from that which foregrounds A in the respective context(s).
Once it has been established that a given meaning does indeed arise by inference, this in-
ference will only be considered to define (and to belong to) a bridging context if it can be
shown to be at least minimally systematic: it must occur (i) with reasonable frequency and (ii)
in a clearly identifiable (cluster of) context(s), which is certainly not the case with all pragmatic
inferences. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, (iii) context-induced reinterpretation
must only affect the meaning of the relevant construction, and not that of the whole utterance
as happens with particularized conversational implicatures (cf. the classical example “It’s cold
in here” → “Please close the window”). It is precisely for this reason that a synchronic inferen-
tial process can trigger diachronic change in the meaning of one specific construction.
Another important difference between the process taking place in bridging contexts and
less generalized kinds of implicature is that, with the former, a contradiction arises if the target
meaning is explicitly denied – unless some of the relevant contextual (etc.) information is al-
tered – which notoriously does not happen with particularized implicatures. Compare (7) and
(8):

(7) *You will eat all of your soup, but don’t do it.

(8) It’s cold in here, but please don’t close the window (I enjoy the cold). [Comrie 1985:
23-24]

45
As far as our model is concerned, it can be argued that (7) is unacceptable (at least in the in-
tended interpretation) because the inferred meaning “IMPERATIVE” is incorporated within the
Contextual Component, so that its explicit denial in the subsequent Discourse Act creates a
confusing clash between the information in the Grammatical Component and that in the Con-
textual Component. By contrast, no such problem arises in (8), so there is no reason to assume
that the implicatum of “It’s cold in here” (“Please close the window”) is recorded in the Con-
textual Component as conceived here. The interpretation of such highly context-specific uses
of language is not a matter for a model like FDG (not even in a “broadened” version), and,
what is most important here, is certainly not relevant for studying the multifunctionality and
grammaticalization of grammatical markers. The possibility of denying the target meaning
explicitly, however, cannot be systematically used as a test for identifying bridging contexts in
this dissertation, due to the infeasibility of assessing the acceptability of invented sentences in
languages the author does not speak.
On the basis of the data analyzed so far, it seems that the inferences leading to the target
meaning in bridging contexts can be generally characterized as conversational implicatures.
These implicatures appear to be quite generalized, to the extent that, as noted above, the
target meaning can be cancelled, but not explicitly denied if all the relevant contextual (etc.)
variables are maintained. Nonetheless, precisely because they require a quite specific kind of
context, implicatures occurring in bridging contexts differ from typical examples of generalized
implicature (e.g. “John met a woman” → “The woman John met is not John’s wife”), which are
relatively context-independent. Moreover, the possibility that other types of inference (e.g.
explicatures, entailments, metaphors) are found in bridging contexts cannot be excluded a
priori. This, however, is not problematic for the approach defended here, since, in principle,
any kind of inference can undergo conventionalization as an effect of increased frequency.

3.3.3.2 Switch contexts

Meanings appearing in switch contexts have clearly undergone a certain degree of conven-
tionalization, to the extent that, in the relevant context(s), the construction cannot be said to
convey the source meaning in any sense. On the other hand, the new meaning cannot be con-
sidered “fully” grammatical, precisely because it can only occur in one specific (cluster of) con-
text(s). So, although no implicature is involved in the expression of the target meaning, contex-
tual information still plays a decisive role in the process (again, the term “contextual” is to be
intended in the broadest sense, also including conceptual and co-textual factors). Therefore, it
is again in the interaction of components that these particular uses of grammatical markers
must be accounted for, and this must be done in such a way that the difference with respect to
meanings arising in bridging contexts is adequately reflected.
This difference is indeed a considerable one. Secondary 29 uses of grammatical markers
occurring in bridging contexts never exclude but actually presuppose an underlying interpreta-
tion in terms of the source meaning and are achieved in the Contextual Component as the
representations developed by the grammar are incorporated into it. In this sense, from a syn-
29
This term is used by both Comrie (1985) and Dahl (1985) to distinguish context-specific uses of con-
structions from their grammatical or “basic” (Comrie) meanings.

46
chronic point of view, we could characterize this kind of meaning as “post-grammatical”. By
contrast, meanings occurring in switch contexts represent the only possible interpretation of
the marker in that specific context, 30 while the source meaning is blocked precisely because it
is incompatible with some aspect of that context. Therefore, the function of the marker can by
no means be characterized in terms of the older meaning in underlying grammatical represen-
tation. In other words, one cannot claim that the marker grammatically expresses the source
meaning, which is then reinterpreted by pragmatic enrichment as the underlying representa-
tion accesses the common ground: in switch contexts, the target meaning is expressed by the
marker in conjunction with the relevant contextual information, that is, it is an alternative
grammatical meaning of the construction, but one that is only available under specific condi-
tions. This meaning must therefore correspond to a separate operator in the underlying repre-
sentation inside the Grammatical Component. At the same time, the contribution of contextu-
al information in licensing the use of the construction with that particular meaning must also
be accounted for.
We have seen that, in bridging contexts like (5) above, the presence of certain information
in the Contextual Component determines the pre-linguistic decision to use a marker whose
grammatical meaning, in that context, yields an inference suggesting another, more contextu-
ally relevant interpretation. In switch contexts there is no such implicature at work: the speak-
er is not saying something by uttering something else – that “something else”, the source
meaning, is just not available in the given context – but is using the construction as a marker of
another grammatical category than the one corresponding to the source meaning. This is thus
not a pre-linguistic choice but a grammatical one: the factors that determine the use and
meaning of the construction (be these factors linguistic, contextual or conceptual in nature)
are not computed in the Conceptual Component, but directly affect the grammatical operation
of Formulation. This of course does not mean that the Conceptual Component plays no role at
all in the process, since the pre-linguistic intention to express a given meaning (either literally
or indirectly) is always developed in the Conceptual Component: 31 but once this decision has
been made, the way that meaning is expressed is a matter for the Grammatical Component.
The point here is precisely that, under precise contextual conditions, a construction that was
not available for expressing a certain meaning in previous stages of the language has now be-
come an available grammatical option.
Let us see by way of example how the expressive and interpretive processes at work in
switch contexts can be explained in our model. To facilitate comparison with the analysis pro-
posed for bridging contexts in 3.3.3.1, I will present a case of a switch context which, like the
bridging context in (5), only requires computation of one Contextual Component variable. A
case in point is the reportative use of the Portuguese future tense marker, exemplified in (9):

(9) Ensino do Português estará ameaçado no Canadá.

30
This, at least, is predicted by Heine’s (2002) definition of switch context. The possibility of there being
more than one interpretation available in switch contexts will be verified in the examination of syn-
chronic data, but what is important here is that, in any case, the source meaning is ruled out in such
contexts.
31
Moreover, part of the information concurring to the foregrounding of the new meaning and the block-
ing of the older one may be conceptual in nature.

47
 “Portuguese teaching reportedly endangered in Canada.” (Diário de Notícias 25/02/1999,
cited in Squartini 2004: 83)

Both cross-linguistic and intra-linguistic evidence strongly suggest that this use of the Portu-
guese future morpheme does not directly derive from its use as a tense marker, but rather
from its proposition-oriented epistemic meaning (which, in turn, derives from the future tense
use). 32 However, estará in (9) cannot be interpreted as an epistemic marker in the relevant
context – a newspaper article title. By contrast, in a different context an evidential interpreta-
tion of the morpheme would only be possible if an explicit reportative modifier were inserted,
or if the preceding discourse made it clear that the speaker is reporting someone else’s state-
ment. But there is no reportative modifier in (9), and the title of an article is necessarily the
opening Move of the communicative event, so no previous discourse is available: what licenses
the reportative use of the marker – and provides the addressee with the clues to interpret this
correctly – is therefore the communicative situation itself, i.e. the genre of journalistic report.
While Connolly (2007) classifies genre as a variable of the “inter-text”, or “broad dis-
coursal context”, Hengeveld and Mackenzie (fc) exclude “general social circumstances such as
genre” from their analysis of the Contextual Component, because “they cannot be shown to
have systematic influence upon the workings of the grammar.” However, as far as the expres-
sion of evidentiality in Portuguese is concerned, the impact of this factor on the grammar does
appear to have a systematic and mandatory character, namely in that the future morpheme
represents the only available grammatical strategy for expressing a neutral report in contexts
such as (9). 33 At the same time, in any other type of exchange the reportative function of the
marker obligatorily has to be supported by explicit lexical means (or by the preceding dis-
course). Similarly, from the addressee’s perspective, the very fact that the utterance occurs as
a title in a newspaper forces a reportative interpretation of the marker, blocking the epistemic
one. Importantly, this entails that the construction can only be specified in underlying repre-
sentation by inserting a reportative operator, for the addressee as well as for the speaker. In
sum, in switch contexts such as (9), the impact of the contextual information relative to genre
on the operations performed by the grammar seems to be a systematic, rule-governed one of
the type described by Hengeveld and Mackenzie (fc): neither Formulation nor Interpretation
can develop complete grammatical representations without computing that particular contex-
tual information. When this specific aspect of Portuguese verbal inflection is considered,
therefore, information about genre must be ascribed to what I have called a narrow concep-
tion of the dynamic interaction between the components of FDG (see 3.3.2.3). 34

32
Cross-linguistically, it is fairly common for epistemic and evidential functions to be realized by the
same sets of forms. Furthermore, as regards the Portuguese future marker, the reportative use exhibits
a strong association with stative States-of-Affairs, a restriction which it shares with the epistemic use,
but not with the future tense use (see (14)-(15) below).
33
In Portuguese, reportative evidentiality can also be expressed by the conditional mood, but this form,
in this context, would imply a negative bias toward the truth of the propositional content.
34
Theoretically, an alternative explanation could be to assume that journalistic reports, such as dialects
and sociolects, make use of a specific grammar, distinct from that of standard Portuguese (see
Hengeveld and Mackenzie, fc). But at least for Portuguese, journalistic style/genre can hardly be regard-
ed as a separate variety of the language, since no significant structural difference is found at any level of
grammatical analysis, when compared to standard formal Portuguese.

48
 This analysis can be graphically represented as in Figure 8 below. As in Figures 3, 6 and 7,
only the elements and phases of the process that are relevant for the use and interpretation of
the morpheme under analysis are explicitly represented. Likewise, only the interpersonal and
representational operators 35 corresponding to that morpheme are highlighted within the
Grammatical Component (in red).

Conceptual Conceptual
Component Component

IL: (AI: … (rep CI) … (AI))

Grammatical Component
Grammatical Component

Formulation
Situational information
RL: (pi: (–past epi) … (pi))
Communicative situation:
IL: (AI: … (rep CI) … (AI))
journalistic report

Interpretation
RL: (pi: (–past epi) … (pi))

Contextual
Encoding Component Decoding

Articulation Transmission

Output Component Input Component

Figure 8: The interaction of components in the production and interpretation of Ensino do Português
estará ameaçado no Canadá.

To conclude, a given meaning of a construction will only be considered to belong to a switch

context phase if both of the following criteria are met: (i) the target meaning occurs in con-
35
Reportative evidentiality applies at the Communicated Content layer of the Interpersonal Level. As for
the temporal specification “–past” (non-past), this is meant to reflect the fact that the present/future
distinction is neutralized in the reportative use of the Portuguese future morpheme: that is to say, the
“simple future” can be used for either present or future reported events, whereas past reported events
require the use of either the conditional mood or the future perfect construction, depending on their
aspectual profile.

49
texts in which the source meaning is not a possible interpretation; 36 (ii) all the contexts in
which this happens are characterized by the presence of a precise (configuration of) variable(s)
– which is what makes the target meaning available. 37 Importantly, however, the fact that a
certain meaning has reached switch contexts does not at all exclude the possibility that, at the
same time, that meaning continues to occur as an inference in bridging contexts. On the con-
trary, since meaning change is a constant and fairly gradual process in the evolution of gram-
mar, there is a general expectation that any meaning will appear in more than one context-
stage in a single synchronic cut.

3.3.3.3 Grammatical meaning

Grammatical meaning is the result of full conventionalization. This leads to the use of the con-
struction in new linguistic and situational contexts, which do not necessarily satisfy the con-
straints existing in switch contexts. Thus, for instance, the reportative use of the Portuguese
synthetic future could be said to be fully grammaticalized if the marker occurred with that
meaning in any type of discourse and social/institutional setting without needing to be sup-
ported by the preceding discourse or by an explicit lexical expression.
A clear example of conventionalization can be seen in the evolution of the English con-
struction be going to + V, probably one of the best-studied cases of grammaticalization. Most
scholars agree that the future meaning of the construction developed out of a stage in which it
served to express intention. Although here the present-day English be going to + V will not be
analyzed as a future tense, but rather as a prospective aspect marker (see Hengeveld and
Mackenzie 2008), this hypothesis can unproblematically be maintained in our analysis. Accord-
ing to the literature, once the locative meaning of the original lexical construction was defini-
tively lost, the construction turned into a modal marker expressing intention, continuing to be
used exclusively with human subjects (see Hopper and Traugott 1993, Bybee et al. 1994, Bybee
2003, Traugott 2010, inter alios). However, in certain contexts, the expression of intention
yields an inference by which a non-modal meaning of future tense (or prospective aspect) may
offer a more plausible interpretation: this inference came to be more and more often associ-
ated with the construction, until this started to be used with the new meaning in contexts in
which an intention interpretation was no longer available, as with most passive infinitives and
non-controlled events, and finally with inanimate subjects. Such contexts are well attested in
the literature and may well have constituted the switch context in which the new function
developed (be it future tense or prospective aspect).
Finally, full conventionalization is reached when the construction begins to be used with
the new meaning in any kind of context. This implies that the new meaning can now appear in

36
In this respect, it can prove very useful to consult parallel translations of the chunk of text under anal-
ysis into several languages. In doubtful cases, in fact, the availability of the source meaning in a given
context can be proved by the existence of translations in which a construction which unequivocally ex-
presses that meaning is used. Such a comparison may thus help to distinguish bridging contexts – where
the source meaning always provides a theoretically available interpretation – from switch contexts – in
which this is not the case.
37
In our example, an indication that the information conveyed by the utterance is being reported must
be present either in the utterance itself or in the Contextual Component (and, in the latter case, either
in the preceding discourse or in the situational context, where variables such as genre are specified).

50
contexts in which, in the previous stages, an interpretation in terms of the older meaning
would have been prominent. Consider for instance the following utterance:

(10) The children are going to eat their soup.

Although an interpretation in terms of the agent’s intentions is often available in sentences

like (10), and may even be foregrounded under certain circumstances, in present-day English
this meaning can at best be expressed through an implicature and no longer as the grammati-
cal meaning of the marker. This is shown in (11), where the intention meaning is ruled out, as a
consequence of the cancellation of that implicature:

(11) The children are going to eat their soup because they are forced to.

By contrast, it does not seem possible to exclude a prospective interpretation of be going to +

V by manipulating the sentence or the context in which it occurs, which confirms that this use
of the construction is nowadays fully grammatical in English.
Heine (2002: 84-85) presents three criteria for determining that a new meaning has be-
come fully conventional:

a. [the target meaning] can be used in new contexts, other than the ones character-
izing bridging and switch contexts.
b. While in switch contexts, the target meaning is incompatible with the source
meaning, conventionalization contexts can violate or contradict the source seman-
tics.
c. This means that the source and the target meanings can co-occur side-by-side in
the same clause.

For practical reasons, the latter two criteria will not be followed here. First, the distinction
between “being incompatible with the source meaning” and “violating or contradicting the
source semantics” appears to be too subtle to be systematically applied in distinguishing
switch contexts and conventionalization contexts. For instance, in discussing the grammaticali-
zation of German dabei from temporal to concessive connective, Heine proposes the following
two sentences as examples of switch context and conventionalization context, respectively:

(12) a. Karl geht schlafen; dabei geht er um diese Zeit nie schlafen.
Karl go.3S.PRES sleep.INF CONC go.3S.PRES he PREP this.ACC.F.S time never sleep.INF
“Karl goes to bed; although he never goes to bed at this time.”

b. Karl geht schlafen; dabei war er eben noch überhaupt nicht müde.
Karl go.3S.PRES sleep.INF CONC be.3S.PAST he just still at-all NEG tired
“Karl is going to bed, although a moment ago he wasn’t tired at all.”

Heine argues that contexts such as (12a) are incompatible with the “same-time-span con-
straint” – which characterizes the initial stage as well as bridging contexts – but do not violate

51
it, since “[e]ven if S2 denotes a time-stable situation, S1 and S2 are not in temporal contrast”. 38
Conversely, in (12b) “the dabei-clause contradicts the same-time constraint, in that S1 and S2
refer to different time periods”. Although the difference between the two contexts is fairly
evident in logical terms, the reason why a temporal interpretation of dabei does not make
sense seems to be exactly the same in both (12a) and (12b), viz., that in both cases the second
predication has its own temporal specification (nie um diese Zeit, eben noch), which, by itself,
is sufficient to rule out a temporal connective meaning ‘at the same time’. The fact that in both
sentences the temporal specifications of the second State-of-Affairs do not coincide with that
of the first certainly contributes to making a temporal interpretation of dabei nonsensical, but
is not essential for determining its reinterpretation in concessive terms. This can be easily seen
in English too: in (13), for instance, a temporal interpretation of at the same time is blocked
even though the adverbial now in the second clause refers to exactly the same time interval at
which the first State-of-Affairs takes place:

(13) Karl is going to bed; at the same time, he is not tired at all now.

In (13), the context satisfies the same-time-span requirement, but the temporal source mean-
ing is nonetheless unavailable: this suggests that an additional constraint on the temporal
reading of dabei/at the same time is that no lexical expression of time location should be pre-
sent in the second clause, since this inevitably makes a temporal interpretation of the connec-
tive either contradictory, as in (12a-b), or utterly redundant, as in (13). At least in this case,
thus, the notions of “being incompatible with the source meaning” and “contradicting or vio-
lating the source semantics” boil down to one and the same general constraint. 39
As for Heine’s third criterion – the possibility of the older and the newer meanings ap-
pearing side by side in the same clause – this may theoretically constitute a useful test, but
there is no real reason to expect this situation to occur with any frequency in our corpus data.
The main criterion to be followed in identifying fully conventionalized meanings will be
the degree of context generalization exhibited by the different uses of a construction: if a giv-
en meaning appears in only one clearly identifiable (cluster of) context(s) in which the source
meaning is not available, then it will be considered to belong to a switch context stage; con-
versely, if a meaning occurs in more than one (cluster of) linguistic and situational context(s) in
which the presumed source meaning does not provide a sensible interpretation, this will be
regarded as evidence that the meaning in question has reached a fully grammatical stage. In
principle, the diversity of the context clusters in which a grammaticalized meaning occurs in a
given language can also be used to assess how recent full conventionalization of that meaning
may be. If the meaning in question mainly occurs in a homogeneous cluster of contexts in
which the source meaning is not available (the switch context) and only sporadically in con-
texts which cannot be subsumed under that same cluster, but which are also incompatible
with the source meaning, this may serve as an indication that full conventionalization of that
meaning is a (relatively) recent phenomenon; if, conversely, a meaning occurs with some fre-
quency in a variety of clearly different contexts without the possibility of being overridden by

38
Where S1 and S2 stand for the first and the second sentence, respectively.
39
Also note that, in Heine’s approach, “conventionalization contexts can violate or contradict the source
semantics” (my emphasis): this implies that not all conventionalization contexts actually do so, which
makes the criterion extremely difficult to apply in real data analysis.

52
an interpretation in terms of the older meaning, then the newer meaning is likely to have been
fully conventional for quite some time. By “conventionalization contexts” I will refer to all the
(clusters of) contexts in which the source meaning is not available, but which do not seem to
have functioned as a switch context in the grammaticalization of the target meaning on the
basis of their frequency.
As regards the FDG representation of grammatical meaning, this, in principle, does not
require explicit modeling of any contextual, co-textual or conceptual variable. This is because
grammatical meanings, which are inherent to the construction, should ideally be available in
any possible linguistic and situational context, except those very specific contexts in which the
presence of a precise (bundle of) variable(s) enforces an interpretation in terms of a new,
emerging meaning (thus defining a switch context). Therefore, when a construction has mean-
ings belonging to a switch context phase, it is these meanings, and not the grammatical one(s)
they derive from, which should be explicitly represented as resulting from the interaction of
several different elements.
However, the situation is often complicated by the existence of more than one fully
grammaticalized meaning for the same construction, which is particularly frequent with future
tense markers. Differently from what happens in switch contexts, alternative grammatical
meanings do not depend on particular conditions, but may in some cases be associated with a
specific linguistic or contextual feature, standing in some type of distribution with respect to
that feature. However, such oppositions – when they exist – may at best be regarded as gen-
eral tendencies rather than real restrictions. Thus, for instance, epistemic or inferential mean-
ings of markers such as the Romance inflectional future or (to a lesser extent) English will + V
most commonly occur when the construction combines with stative States-of-Affairs, while
dynamic States-of-Affairs strongly favor a temporal interpretation of the construction. But
collocation with predicates of one or the other class cannot be said to dictate the interpreta-
tion of the construction in a mandatory way: on the one hand, epistemic and inferential mean-
ings do occur with dynamic predicates bearing progressive or perfect morphology, and even in
the “simple future”, under a generic or habitual interpretation; on the other, the future mean-
ing can be made explicit by lexical means when occurring with stative predicates (if necessary).
Compare (14a-b) and (15a-b), from Portuguese:

(14) a. O Paulo lerá aquele livro que tu já leste.

b. O Paulo estará a ler aquele livro que tu já leste.

(15) a. O Paulo estará em casa.

b. O Paulo estará em casa até às cinco.

With the dynamic State-of-Affairs ler um livro (“read a book”) a temporal interpretation of the
marker is most likely with the simple future in (14a), while an epistemic or inferential meaning
is normally associated with the progressive construction in (14b). In (15), with the stative estar
em casa (“be home”), an epistemic/inferential interpretation is favored when no temporal
modifier is present, but much less likely (although not impossible) when future temporal refer-

53
ence is made explicit. 40 However, these are just the readings that sentences such as (14)-(15)
most immediately receive when they are considered out of context: in the reality of verbal
interaction, the morpheme can actually express either meaning in all four sentences, depend-
ing on the information available in the linguistic and situational contexts of the sentence. And,
in highly ambiguous contexts, it may even be impossible to ascertain which meaning is really
being expressed by the speaker – that is to say, in some cases the possibility must also be
acknowledged that the construction is ambiguous. 41
More frequently, when more than one grammatical meaning is involved, the variables
determining one or another interpretation are totally context-specific, and may comprise a
variety of factors of different kinds. As a consequence, it is an extremely complicated matter to
identify and categorize all of the various kinds of information that can happen to influence the
use and interpretation of the construction. An example is (16), from a Swedish translation of
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (the English original is given below):

(16) Men det här är nånting för tjänste-folk, det är inte

but DEF here COP.PRES something PREP service-personnel that COP.PRES not
sånt som elever ska göra.
stuff REL students FUT/MOD do.INF

“But this is servant stuff, it's not for students to do.”

Swedish ska (a cognate of English shall) has both a future and an obligation grammatical mean-
ing, having retained the latter since its lexical origins up to the present day. Although both
interpretations are theoretically possible in (16a), it is sufficiently clear that the meaning in-
tended by the speaker is the deontic one. The factors foregrounding this interpretation do not
only include elements which, in some cases, may be claimed to affect Formulation and Inter-
pretation in an “automatic” fashion, such as the situational information about the speech par-
ticipants (namely, the fact that the speaker is himself a student) and the information supplied
by the preceding discourse (in the preceding turns, the speaker has been ordered to do some-
thing and has expressed an explicit refusal, which he starts motivating with the first clause of
(16)); all these elements must be computed together with long-term information about the
general setting of the ongoing communicative situation (such as the fact itself that the ex-
change is taking place in a school) and with general encyclopedic knowledge about the type of
event designated in the utterance and the participants involved (here, the fact that students
are generally subject to precise rules and regulations of conduct). And even when all these
conditions are met, a temporal interpretation of the marker could still be foregrounded by
some additional information.
Generally speaking, it would be desirable for a linguistic model to provide systematic rep-
resentations of all the factors which may concur to determine the meaning of the construction
in examples such as (14)-(16), because these factors have an undeniable effect on the opera-

40
Of course, the same temporal information can also be present in the immediately preceding dis-
course.
41
Note that, by corollary, this entails that one cannot always be sure that both the speaker and the
hearer assign the same underlying representation to the marker.

54
tions performed by the grammar. This effect is most evident in comprehension, and especially
at Interpretation, where potential ambiguities are resolved. In principle, the impact of these
disparate factors on the grammar could be represented in FDG in the same way as was pro-
posed for meanings emerging in switch contexts (see 3.3.3.2), i.e. by highlighting the relevant
elements and the processes by which they influence the development of the grammatical
structure corresponding to the construction in question. But this solution brings along a couple
of quite serious problems. From a practical point of view, it is not always easy to identify all the
factors which may concur to disambiguate the function of a construction when this is ambigu-
ous between two fully conventionalized meanings. From a theoretical point of view, even
when this is possible, a unified representation would obfuscate the difference between fully
grammatical meanings and meanings characteristic of switch contexts: that is to say, the con-
text-specific, unpredictable processes by which alternative grammatical meanings are fore-
grounded or discounted on each occasion would be represented in the very same way as the
processes at play in switch contexts, where the linguistic, contextual and/or conceptual factors
involved are always the same, and have mandatory effects on the grammar (so that no ambi-
guity is possible). 42 While in switch contexts Formulation and Interpretation must necessarily
consult the Contextual Component and/or some specific grammatical level in order to gener-
ate their outputs, fully grammaticalized meanings are intrinsically expressed by the construc-
tion, so that it is only when there is the possibility of ambiguity between alternative grammati-
cal meanings that the grammar will need to compute a certain amount of additional infor-
mation. (Note also that this is probably only necessary at Interpretation, since ambiguity is
only a problem, if ever, for the addressee’s grammar.) Therefore, differently from bridging and
switch contexts, no diagrammatic representation of the whole model is needed to explain the
expression and interpretation process at work with fully grammaticalized meanings.

3.3.3.4. Ambiguity

We have seen that fully grammatical meanings can give rise to inferences foregrounding
other meanings when occurring in particular contexts. As shown by (10)-(11), some contexts
may allow an inference foregrounding the older meaning from which the new grammatical
function has developed, which can create some confusion between stage IV (full conventional-
ization) and stage II (bridging contexts). In cases such as (10) above, this is not a problem for
determining the underlying value of the construction, since the source meaning of intention
cannot be argued to be grammatically expressed by going to + V in present-day English (it nev-
er occurs in contexts in which the prospective aspect meaning is not available): therefore, the
only admissible representation of the construction in underlying semantic structure appears to
be one in terms of a prospective operator. But if both the source and the target meaning can
be shown to be at least partly grammaticalized in the same synchronic stage (i.e., if both occur
independently from each other in at least one cluster of contexts), then, in highly ambiguous
contexts there might be no way to decide which exactly is the meaning encoded by the con-
struction. In this case, unless the language is one in which the author can personally propose
such tests as the cancellation of an implicature, the only hint we may obtain as concerns the
42
At least, not between the target meaning and the source meaning, which is unavailable in switch con-
texts.

55
grammatical or inferential nature of the available interpretations comes from the comparison
with the translations of the same chunk of text in other languages. As an example, consider the
following excerpt from a Lithuanian translation of M. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita,
where both a future and a volitive reading seem to be equally plausible. (17b) is the corre-
sponding sentence in the English translation present in the corpus:

(17) Štai kuo tenka mokėti už melą,— kalbėjo jinai,— ir daugiau

here what fall.PRES.3S pay.INF for lie.ACC.S say.PAST.3S she and more
aš ne-bemeluo-siu
1S.NOM NEG.lie.FUT.1S
“This is how one pays for lying, – she said, – and I don't want to lie anymore.”

The Lithuanian inflectional future derives directly from the PIE sigmatic future, whose de-
scendants are also attested in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Irish and Old Church Slavonic and which is
believed to originally have expressed a desiderative meaning (Zinkevičius 1984: 147, Chan-
traine 1984: 246). Both volition and future are available grammatical functions of the mor-
pheme in present-day Lithuanian (cf. Ultan 1978: 103), that is, both can occur independently of
each other depending on the context: the question thus arises as to which of the two mean-
ings is grammatically expressed – and which may emerge by inference – in contexts such as
(17a), where both interpretations seem to be possible.
Parallel data comparison can be very useful in such cases. If the text under analysis is an
original, a clear tendency on the part of translators to render the ambiguous instance with
constructions expressing one of the two meanings available in the original can be taken as a
good indicator of the interpretation intended by the original writer. If the text under analysis is
itself a translation, one should first and foremost look at the original and see what construc-
tion is found in the source language, while the constructions used by translators in other lan-
guages can be used as an additional indicator. Thus, in (17a), one may quite reasonably as-
sume that the underlying meaning encoded by the first person morpheme -siu is a volitive one,
since in the Russian original and in all other translations in the corpus (except the Swedish one
and the Lithuanian one itself) a lexical verb of volition is employed in the same sentence. 43
However, when two fully grammatical meanings are involved in this kind of ambiguity, the final
word on the exact value to be assigned to the construction can hardly be said, to the extent
that, in some cases, the possibility must be admitted that the construction is – and remains –
simply ambiguous (see 3.3.3.3).

43
Similarly, out of 21 translations of (16b) – into 19 different languages besides Swedish – the only two
translators who chose to use a verbal construction in the second sentence make use of an explicit deon-
tic marker (полагаться, “be expected to”, in Russian and належыць, “be supposed to”, in Belarusian),
which confirms the analysis proposed here for (16a). All other translators use a non-verbal predication
with a prepositional phrase, doubling the structure in the first clause (e.g. Portuguese “Mas isso é coisa
para empregados e não para estudantes”), a construction which can also express deontic meaning in
many languages.

56
 3.3.4. Summary

In the preceding sections I have proposed an extended model of FDG designed to account for
the multifunctionality of grammatical constructions, a phenomenon which can only be under-
stood in the context of the interaction of separate but tightly interlinked linguistic modules.
The three different classes of meanings corresponding to Heine’s (2002) stages of grammati-
calization were redefined and explained in accordance with this model: in this perspective,
each stage differs from the other with respect to the role that is played by each component in
the expressive and interpretive process associated with the grammaticalizing construction –
without prejudice to the fact that information from any component can be relevant at any
stage.
We have seen that, in bridging contexts, the target meaning is the result of a pragmatic
enrichment which presupposes a basic interpretation in terms of the source meaning and
should thus not be reflected in underlying grammatical representation. The inference leading
to the target meaning, however, is rather systematic and predictable in nature (it occurs with a
certain frequency and in a homogeneous cluster of contexts, unlike particularized implica-
tures), so it was suggested that this inferential process is automatically performed as soon as
the conventional meaning of the construction is incorporated into the Contextual Component.
This implies that the outcome of the process (the target meaning) should itself be represented
within the Contextual Component. In this sense, bridging contexts are distinct from both
switch and conventionalization contexts, in which the new meaning must necessarily be repre-
sented inside the Grammatical Component: from a diachronic point of view, this means that
the crucial step in the grammaticalization of new meanings is the passage from bridging to
switch contexts, that is, the passage of the target meaning from the Contextual to the Gram-
matical Component.
In the “proto-grammatical” phase represented by switch contexts the construction can
only express the new meaning under precise linguistic, contextual and/or conceptual condi-
tions, i.e. when certain complementary information is supplied by the Grammatical, the Con-
textual and/or the Conceptual Component: the presence of this information makes the target
meaning available at the same time as it excludes an interpretation in terms of the source
meaning. It is in this sense that representations such as Figure 8 must be interpreted.
The following step, whereby the new meaning becomes fully grammatical, consists in the
loss of the constraints existing in switch contexts, which results in context generalization. The
occurrence of the new meaning in contexts which cannot be clearly ascribed to one homoge-
nous cluster can thus be taken as decisive evidence for full conventionalization. As far as FDG is
concerned, the absence of systematic constraints on grammatical meanings entails that, in
principle, there is no need to invoke the interaction between components to justify the under-
lying Representational or Interpersonal structure encoded by the construction, unless there is
the possibility of ambiguity with other grammaticalized meanings..
In the course of the discussion, I have also presented the main methodological criteria for
distinguishing between bridging, switch and conventionalization contexts on the basis of paral-
lel corpus data. Generally speaking, parallel translations are obviously necessary for under-
standing which meanings can be conveyed by the constructions under analysis (either gram-
matically or by inference) in languages the author is not fully conversant with. More specifical-
ly, the possibility of consulting large chunks of translated text is indispensable for a study such

57
as this dissertation, in which the degree of grammaticality of the multiple meanings of a con-
struction is established on the basis of the contexts in which this construction occurs. It is clear
that an approach of this kind requires detailed and systematic descriptions of the contexts in
which each meaning is available. Such descriptions are only possible if every occurrence of the
construction can be observed in its larger linguistic and situational context: this may include a
variable amount of preceding discourse, information about the participants and their mutual
relations, general setting of the exchange and other similar factors which cannot normally be
extrapolated from isolated utterances or small excerpts. Furthermore, in the qualitative analy-
sis of single occurrences, comparison with parallel translations of the same text into several
languages can prove very helpful for identifying the context-stage to which the occurrence
under consideration belongs. This kind of comparison is also an extremely useful tool for the
analysis of ambiguous contexts, especially when multiple grammatical meanings are involved.
From a quantitative point of view, the comparison of a number of parallel translations of the
same texts will allow us to assess the relative frequency of the various functions of future
markers (both intra- and inter-linguistically), which is itself an important indicator of grammat-
icalization.
Let us now see how the proposed model can be applied in the analysis of specific cases of
grammaticalization and multifunctionality. I will start by presenting an overview of the dia-
chronic evolution of future markers in the languages of the sample as it is explained in the
relevant literature (Chapter 4). Due to limits of space, the general picture will have to be out-
lined in a very synthetic – and thus much simplified – way, while the grammaticalization of one
specific constructions (English shall + V) will be analyzed in more detail in order to exemplify
the working of the diachronic model outlined in 3.1-3-2. In Chapter 5, I will focus on the Greek
and Swedish futures θα + non-past and ska + infinitive and discuss a number of examples from
the synchronic corpus, illustrating how each single occurrence of these two constructions (and,
in principle, of any grammatical marker) can be characterized as belonging to one of the four
context-stages individuated by Heine (2002) and explained in terms of the extended FDG mod-
el presented in this chapter.

4. The grammaticalization of Indo-European future markers

As said above, one major purpose of this chapter will be to sketch out (very briefly) the dia-
chronic evolution of future markers in the languages of the sample, from their (lexical) origins
up to the present. In 4.1, the semantic evolution of each (type of) construction will be summa-
rized in a grammaticalization path in which, at every stage, the construction is assigned an
adequate FDG representation at the Representational Level (insofar as this is allowed by the
diachronic evidence available for each construction); the main formal changes the various con-
structions underwent will also be characterized in FDG terms and briefly commented upon. 44
These semantic and formal clines will serve as a first test for Hengeveld’s (1989, 2011) and

44
Only the constructions for which enough diachronic data is available will be mentioned here, while in
the final dissertation a separate section will be devoted to the evolution of each construction consid-
ered. Of necessity, the size of these sections will vary considerably depending on the amount of data
and literature available for each construction.

58
Keizer’s (2007) hypotheses about the unidirectionality of grammaticalization at the Formula-
tion and Encoding levels, respectively (see 2.2.1 and 3.1 above).
In 4.2, the paths of semantic change hypothesized for the various constructions will be
merged to obtain a first, tentative semantic map of future tense. This will have to respond to
the requirement on semantic maps that diachronically related meanings should be represent-
ed adjacent to each other on the map (while the synchronic requirement regarding the adja-
cency of co-existing meanings of the same marker will be verified in the construction-specific
maps in the next chapter). At the same time, the map (as well as the other maps to be pro-
posed in this work) crucially differs from traditional semantic maps in that, while the latter aim
to provide a “neutral” representation of an entire semantic area (Narrog and van der Auwera
2011), here future tense is deliberately assumed as the focus (or “perspective”) of the maps
themselves: this means that only the semantic clusters which are encountered “on their way”
to future tense marking (and beyond) will be explicitly represented, while no claim is made
about the possibility that the constructions under analysis may have also evolved in directions,
along paths that may include functions not represented in the map.
Subsequently, I will discuss in a more particularized way the grammatical evolution of one
specific future marker, English shall + V. This analysis will serve both as a “case study”, to illus-
trate the working of the model, and as a further verification of Hengeveld’s “scope-increase”
hypothesis, where this will be confronted with more fine-tuned data analysis. Finally, in 4.3 the
results of this analysis will be incorporated into the semantic map to be proposed in 4.2, and
the functions which can be expressed by future markers in the contemporary languages of the
sample will also be added to the general picture. This new, expanded map will provide a series
of predictions and work hypotheses for the synchronic analysis to be carried out in Chapter 5.

4.1. Overview

The vast majority of the future markers considered in this study derive from a construction
involving a former lexical verb, the only exceptions among the languages in the sample being
the Lithuanian sigmatic future, deriving from a PIE desiderative morpheme (see 3.3.3.4 above)
and the Slavic perfective future, which is morphologically the present tense of perfective verbs
and is present as a full-fledged future tense in Polish and Russian. Following Dahl (2000), the
remaining types of construction are presented below according to the meaning of the lexical
verb which functioned as the head of the source-construction, before evolving into an auxiliary
(and later, in some languages, into a particle or inflectional affix). 45 For inflectional markers
and inflected auxiliaries, the first person singular indicative form is given.

45
Here, due to limits of space, I will only consider constructions which appear to be (or have been) high-
ly grammaticalized as future markers, which means that the so-called “futurate” uses of present and
progressive markers will not be taken into account. The future markers from the same sources which
appear in other Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages are not mentioned in this brief overview.

59
 (i) ‘have’-futures
Romance: Portuguese, Italian (AFFIX -rei/-rò < Latin INFINITIVE + habeo), Roma-
nian (AUX am + finite clause; possibly also PARTICLE o + SUBJUNCTIVE); 46
Slavic: Bulgarian (negative future: PART няма + finite clause); 47 auxiliary con-
structions historically attested in Old Church Slavonic (OCS) (AUX jĭmamĭ + INF)
and throughout the Slavic-speaking area; 48
Albanian (Gheg: AUX kam + PREPOSITION + PARTICIPLE; 49 Tosk: AUX kam + PREP
+ COMPL + PRTCP);
Greek (AUX ἔχω + INF, until the Middle Ages).

(ii) ‘owe’-futures
Germanic: English (AUX shall +V), Dutch (AUX zal + INF), Swedish (AUX ska +
INF), historically and dialectally attested in German (soll + INF).
(iii) ‘want’-futures 50
Romance: Romanian (AUX (v)oi + V; possibly also PART o + finite clause – see
footnote 46);
Germanic: English (AUX will + V), historically and dialectally attested in German
(will + INF);
Slavic: Serbian (cliticized AUX ću + INF or finite clause, also realized as an inflec-
tional affix under certain syntactic and phonological conditions), Bulgarian
(PART ще + finite V); historically attested in OCS (AUX xotjǫ + INF) and
throughout the Slavic-speaking area;
Albanian (PART do + finite clause or finite V);
Greek (PART θα + finite V < AUX θέλω + finite clause; AUX μέλλω + INF, until the
Middle Ages).

(iv) ‘go’-futures
Romance: Portuguese (AUX vou + INF);
Germanic: English (progressive AUX am going to + V), Dutch (AUX ga + INF).

(v) ‘come’-futures
Germanic: Swedish (AUX kommer + PREP + INF).

(vi) ‘be’-futures
Latin (AFFIX -bo < PIE verbal noun + *bhuh2);
(Slavic: Polish, Russian). 51

46
The origins of the latter construction are not clear. According to Kramer (1994: 132), it may also derive
from a Latin construction with the volitive lexical verb volo.
47
According to Heine and Kuteva (2004: 243), an affirmative future има + finite clause is also found,
colloquially, in modern Bulgarian.
48
It must be borne in mind that OCS, the earliest attested Slavic Language, is not a common source
language in the way Latin is for the Romance family. It has however been extensively used to recon-
struct Late Common Slavic (LCS), given its assumed close resemblance to that language.
49
The combination of the preposition me with the so-called “short participle” is labeled infinitive in the
Gheg grammatical nomenclature; the Tosk construction kam për të + short participle is assumed to be a
calque formed on the Gheg model (see Newmark et alii 1982: 98).
50
This group includes constructions with verbs originally meaning ‘want’, but also ‘wish, desire’ – like
Old English willan and Ancient Greek (ἐ)θέλω – and ‘intend’ – like Ancient Greek μέλλω.

60
 (vii) ‘become’-futures
Germanic: German (AUX werde+ INF), Old Norse (verða + present PRTCP);
Slavic: Polish (AUX będę + imperfective INF, AUX będę + imperf. past active
PRTCP), Russian (AUX буду + imperf. INF; AUX стану + imperf. INF). Both lan-
guages also have copula and passive constructions with the auxiliary
będę/буду (AUX będę/буду + N; AUX będę/буду + passive PRTCP). All of these
constructions are historically attested throughout the Slavic-speaking area; the
AUX + active PRTCP construction also survives in Serbo-Croatian dialects.

(viii) ‘begin’-futures
Slavic: historically attested in South and East Slavic texts, surviving in Russian
dialects (AUX на-чну/по-чну/у-чну 52 + imperf. INF).

(ix) ‘take/seize’-futures
Slavic: attested in OCS and Old East Slavic (AUX jĭmǫ + imperf. INF), surviving in
Ukrainian and in Russian dialects.

4.1.1. From lexical to grammatical

4.1.1.1. Meaning: from lexeme to operator

Anyone looking at the vast literature on the grammaticalization of TAM markers notes a very
large degree of similarity in the first stage of the evolution as grammatical markers of con-
structions coming from similar lexical sources (or rather, of those constructions which have
already been studied in a diachronic perspective). In this sense – also relying on work on other
constructions and language families – it even seems that the grammatical categories which the
various types of constructions first come to express is “dictated” by the meaning of the lexical
verb participating in the original construction (on this point, see especially Wierzbicka 1978,
1988 and Bybee et al. 1994). Specifically, have- and owe-futures evolve into participant-
oriented deontic markers with a meaning of necessity (i.e. obligation), with the possible excep-
tion of Ancient and Medieval Greek ἔχω + infinitive, which, according to Markopoulos (2009:
68, ff.), may have grammaticalized into a participant-oriented facultative modality (i.e. ability)
marker. Want- and go-futures evolve into participant-oriented volitive markers with a meaning
of intention and come-, become-, begin- and take/seize-futures into ingressive aspectual mark-
ers; finally, if Slavic constructions with the descendants of LCS *biti were to be regarded as be-
futures, the possibility should also be considered that this kind of construction functioned as a
prospective aspect marker in LCS (as is suggested by Andersen 2006). 53 In FDG, all of these

51
While most authors agree that the Slavic future constructions with the verb ‘to be’ derive their
auxiliary from a Common Slavic perfective stem *bǫd-, meaning “become” (see Whaley 2000: 22),
Andersen (2006: 11-12) seems to deny this view. However, he does not invoke any actual data to
support his claim, nor am I aware of any other study providing evidence in this sense. Polish and Russian
constructions with będę/буду will thus be regarded as become-futures, a stance which appears to be
more consistent with both semantic and comparative evidence (see 4.1.1 below).
52
Russian forms.
53
As regards Latin inflectional future, its origins are too ancient to allow any speculation on the seman-
tics of the PIE (or, possibly, proto-Latin) construction it derives from.

61
grammatical categories apply at the “Configurational Property” 54 (fc) layer, that is, they modify
the abstract predication frame constituted by the predicate and its arguments together, di-
vested of any kind of “situatedness” in relation to the real world, which concerns the predica-
tion layers (e.g. location and quantification in time or space, (un)reality), and of any characteri-
zation in terms of the speaker’s attitudes, which apply either at the Propositional Content layer
(e.g. truth, likelihood and “way-of-knowing” of the information presented) or at the Interper-
sonal Level (e.g. illocution, information structure, social relationship with the addressee). In
keeping with Hengeveld’s (1989, 2011) scope-increase hypothesis, the Configurational Proper-
ty is the lowest layer at which TAM categories may be relevant.
The above-listed semantic changes, whereby a lexeme (or “Lexical Property”) comes to
function as a Configurational Property operator, can thus be represented in FDG as follows:

(i) a. ‘have’(lexical) > (deo nec fc)

b. ‘have’(lex) > (facult poss fc)

(ii) ‘owe’(lex) > (deo nec fc)

(iii) ‘want’(lex) > (intent fc)

(iv) ‘go’(lex) > (intent fc)

(v) ‘come’(lex) > (ingress fc)

(vi) ‘be’(lex) > (prosp fc) 55

(vii) ‘become’(lex) > (ingress fc)

(viii) ‘begin’(lex) > (ingress fc)

(ix) ‘take’(lex), ‘seize’(lex) > (ingress fc)

The development in (i.a) is a well-known one, whose cross-linguistic relevance has been exten-
sively demonstrated in the literature (see Ultan 1978, Heine and Kuteva 2004, Bybee et al.
1991, 1994: 263, 273-ff). As regards Romance languages, this first semantic transition seems to
have taken place as early as in Classical Latin (although some further considerations on the
multifunctionality of the construction at this stage are in order, see 4.2.1) and was well estab-
lished by the times of the Late Latin Christian writers. Have-auxiliaries have also been proven
to have displayed a mainly deontic function before acquiring future tense uses in the Slavic
family, as shown by Andersen (2006: 25) for LCS and by Hansen (2003, apud Mazzitelli 2012:
155) for East Common Slavic (see also Whaley 2000 on Old Belarusian).
As noted above, a different development, that in (i.b), is proposed by Markopoulos (2009)
for Ancient Greek ἔχω + infinitive. Although the grammaticalization of ability markers into fu-
ture tense markers is not attested elsewhere in the Indo-European families under considera-

54
Perhaps a more transparent label for this linguistic unit is “situational concept”, proposed by
Hengeveld (2011), who retrieves it from Vet (1990).
55
This hypothesis will not be investigated here, as most authors agree with Whaley in characterizing the
*bǫd- stem as a perfective formation and in assigning an ingressive meaning to the early OCS construc-
tions with biti (see footnote 51).

62
tion, that such a development is indeed possible has been demonstrated for other languages,
such as Chinese (see Bybee et al. 1994: 266 for Cantonese and Ren 2008 for Mandarin; on the
viability of the ability > future path, see also Heine et al. 1991: 174).
Besides have-constructions, the other type of future which typically involves a previous
stage of obligation is that of owe-futures, a type which is only attested as a full-fledged future
marker in the Germanic family and in some varieties of Sardinian (see Casti 2012: 129-130).
The best-studied case is that of English shall + V (< OE *sculan + INF): although the future tense
meaning of this construction was already established in Old English, Traugott (1992: 196)
shows that many occurrences from the same period still clearly attest a meaning of obligation
(see also Bybee and Pagliuca 1987: 114). The development of Old Norse skola + INF (> Swedish
ska(ll) + INF) into a future marker must have been an early one too, since the construction has
been encountered with a purely temporal meaning since the most ancient texts (in competi-
tion with such other periphrases as munu 56 + INF and verða + present PRTCP); nonetheless, a
deontic meaning could also be expressed by skola + INF in the same period, and some authors
go as far as to present this meaning as the main function of the construction (see Faarlund
2004: 129, 245). The same kind of multifunctionality involving a deontic and a future tense
meaning, in which the former is diachronically prior to the latter, is referred to by Nuyts (2001:
231-233) for Old and Middle Dutch sullen (> zullen) + INF. A de-obligative periphrasis sollen +
INF is also attested in Old High German: with reference to that period, Lockwood (1968: 109)
states that “it is […] rarely possible to be certain that the auxiliary has quite given up its modal
meaning and become purely an indicator of future time.”
The development of Old English willan + INF (> will + V) into a grammatical marker of voli-
tion is nowadays a commonplace in grammaticalization studies (see Traugott 1989, Bybee et
al. 1991, 1994, Hopper and Traugott 1993, among others). While the later phases of the se-
mantic evolution of the construction have raised some debate (see Ziegeler 2006a-b for a rele-
vant example), no significant opposition is found in the literature to this early meaning change,
to my knowledge. The evolution of Slavic want-constructions has been much less studied: alt-
hough it is often claimed that the retention of lexical meanings was stronger for want-, have-,
begin- and take/seize-futures than for the be(come)-type (see Whaley 2000), a general consen-
sus exists that all these types of constructions had already reached a grammatical status in LCS,
at the latest. For Old Bulgarian, this is shown in particular by Kuteva (1994, 2001: 125-129),
who argues that the lexical volitional meaning of xotĕti + INF had already shifted to a gram-
matical meaning of intention before the 13th century (see also Heine and Kuteva 2005: 190).
The two Greek de-volitive constructions, μέλλω + INF and (ἐ)θέλω + INF, are already attested
with TAM meanings in Ancient Greek: according to Markopoulos (2009: 21, 41), both these
periphrases followed the volition (lexical) > intention > future path. For lack of sufficient dia-
chronic information, no hypothesis will be posited here as regards the development of Roma-
nian and Albanian want-futures, although an initial ‘want’ (lexical) > (intent fc) development
can hardly be excluded in the light of cross-linguistic comparison (with both Indo-European
and genetically unrelated language families).

56
The verb munu derives from the same root as English mind, thus attesting a further lexical source for
future tenses, which is only found in Northern Germanic languages. An etymologically distinct but se-
mantically related auxiliary is present-day Swedish tänka (cf. English think), which however will not be
taken into account here, as it seems to be more of an intention or prospective aspect marker than a real
future tense.

63
 At least since Traugott (1989), intention has also been commonly assumed to have been
the first grammatical function of the construction be goyng to + V in Middle English. The same
idea is argued for by Hopper and Traugott (1993), Bybee (2002), Bybee et al. (1994) and Eck-
hardt (2006), among others; similarly, Disney (2009) claims that an intention use of the con-
struction “must have been established before 1646”. A strong association with volitional sub-
jects and controlled events is acknowledged by Hilpert (2008a: 113-ff.) for Middle Dutch gaan
+ INF, which suggests that a meaning of intention was also characteristic of the early grammat-
ical stage of this construction. Intention is also the only non-lexical meaning attested in the
few occurrences of ir + INF in 14th century Old Portuguese according to Mattos e Silva (1989,
apud Lobato 2000).
The semantic development of Swedish kommer att + INF has been studied by Traugott
(1978), Christensen (1997), Dahl (2000) and Hilpert (2006, 2008a-b). All four authors reach the
conclusion that this construction gained its future-marking function through a stage of “incho-
ative” aspect, following a pattern which is also recognized as cross-linguistically significant in
Bybee et al. (1994). Hilpert (2008b: 115), in particular, shows that the aspectual meaning of
kommer (til) (at) + INF surfaces in Old Swedish as early as in the 13th/14th century (although still
very sporadically).
In his wide-ranging investigation on the future markers of the Germanic family, Hilpert
(2008a: 136) states that “there is a general consensus that the [werden + INF] construction
emerged in the late 13th century, and that its future interpretation grew out of ingressive as-
pectual meaning.” The verb werden is a cognate of Latin vertere, and originally meant ‘to turn’;
just like English turn, the verb first acquired a meaning of ‘become’ and came to be used as a
copula in combination with nominal and participial forms; this kind of construction then served
as an analogical model for the creation of an aspectual werden + INF construction (see Heine
1995: 128), which should presumably be traced back to the 11th-13th centuries (Rösler 1952,
apud Whaley 2000: 79; cf. also Lehmann 2002: 26). Similarly, in OCS the perfective stem *bǫd-
is only found in collocation with nouns and participles (Birnbaum 1958, apud Whaley 2000:
24), while auxiliary + infinitive constructions only start occurring in the descendant languages.
There is an exception though, which is represented by an impersonal obligative construction
with *bǫd- + INF + dative NP, where the dative-marked noun phrase functions as the subject of
the main verb (in the infinitive): from a structural point of view, analogy with this construction
may well have played a role in the creation and spread of personal *bǫd- + INF, but there is no
evidence that the obligation meaning of the former construction was ever transposed to the
latter. Further evidence for the originally ingressive meaning of *bǫd- + INF is that the con-
struction occurs exclusively with imperfective main verbs in all of the old Slavic languages in
which it is attested, 57 a characteristic that is shared with ingressive begin- and take/seize-
constructions, 58 but not with modal have- and want-constructions (which do not impose as-
pectual restrictions on the infinitival complement). The ‘become’ > ingressive > future path is
also the most likely for East Slavic стану 59 + INF, whose early attestations often show aspectual
(rather than future tense) meaning, and which is also used with imperfective infinitives only. In
this case, the original meaning of the perfective stem supplying the auxiliary (стан-) is ‘to stand

57
Including Serbo-Croatian and Sorbian, which nowadays admit infinitival complements of either aspect.
58
These will not be discussed here, as none of them was continued into the modern languages under
consideration.
59
Russian form.

64
up’; as with OHG werden, the shift to a change-of-state meaning of ‘become’ must have taken
place before the verb started being used as an auxiliary.

4.1.1.2. Form: from full verb to auxiliary

The Latin have-construction shows signs of incipient grammaticalization since early stages,
namely in the reduction of the paradigm of habeo, when this combines with an infinitive (at-
tested since Classical Latin), and in the subsequent extension of the classes of lexical verbs the
construction could occur with (from transitive only to both transitive and intransitive): the first
change is to be interpreted as a sign of auxiliarization of habeo (see below), while the second
testifies that the construction underwent syntactic reanalysis, so that that the auxiliary could
directly govern an infinitive (and not only a nominal direct object to which an infinitive is at-
tached). Both phenomena fall within the more general notion of decategorialization. Syntactic
reanalysis of Ancient Greek ἔχω + infinitive (expressing ability) is also necessarily old, if, as
shown by Markopoulos (2009: 35-38), the construction could already be found in combination
with intransitive infinitives in Homer’s Iliad. Finally, some formal signs of grammaticalization
are already present in OCS have-constructions, but, differently from both Latin and Greek,
here these changes seem to have occurred only after the emergence of a purely temporal
meaning, as this function is attested since the earliest Slavonic documents, alongside with the
deontic one.
Although *sculan is still attested as a lexical verb in Old English, its inflectional paradigm
already exhibits some degree of reduction, never occurring in the infinitive (Traugott 1992:
194): as noted above, this is a clear sign of auxiliarization. I am not aware of formal evidence of
grammaticalization in the early evolutionary stages of the Dutch and Swedish cognates of shall
+ V (zal + INF and ska(ll) + INF, respectively), which have not been studied as much from a dia-
chronic perspective.
Like *sculan, all OE “pre-modals” underwent auxiliarization at an early stage (Traugott
1992: 194) and willan is no exception in this sense. Formal evidence of an early grammaticali-
zation is also available for the South Slavic want-construction, namely in the reduction of both
the inflectional paradigm and the phonetic weight of the auxiliary when complemented by an
infinitive, which are attested since the 13th century in Old Bulgarian and since the 14th century
in Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian dialects (Andersen 2006: 21, 24). The same holds true of Ancient
Greek (ἐ)θέλω + INF, which according to Markopoulos (2009: 44) “can arguably be considered
as more grammaticalized than the μέλλω [construction] because of its broader semantics and
restricted morphology” (although the latter construction was by far more frequent at this
stage).
As for the morphosyntactic structure of Middle English goyng to + INF, the fact that the
construction only occurs as an intention marker with go in the progressive (either present or
past) or as a present participle (see Eckardt 2006: 109-ff., Garrett 2012: 67) can again be con-
sidered as a sign of auxiliarization, since the same constraint does not hold for the lexical uses
of the periphrases (where the original meaning of “movement with a purpose” is retained). A
further step in the reduction of the paradigm of auxiliary go is represented by the disappear-
ance of participial constructions still in Middle English. Similarly, one may take the fact that

65
only the present tense forms of Swedish komma are used in the ingressive construction as an
indicator of auxiliarization (and thus of decategorialization) of the erstwhile lexical verb.
Similarly, Slavic become-constructions show reduction of the paradigm of the auxiliary to
the sole present tense forms since the earliest texts, although some rare past imperfect forms
are attested in Old Russian according to Andersen 2006: 11. By contrast, German werden + INF
does not exhibit any appreciable sign of grammaticalization in the old language and is still
weakly grammaticalized, from the formal point of view, in contemporary German (see Van
Olmen, Mortelmans and van der Auwera 2009).
In sum, two major types of formal change are observed in the early evolutionary stages of
the constructions under analysis: decategorialization and phonological erosion. In FDG, these
are captured at the Morphosyntactic and at the Phonological Levels, respectively.
Decategorialization, by which a former lexical element acquires grammatical status, is not
a single type of formal change but a general theoretical notion: it is best defined in terms of
loss of a number of specific morphosyntactic properties:

(a) Loss of ability to be inflected.

(b) Loss of ability to take on derivational morphology.
(c) Loss of ability to take modifiers.
(d) Loss of independence as an autonomous form, increasing dependence on some
other form.
(e) Loss of syntactic freedom, e.g. of the ability to be moved around in the sentence
in ways that are characteristic of the non-grammaticalized source item.
(f) Loss of ability to be referred to anaphorically.
(g) Loss of members belonging to the same grammatical paradigm.
(Heine and Kuteva 2007: 40-41)

These individual morphosyntactic changes are defining features of grammaticalization as a

whole, being encountered in grammaticalization processes involving different lexical catego-
ries and grammatical functions. Obviously, not all of them are relevant for all languages, but
most can be observed at different stages in the grammaticalization of Indo-European future
markers. Besides (a), at least (c) and (d) are also attested since early stages in virtually all of
our cases, to different degrees (although this is not often made explicit in the literature).
At the beginning of the grammaticalization process of the constructions considered here,
a lexical verb + subordinate clause structure is reanalyzed as an auxiliary + main verb construc-
tion. For FDG, the former structure consists of a Verb Phrase (Vp) plus a Clause (Cl), whereas
the new structure is seen as a single (Vp) headed by a grammatical Verbal Word (Vw). In this
latter configuration, the erstwhile lexical verb has undergone a type of decategorialization
known as auxiliarization (or auxiliation, see Heine and Kuteva 2007: 104-105), while the other
element, formerly a Clause, will be regarded either as a Verb Phrase or as a Verbal Word, de-
pending on language-specific morphosyntactic properties which do not need to be singled out
in this brief summary (see Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 290 for an English example). In
addition, in some of the constructions considered the main verb is preceded by a preposition
(e.g. Swedish kommer att + INF), in which case the construction will be analyzed as a grammat-
ical Verbal Word combining with and Adposition Phrase within a single Vp.

66
 Without going into the technicalities of FDG morphosyntactic representations, the lexical-
to-grammatical shift in the status of the former element – here exemplified by the 1st person
singular of Old English willan – can be represented as in (18b). This morphosyntactic process
reflects (and is triggered by) the semantic shift by which a Lexical Property comes to function
as an (fc)-operator at the Representational Level (18a): 60

(18) a. RL: ‘Willan’ (lex) > (intent fc)

b. ML: (Vpi: (Vwi: –Wille– (Vwi)) (Vpi)) > (Vwi: –wille– (Vwi))

Although erosion has been variously characterized and referred to in grammaticalization stud-
ies, 61 it is generally accepted that the phenomenon ultimately consists in the loss of phonetic
substance – either segmental, suprasegmental or both (see Heine and Kuteva 2007: 43). Given
the top-down view of language production defended by FDG, whereby phonetics is dealt with
by the Articulator and governed by underlying phonological representations (which are part of
the Grammatical Component), a systematic, generalized loss of phonetic substance can only be
seen as the concrete manifestation of a diachronic change which affects the structure of the
grammaticalizing element at the Phonological Level. 62 Thus, from an FDG perspective, “phono-
logical erosion” seems a more appropriate term.
Phonological erosion is not as widespread as morphosyntactic decategorialization in the
evolution of Indo-European future markers. It comes about at different points in the grammat-
icalization of some markers, generally leading to a monosyllabic element which depends for its
realization on a phonologically heavier element; the process may be taken a step further with
the reduction of a syllable to a single phoneme, as in English will > ‘ll. Both passages reflect the
general tendency for functional elements to be encoded as smaller and smaller units as gram-
maticalization proceeds (see 2.2.1), allowing us to propose the general pattern in (19), where
(PW) stands for Phonological Word, (S) for Syllable and /X/ for “any phoneme”:

(19) PL: (PW) > (S) > /X/ 63

60
I use normal font and initial capitals for lexical material and italic font for grammatical elements. For
the sake of simplicity, the two Verbal Words at ML are not analyzed as to their internal constituency,
which in FDG is conventionally indicated by enclosing the orthographic representation of the units in
question between dashes (“–”). A complete representation of Old English will-e (be it used as a lexical or
st
as a grammatical item) should of course reflect the combination of a Verbal Stem and a 1 person pre-
sent tense Affix.
61
For instance, Lehmann (2002: 113) and Newmeyer (1998: 260) prefer the to speak of “phonological
attrition” and “phonetic reduction”, respectively. Here, I will stick with the traditional term “erosion”
(see Bybee 1985, Bybee and Pagliuca 1985) and refer the reader to Heine and Kuteva (2007: 44) for
some relevant terminological discussion.
62
By contrast, the idiosyncratic articulatory choices of individual speakers do not necessarily involve the
Phonological Level but are best understood as a contextually motivated, addressee-oriented pragmatic
strategy that language users may activate in pursuing the most diverse communicative effects.
63
Although I cannot currently present any conclusive evidence in this sense, the possibility should also
be acknowledged that Feet (F) may represent an intermediate stage between the Phonological Word
and the Syllable. Recall that, according to Hengeveld and Mackenzie’s (2008: 452) definition, the Foot is
only relevant as a phonological layer in stress languages (see 2.1.2.2): all the languages in the sample are
stress languages, although Swedish, Lithuanian, Serbian and Ancient Greek also exhibit clear tonal fea-
tures (see Gårding 1998, Duanmu 2004: 895-896, Zec and Zsiga 2009 and Botinis 1989 [2011: 9], respec-
tively).

67
However, in keeping with Hengeveld and Mackenzie’s (2008: 443) warning that “[t]he charac-
teristics that distinguish Phonological Words differ immensely from language to language,” the
FDG representation of phonological change will always require detailed language-specific anal-
yses. Such analyses may turn out to be unfeasible for the old languages, for which only written
data are available: in particular, it is extremely complicated to assess whether auxiliarization
(i.e. the transition from lexical to grammatical word) is reflected by any concomitant change at
the Phonological Level.
Among the constructions under analysis here, erosion is probably only attested at early
grammatical stages in South Slavic de-volitive futures:

[Štokavian:] 64 In the codex of tsar Stefan Dušan (1325–1355), future-time reference

is expressed in main clauses with ć-u [< hoć-u] + INF […]. The short form is a
Wackernagel clitic from (by) 1200s. (Andersen 2006: 21)

[Bulgarian:] The historical record shows the establishment of a shortened stem of

‘want, will’ (LCS xŭtj- > xšt- >) št- by the 1200s […]. (ibid.: 24)

In both cases, a bisyllabic word is reduced to a monosyllabic element, a process which is ac-
companied by morphosyntactic reduction of a Verbal Word to a clitic, at least in Štokavian
dialects. Hence, the erosion of Old Serbian hoću > ću can quite safely be assumed as an in-
stance of the first kind of change reflected in (19) (from Phonological Word to Syllable),
whereas this analysis may at best be regarded as a plausible hypothesis for Old Bulgarian.

4.1.2. The emergence of future tense

4.1.2.1 Meaning: from the Configurational Property to the Episode

The following steps in the functional evolution of future markers have generally raised much
more debate than those observed in incipient grammaticalization. Among the constructions
under analysis here, a first distinction can be traced between those which seem to have
evolved directly from aspectual or modal markers into “simple future” (i.e. absolute tense)
markers and those which acquired a future tense meaning through some intermediate stage,
in which they served to express a separate functional category. Restricting ourselves to the
constructions for which a certain amount of diachronic data and/or literature has already been
consulted, I may cite Slavic become- and begin-futures, Ancient Greek (ἐ)θέλω + INF, Serbian
hoću + finite clause, English shall + V and Swedish kommer att + INF as probable (or at least
possible) instances of a “direct” development from early (fc)-operators to future tense mark-
ers; the remaining constructions seem to have followed more complex grammaticalization
paths.
A very influential hypothesis about the rise of future tenses has been formulated by
Bybee et al. (1994: 254) and states that “all futures go through a stage of functioning to ex-
press the intention, first of the speaker, and later of the agent of the main verb”. However, a
survey of the language-specific literature cited in the previous sections reveals that there is

64
Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian dialects.

68
only one marker for which a direct development from intention to future seems to be beyond
any doubt, namely Ancient Greek (ἐ)θέλω + INF (Markopoulos 2009: 41). Instead of intention,
the semantic cluster which is most often referred to as preceding the emergence of a future
tense function is the so called “future in the past”. This is an instance of “absolutive-relative”
tense (see Comrie 1985: 64-ff.): the construction serves to locate a State-of-Affairs posterior to
a co-textually or contextually given past time interval (which serves as the temporal reference
point, in Reichenbach’s 1947 terms), irrespective of the location of that State-of-Affairs relative
to the utterance time. A future-in-the-past stage is mentioned as diachronically relevant for
almost all the constructions which have a grammaticalized counterpart with past auxiliary (e.g.
Old English wille/wolde + INF), in which case it is the latter which is used to express the future
in the past. At this stage, the construction as such functions as a marker of posteriority (i.e.
relative tense), while the tense inflection of the auxiliary indicates whether the reference point
is the speech time (wille) or some prior time (wolde). It is the combination of these two opera-
tions which results in absolute-relative tense.
In the structure of FDG’s Representational Level, relative tense applies at the Event layer
(e) – that is, it has scope over the State-of-Affairs – whereas absolute (i.e. deictic) tense is only
relevant at the immediately superordinate layer, that of Episodes (ep). Episodes are described
by Hengeveld and Mackenzie (2008: 157) as sets of “one or more States-of-Affairs that are
thematically coherent, in the sense that they show unity or continuity of Time (t), Location (l),
and Individuals (x).” As is evident from this definition, one distinctive characteristic of an Epi-
sode is that it “consists minimally of one nuclear State-of-Affairs (e1), but may contain more
than one additional State-of-Affairs (e1+N)”: therefore, the head of an Episode will always con-
tain at least one Event. 65 Consequently, absolute tense operators, which apply at the Episode
layer, always have scope over relative tense operators, which apply at the Event layer. 66 An
absolute-relative past posterior marker such as would + V can thus be represented as in (20),
while an absolute future tense marker such as present-day English will + V will encode the
semantic structure in (21):

(20) (past epi: (post ei) (epi))

(21) (fut epi: (ei) (epi)) 67

The most effective way to assess whether a relative tense stage is relevant in the evolution of
a given marker is to see whether the earliest examples of a “purely” temporal meaning (i.e.
one in which no older modal or aspectual sense can be detected) are found with present or
with past tense auxiliary: in the latter case, we can safely assume that the emergence of a

65
Unless this head is expressed as a Noun Phrase, as in The end of the movie, or by a placeholder, as in
The end was a tragic one (see Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 161).
66
Of course the same holds for modifiers, as shown in Hengeveld and Mackenzie’s (2008: 161) example
Tomorrow he will go to London before lunch and she to Paris after dinner, where the absolute tense
modifier tomorrow has scope over the two relative tense modifiers before lunch and after dinner.
67
Differently from Hengeveld and Mackenzie, I do not consider relative tense to be relevant for the
analysis of the so-called deictic tenses in such languages as English or Spanish (see examples in
Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 237, 304; for English, see also Leufkens 2013). In other words, I do not
assume that the deictic tenses of such languages express absolute-relative tense, but I follow Comrie
(1985: 122-124) in assuming that absolute tense only expresses the relation between the time of speech
and the time of the event (or rather, in FDG terms, between the time of speech and the time of the
Episode).

69
(post e) function is diachronically prior to that of the (fut ep) one. Additional evidence in this
sense is the tendency for a grammaticalizing construction to be mainly used with temporal
meaning in complement clauses with past matrix verb, unless it can be shown that, even in this
context, the temporal reference of the construction is always that of a deictic future.
As for those constructions which do not have a past counterpart, these can be generally
regarded as instances of a direct evolution from an older (fc)-oriented function to a future
tense one. Yet, the situation is not so clear-cut as regards the Slavic family, since Slavic lan-
guages generally admit the use of future markers with a morphologically present auxiliary for
the expression of the future in the past, both in embedded and in main clauses (where a past
reference point is provided by the preceding discourse). As a consequence, the possibility that
the Slavic constructions without a past counterpart 68 evolved through a relative tense stage
will have to be verified case by case through the analysis of specific examples – which cannot
be done in this brief survey but will be tackled in future research. At any rate, again, a tenden-
cy to occur principally in embedded clauses would represent an indicator that relative tense is
diachronically prior to absolute tense in the grammaticalization of these constructions.

Markopoulos proposes the intention > future path not only for (ἐ)θέλω + INF (see above)
but also for the other de-volitive construction of Ancient Greek, μέλλω + INF. However, the
data he presents show that in Classical Greek the attestations in which μέλλω occurs in the
present tense are a minority of the total occurrences of the construction, especially when
compared to the past-referring and participial forms of the auxiliary. This is particularly evident
in the earliest period (5th century BC), when present μέλλω + INF only represents 16.7% of the
total occurrences. Markopoulos (2009: 24) also points out that “the participial μέλλω construc-
tion was used to convey posteriority in a participial syntactic configuration (…). Consequently,
one would predict that, from the moment the μέλλω AVC [Auxiliary Verb Construction] be-
came almost indispensable for a particular context in the overall domain of FCs [Future Con-
structions], it started gaining ground and competing with the [synthetic] Future in other con-
texts as well”. Given that participial forms of μέλλω are clearly the most frequent all through
the Classical period (from 40% in the 5th century to 47.8% in late 4th/early 3rd centuries BCE),
and also considering that the sum of participial and past imperfective forms of the auxiliary
amounts to 71.7% of the total occurrences in the 5th century, it appears more than likely that
the main function of the construction at that period was that of a “relative future”, i.e. an ex-
pression of posterior tense.
The other de-volitive future markers in the sample are English will + V, Serbian ću + finite
clause and Bulgarian ще + finite V (besides Romanian (v)oi + short INF and Albanian do (të) +
finite V, for which, as said above, not enough diachronic information has been collected so far.
Old English and Old Bulgarian constructions developed from volitional into relative future
markers before acquiring a deictic future function: in both cases, a “purely” temporal use oc-
curs first with past auxiliary, as has been shown by Traugott (1989: 40) for OE wolde + INF and
“proved beyond reasonable doubt in research on [Old] Bulgarian” (Kuteva 2001: 109). 69 The

68
I.e. the become- and begin-types, plus the Serbian de-volitive future ću + INF/fin. clause.
69
As regards will + V, an interesting alternative has been proposed by Ziegeler (2006a-b), who claims the
passage from volition to future took place through a stage in which the construction was used to ex-
press generic or “timeless” truths (see 4.2.3 below). This use is often referred to as “gnomic” and is also
recorded from early stages for another de-volitive future, Greek (ἐ)θέλω + INF (see Markopoulos: 40-ff.).

70
grammaticalization chain which led English will + V and Bulgarian ще + finite V to acquire a
future function may thus be represented as (22), which also captures the evolution of Ancient-
Medieval Greek μέλλω + INF, as described above:

(22) ‘want, wish, intend’ (lex) → (intent fc) → (post e) → (fut ep)

Ancient Greek (ἐ)θέλω + INF, on the other hand, is more likely to have developed along the
path in (23). This hypothesis is consistent with the non-occurrence of the construction with
past auxiliary (Markopoulos 2009: 38-45), which sets (ἐ)θέλω + INF apart from the two other
future-referring periphrases of Ancient Greek.

(23) ‘want, wish’ (lex) → (intent fc) → (fut ep)

Although the evidence is less than conclusive in this respect, a similar evolution can presuma-
bly be proposed for Old Serbian (ho)ću + INF, since, according to Andersen (2006: 21), in 14th
century Serbian “future-time reference is expressed in main clauses with ć-u + INF, in subordi-
nate clauses, with Perfective Presents”. As is common with Slavic future periphrases, the past
counterpart of the construction never grammaticalized into a TAM marker.
The now long-standing debate on the grammaticalization of Latin INF + habere has come
to demonstrate that in Late Latin the construction was common as a temporal marker in sub-
ordinate (especially relative) clauses, with the auxiliary inflected in the past imperfective
(habebam) or, much more rarely, in the past perfective (habui); at the same time, the synthetic
futures inherited from Classical Latin continued to be used deictically in main clauses (see
Coleman 1971: 224 and Fleischman 1982: 54-55). Therefore, a posterior tense stage seems to
have been relevant in the evolution of Romance have-futures. Abstracting away (for the mo-
ment) from the details of the multifunctionality patterns exhibited by the construction at each
stage, we thus may propose that the main steps in the grammaticalization of habere + INF
were those reflected in (24):

(24) ‘have’ (lex) → (deo nec fc) → (post e) → (fut ep)

As noted in 4.1.1, the now extinct Greek future ἔχω + INF may have followed a different path,
grammaticalizing into an ability marker as early as in Ancient (possibly, pre-Classical) Greek.
According to Markopoulos (2009: 37-38), the construction with present tense auxiliary ἔχω
“did not belong yet to the domain of future reference” in Classical Greek; by this period, “[t]he
only context where ability becomes noticeably more tightly associated with futurity is the past
conditionals […], where both ability (“could”) and futurity (“would”) are plausible interpreta-
tions”. The periphrasis is only used in the latter context with imperfective past auxiliary (εἶχον),
which, again, points to the diachronic priority of posterior tense over deictic future (which is
not attested at all for ἔχω + INF until the Hellenistic period). Since Markopoulos’ proposal is
that the transition from ability to “futurity” was mediated by a stage of signaling root possibil-

Ziegeler’s hypothesis will not be discussed in detail here, as the development of a generic meaning
seems to be better understood as a parallel grammaticalization path than as a necessary step to explain
the emergence of a future tense function.

71
ity (i.e. participant-external facultative possibility), we may hypothesize the following gram-
maticalization path for ἔχω/εἶχον + INF:

(25) ‘have’ (lex) → (facult poss fc) → (facult poss e) → (post e) → (fut ep)

The exact diachronic relationship between event-oriented modality and relative tense, howev-
er, will require some further examination (which I cannot go into in this overview), and espe-
cially in a comparative vein, given that an independent development of future-in-the-past
markers into irrealis (i.e. epistemic event-oriented modality) markers is also well attested
cross-linguistically – e.g. for English would + INF, Late Latin INF + habebam, Swedish skulle +
INF and virtually all future-in-the-past constructions in the languages of the Balkans, irrespec-
tive of their lexical origins.
Given the relative scarcity of data presented in the diachronic literature, I am not current-
ly in a position to propose a fine-tuned analysis of the evolution of the Germanic owe-futures
in the sample, except for English shall + V, which will be the object of a more detailed discus-
sion in 4.2.2. The synchronic evidence in Hilpert (2006, 2008a) seems to suggest that an inten-
tion stage may have been relevant in the grammaticalization of Swedish ska + INF, while the
presence of the past form skulle + INF to express future in the past as early as in Old Norse
may arguably be regarded as evidence that a posterior tense also played a role in the gram-
maticalization of the construction. However, both hypotheses can only be left as a topic for
future investigation. As to Dutch zal + INF, Nuyts (2012: 231-233) proposes the deontic > fu-
ture path, but does not take into account the past counterpart zou + INF, nor does he make
reference to the syntactic environments in which the construction occurred the most fre-
quently in Middle Dutch, which makes it impossible, for the moment, to assess the relative
chronology of the functions of this marker.
Coming to movement-based futures, the semantic development of English be going to + V
has already been summarized in 3.3.3.3, where the idea was introduced that the construction
should be considered a prospective aspect marker in present-day English, and that this func-
tion has developed out of an older intention meaning (see also 4.1.1.1 above). The specific
meaning of prospective aspect can be defined in terms of the “current relevance” of a situa-
tion which is still to come about at the time of reference: in Comrie’s (1976: 65) words, a pro-
spective aspect marker makes reference to “the already present seeds of some future situa-
tion”. 70
However, since both the academic and the descriptive literature on contemporary English
commonly refer to be going to + V as a “pure” future marker, the possibility must also be
acknowledged that the construction is nowadays undergoing a semantic development by
which it may be acquiring future tense functions. On the other hand, even if we accept that
such a development is currently in progress for the construction with present progressive aux-
iliary, its past counterpart (was/were going to + V) does not seem to have lost its prospective

70
A classic example illustrating the difference between prospective aspect and future tense is the pair
“Don’t sit on that rock. It’s going to fall / It’ll fall” (Palmer 1974: 164). While the event described by It’ll
fall is presented as the consequence of a possible future action of the addressee – and thus has no obvi-
ous connection with the time of the speech – It’s going to fall is interpreted as the foreseen outcome of
a situation which already holds at the time of speech (viz. the current position of the rock).

72
meaning to become a true future in the past. This is evident in (26a-b), were only the first al-
ternative can be interpreted as expressing absolute-relative tense:

(26) a. I left my friend’s house in 1936. We would meet again when the war began.
b. I left my friend’s house in 1936. We were going to meet again when the war
began.

Here would meet again “tells” that the described State-of-Affairs did happen, i.e. it actually
localizes that State-of-Affairs in time relative to the time of the Episode (which coincides with
that of the previous one, i.e. 1936); by contrast, with were going to meet again the sentence
receives a completely different interpretation, namely one in which the beginning of the war
comes to interrupt the (pre-arranged) course of events which would have led to the meeting
of the speaker and his friend. Also compare I was going to leave but I didn’t (because I got
caught in my book) and *I am going to leave but I won’t (because…): as in (26), the contrast
suggests that with was/were going to the “focal point of information” (Hengeveld 2011: 591) is
not the State-of-Affairs designated by the main verb, but rather a previous point in time (indi-
cated by the tense inflection of be) from which that State-of-Affairs is “prospected” as current-
ly relevant. On the basis of this evidence, a relative tense stage can be excluded and the fol-
lowing grammaticalization path can be proposed for be going to + V:

(27) ‘go’ (lex) → (intent fc) → (prospect fc) ( → (fut ep) )

Interestingly enough, exactly the same path is proposed for Portuguese ir + INF by Lobato
(2000: 85) and the very same contrasts as are observed for the English go-future also seem to
hold for this construction.
Swedish kommer att + INF is consensually seen as an originally ingressive periphrasis in
the diachronic literature consulted so far (see 4.1.1). The relevance of an intention stage is
explicitly denied for this construction by Dahl (2000: 322), who claims that “there is no evi-
dence to suggest that the Germanic de-venitives ever expressed Intention.” This idea is strong-
ly corroborated by Hilpert’s (2006, 2008a-b) findings, which are based on extensive data anal-
yses. On the other hand, the lack of a past counterpart suggests that the grammaticalization of
the construction did not pass through a relative tense stage either – and, as a matter of fact,
no reference to such a development is found in the relevant literature. In support of this view,
it may be added that no example of a purely temporal use of the construction in complement
clause is cited in Hilpert’s (2008b) case-specific study of the grammaticalization of kommer att
+ INF. Hilpert’s (2008b: 125) “motion > inchoation > future” path can therefore be taken as a
more than reasonable hypothesis in the light of the available data. A reformulation of this path
in FDG terms would be as follows:

(28) ‘come’ (lex) → (ingress fc) → (fut ep)

A very similar situation can apparently be reconstructed for Slavic become- and begin-
constructions (the former having been much more studied than the latter, presumably be-
cause they survive in many contemporary Slavic languages): none of these constructions has a
grammaticalized past counterpart (see Whaley 2000: 118, 121), and no preference for embed-

73
ded clauses or past reference contexts is mentioned in the literature as regards the earliest
stages of their grammatical development. The latter scenario, in particular, would provide
decisive evidence in favor of a relative tense stage, since, as we have seen, North Slavic be-
come-futures can be used as future-in-the-past markers in both main and subordinate clauses.
In all, the same development as in (28) can be assumed as a working hypothesis for the gram-
maticalization of these constructions (except that they come from different lexical sources).
With regard to the specific evolution of Polish będę + past active PRTCP, it is worth men-
tioning the possibility that “at least some of the early participial constructions can be identified
as future perfects” (Whaley 2000: 45). This suggests that this construction may have devel-
oped along a different path than that followed by the auxiliary + infinitive constructions and
that this path may have involved a “past in the future” (i.e. anterior relative tense) stage at
some point. This hypothesis certainly deserves consideration and will be investigated in the
final dissertation.
German werden + INF is also commonly accounted for as an originally ingressive construc-
tion (with no exception, to my knowledge). An “inchoative > intention > future” path has been
proposed by Heine (1995: 130) on the basis of synchronic data, but the intermediate intention
stage is firmly rejected by Hilpert (2008a: 154) in his analysis of the lexical predicates which
most typically co-occur with the construction from the 16th century up to the present day (dia-
chronic collexeme analysis). Hilpert proposes the same inchoation > future path as seen above
for kommer att + INF and Slavic become- and begin-constructions, but his research does not
take into account the past form wurde + INF, which used to express a future in the past mean-
ing in Middle High German, i.e. at the same time as the present werde + INF was grammatical-
izing as a future tense marker; the past auxiliary wurde was substituted in early New High
German by the suppletive form würde, which is morphologically a past subjunctive (see Leiss
1992: 223, Roels, Mortelmans and van der Auwera 2007: 180, Lockwood: 1968: 141). This sets
the German become-future apart from the other originally ingressive periphrases – which nev-
er had a grammaticalized past version – and, on the basis of inter-linguistic comparison with
the de-obligative and de-volitive futures surveyed above, suggests that a relative tense func-
tion may have preceded the emergence of a deictic future use, along the path in (29):

(29) ‘become’ (lex) → (ingress fc) → (post e) → (fut ep)

Another interesting conclusion reached by Hilpert is that “reference to intended future actions
is more characteristic of later uses of the construction” (2008a: 154), that is, an intention use
of werden + INF seems to have appeared only after the conventionalization of the future
meaning. This is in principle highly problematic for the scope-increase hypothesis, as it would
mean that an (fc)-oriented category has developed out of a higher-scope (ep)-operator.
This development is indeed quite surprising when considered in the light of the literature
seen so far, and it is also not documented in any other diachronic investigation on the evolu-
tion of future tenses, to my knowledge; nonetheless, intention is almost universally mentioned
among the uses of future markers in the language-specific synchronic literature (both academ-
ic and descriptive), regardless of the lexical origins and past evolution of the constructions at
stake. However, saying that a given future-referring construction may serve to express a mean-
ing of intention does not equate to claiming that this is an inherent grammatical function of
that construction, which, as we have seen in Chapter 3, can only be affirmed when a certain

74
meaning exhibits a high degree of context generalization (i.e. of independence from the lin-
guistic and contextual constraints to which it was subject at earlier developmental stages). In
this line of reasoning, the future > intention development that Hilpert proposes for werden +
INF may not necessarily represent a counterexample to the scope-increase hypothesis; rather,
this unexpected semantic extension may help us understand the reason why Bybee et alii’s
(1994: 254) hypothesis that all futures went through an intention stage has been so widely
accepted by students of grammaticalization, despite the fact that a number of seemingly un-
deniable counterexamples have been identified over the past decades. As will be seen in 4.2.2,
enlightening evidence in this sense is supplied by a careful examination of the factors which
constrain the intention use of another Germanic future, (Middle) English shall + V, and by the
chronologic relation of its volitional uses to the other functions of the same construction.

4.1.2.2. Form: further steps in decategorialization and erosion

As we saw in 4.1.1.1, signs of morphosyntactic decategorialization are observed from the earli-
est grammatical stages for virtually all the constructions considered. In the following centuries,
most constructions proceed further in the decategorialization process, with the auxiliary be-
coming more and more limited in inflection and syntactic freedom and more and more mor-
phosyntactically dependent on the main verb. In consequence of these morphosyntactic
changes, a number of markers also undergo phonological erosion. So, English will and shall
gradually lose their personal inflection and the former is eventually reduced to clitic ’ll, while
going to fuses into gonna in contemporary English; Old Swedish skall is almost exclusively en-
countered in the shortened form ska in contemporary Swedish; Late Latin INF + habeo ceases
to admit the AUX-V order and the auxiliary is finally affixed to the main verb in the Italo-
Western branch of Romance; 71 the Modern Romanian auxiliary voi, vei, etc. (< Lat. volo, vīs,
etc.) is reduced to oi, ăi, etc. and, further, to the particle o; Old Bulgarian xotetĭ becomes an
invariable pre-verbal particle (ще) and Serbian hteti cliticizes into ću, which is affixed to the
verb when this occurs in clause-initial position; (ἐ)θέλω is gradually reduced to a clitic and los-
es any personal inflection to become a particle (θα) between Late Medieval and Early Modern
Greek. In all of these cases, the trend from larger to smaller units is fully confirmed at both the
Morphosyntactic and the Phonological Levels (see 4.1.1.2 above).
The formal changes listed above take place at very different rates in different families and
languages, which obviously depends on the general morphosyntactic-typological trends in the
evolution of each language. Moreover, the formal evolution of certain markers is also heavily
influenced by language contact in some areas, most notably, Scandinavia and the Balkans. As
expected, formal change always follows meaning change in time (but see Markopoulos 2009:
229-230 for an alleged counterexample) and undeniably proceeds at a much lower rate: it is
absolutely not the case that each semantic development triggers corresponding morphosyn-
tactic and phonological changes, but this only happens in some languages, and certainly not
until the new meaning has undergone full conventionalization.

71
With the partial exception of European Portuguese, which requires that oblique clitics are inserted
between the main verb and the auxiliary -ei, -ás, etc. in independent clauses.

75
 4.2. From grammaticalization paths to Semantic Maps

4.2.1. A preliminary proposal

The semantic developments surveyed in 4.1.2.1 cast serious doubts on the idea that the evolu-
tion of future tenses may be captured by a “universal” grammaticalization path. A considerable
number of constructions go through a stage of marking posterior relative tense, a develop-
ment which might be related to the lexical origins of the construction: it is attested for most of
the future-types represented in the sample, the only likely exceptions being movement-based
and begin-futures: among the former, a relative tense stage can be excluded quite safely for
English and Romance go-futures, and most probably also for Swedish come-future; as to begin-
futures, which are only attested in the Slavic family, the evidence against the relevance of a
posterior tense stage is certainly strong, but the lack of any data from the Common Slavic peri-
od does not allow us to assume a direct ingressive > future evolution as a matter of fact. This
relative uncertainty notwithstanding, it is particularly interesting that both movement-based
and begin-futures first grammaticalize into aspectual, not modal operators.
As for the rest, however, it is not the case that a posterior tense stage is necessarily in-
volved in the rise of all future markers from other sources: in fact, we also find (i) want-futures
whose evolution almost certainly did not involve a future-in-the-past stage (Greek (ἐ)θέλω +
INF and Serbian ću + INF/fin. clause) and (ii) owe- and become-futures for which such a devel-
opment can be taken as a well-founded hypothesis (Dutch zal + INF, Swedish ska + INF and
German werde + INF).
If we now merge the grammaticalization paths which emerge from the diachronic litera-
ture in a single Semantic Map, this will look as in Figure 9 below. Solid squares contain the
seven different lexical sources of the constructions analyzed here, while the grammatical
meanings that these constructions acquired in the course of their development are enclosed
within a larger dashed square.

‘want, wish, desire’,

‘have’ ‘owe’ ‘go’ ‘intend to’

obligation (π fc) intention (π fc) prospective aspect (π fc)

ability (π fc) root possibility (π e) posterior tense (π e) future (π ep)

ingressive aspect (π fc)

‘come’ ‘become’ ‘begin’

Figure 9: From lexical meaning to Future tense (preliminary proposal).

76
As far as the theory-internal predictions of FDG are concerned, the evolution of the future
markers generally confirms Hengeveld’s (1989, 2011) scope-increase hypothesis: crucially, no
conventionalized development from higher to lower-layer operators is attested. However, the
general picture suggests that the hypothesis should be “relaxed” in two respects:

a) scope widening does not always involve adjacent layers (cf. Boland 2006: 193):
Greek (ἐ)θέλω + INF, Serbian ću + INF/fin. clause: (intent fc) > (fut ep);
English be going to + V, Portuguese ir + INF: (prosp fc) > (fut ep);
(Swedish kommer att + INF, Polish/Russian będę/буду + imperf. INF, Old Slavic на-
чну/по-чну/у-чну 72 + imperf. INF: (ingress fc) > (fut ep);)

b) when one single semantic change is considered, there is not always widening in scope:
Greek ἔχω + INF: (fac poss e) > (post e);
English be going to + V, Portuguese ir + INF: (intent fc) > (prosp fc).

These observations do not diminish the cross-linguistic validity of the hypothesis (which has
already been strongly argued for by other FDG practitioners, see 2.2.1), but warn us about the
way we should conceive and use this hypothesis in the study of grammaticalization: if one con-
clusion can be drawn from the map in this respect, it is that scope increase is better under-
stood as a general trend in the grammaticalization of (TAM) operators than as a strict con-
straint on the individual meaning changes that make up the grammaticalization process.

As to the adjacency requirement of Semantic Maps, recall that functions which (i) are
philogenetically related and which (ii) can be expressed by the same marker at one synchronic
stage must occupy a continuous area on the map. Also recall that the maps proposed in this
work do not aim at a neutral description of “semantic space”: here, future tense is deliberately
chosen as the “perspective” from which the surrounding semantic space is looked at. In this
sense, the map in Figure 9 does not predict that no marker can express, say, obligation and
ingressive aspect at the same synchronic stage, but only that such a multifunctionality pattern
will not, in principle, be encountered for grammaticalized future markers. Similarly, no claim is
made that diachronic developments from obligation to ingressive aspect (or the other way
round) are impossible cross-linguistically, but only that such a development is not attested on
the way to future tense marking. In addition, the fact that each function is characterized as an
FDG operator (i.e. as a grammatical element) means that the synchronic and diachronic predic-
tions of Semantic Maps only hold insofar as functions which are (at least partly) grammatical-
ized are concerned: that is to say, the map above does not exclude the possibility that a given
future tense marker can also convey (e.g.) participant-external possibility under certain cir-
cumstances; rather, it entails that participant-external possibility, which is not placed adjacent
to future tense, is not expected to represent a grammatical meaning of a future marker unless
posterior tense, which falls in between the two functions, is also attested as a grammatical
function of that same marker.
A few remarks are in order at this point. First, INF + habeo was a highly multifunctional
construction from its appearance in Classical Latin onwards, exhibiting uses that have been

72
Russian forms.

77
classified as “potential” (a definition which covers both ability and root possibility) and inten-
tional (see Pinkster 1987: 206 and Wartburg 1969: 152); at the same time, these meanings
never rivaled in frequency the deontic one, which was clearly predominant on the whole
(Fleischman 1982: 56). Second, Greek ἔχω + INF starts displaying a participant-oriented deontic
meaning in the Hellenistic period (Bănescu 1915, Aerts 1965, apud Markopoulos 2009: 60),
although this use of the construction never attained a significant frequency (see data in Mar-
kopoulos 2009: 60-73, 101, 146). Third, as was already mentioned in 4.1.2.1, Swedish ska + INF
may have developed an intention use at some point, but it is not clear whether this ever con-
ventionalized as a full-fledged grammatical meaning – and the same can be said of English shall
+ V, as will be shown in 4.2.2 . 73 All these facts together point to the necessity of establishing
additional connections between obligation and facultative possibility, on the one hand, and
between obligation and intention, on the other: these semantic connections can be added to
our map in order to obtain a more encompassing representation of the multifunctionality of
the constructions under analysis. However, since neither ability/root possibility nor obligation
or intention can be shown to have ever gained grammatical status for (respectively) INF + hab-
eo, ἔχω + INF and ska + INF, these meanings cannot be regarded as operators in the FDG anal-
ysis of the three constructions; in turn, this entails that none of these functions represents a
separate developmental stage in the evolution of the respective constructions from modal into
future tense markers. The relationship between these meanings, thus, should be represented
in such a way that their status is clearly distinguished from that of those developments which
are diachronically relevant to the grammaticalization of future markers. One possibility is to
represent these semantic links as dashed lines instead of solid arrows, as in Figure 10.

‘want, wish, desire’,

‘have’ ‘owe’ ‘go’ ‘intend to’

obligation (π fc) intention (π fc) prospective aspect (π fc)

ability (π fc) root-possibility (π e) posterior tense (π e) future (π ep)

ingressive aspect (π fc)

‘come’ ‘become’ ‘begin’

Figure 10: From lexical meaning to Future tense (extended proposal).

73
It should be added that Gerö and Ruge (2008: 122) also mention deontic and prospective uses of An-
cient Greek μέλλω + INF, although they cite no evidence in support of this claim.

78
 4.2.2. The semantic development of English shall + V

4.2.2.1. Data analysis

The only construction whose functional development would appear to be really problematic
for the scope-increase hypothesis is English shall +V.
An evolution from obligation to intention (and from this to future) has been proposed for
this construction, most notably in work by Bybee and colleagues, according to whom shall +
INF/V 74 was commonly used for expressing intention as early as in Middle English (see Bybee
and Pagliuca 1987: 114, Bybee et al. 1994: 179, 187, 263, 287). 75 However, while all students of
the matter agree that the functions of *sceal + INF were mainly deontic in Old English, “predic-
tion” (i.e. simple future) was already clearly predominant by the end of Middle English. This is
shown in particular by Gotti (2002: 232), according to whom 54% of the 1336 attestations of
the construction in his 14th-15th century corpus can be characterized as expressing a purely
temporal meaning; in the same period, volitional uses of shall + INF/V, although well attested,
were almost limited to 1st person forms and never equaled the deontic ones in frequency (see
data in Gotti 2002: 203-204). In the light of this evidence, it appears quite unlikely that the
volitional use of shall + INF/V actually played any role in the rise of its future function.
Moreover, it is not entirely clear whether, in this context of high multifunctionality, the in-
tention meaning developed directly from the obligation one in Old English or whether it arose
as an inference from the later prediction use, as seems to be suggested by the relative increase
in the frequency of volitional shall from Middle to Early Modern English – that is, at a time
when the future meaning was certainly established as the central function of the construction
(see Gotti 2002: 233). That intention can easily arise as an inference from modally neutral
statements concerning the future actions of a volitional agent was shown in 3.3.3.3 for the
present-day English prospective marker be going to + V; such an inference is of course also
possible with full-fledged future tense markers and is particularly frequent with 1st person sub-
jects, provided that the event designated by the main verb is a controlled action. Such contexts
are extremely frequent, and all Middle English examples of an “intention” meaning of shall +
INF/V cited by Gotti fall within this category: in none of them can a future meaning be reason-
ably excluded. 76 On the other hand, we do find innumerous examples which obviously express
future time reference but in which no volitional or deontic sense can be detected:

(30) If thou be right happy – that is to seyn, if thou be right riche – thou shalt fynde a
greet nombre of felawes and freendes. (Gotti 2002: 228)

74
It is in Middle English that morphological marking of the infinitive was lost, so that both shall + INF
and shall + V can be found in this period. As for the form of the auxiliary, in what follows I use the nor-
malized spelling shall and should, instead of choosing among the multiple alternative spelling variants
that occur in Middle English texts.
75
Though, admittedly, it continued to be used with the earlier obligation meaning throughout the histo-
ry of English, up to the present day.
76
This would be the case if the action described by the shall-construction could be understood as in-
tended by the speaker but not as actually predicted, as in (e.g.) I intend to/??shall leave, but I’m not sure
I will be able to do so.

79
In keeping with the criteria proposed in 3.3.3.1, this means that the intention meaning of Mid-
dle English shall + INF/V belongs to a bridging context stage, while prediction must be regarded
as a fully grammaticalized function of the construction.
The reconstruction of the grammaticalization path followed by shall + INF/V is further
complicated by the lack of a real consensus about the functional evolution of its past counter-
part, should + INF/V. On the one hand, Narrog (2012: 174) claims that “[f]rom OE, the past
form should was used (...) as a future in the past” and Hogg (2002: 77) mentions “[OE] exam-
ples (…) in which sceolde ‘should’ represents a future in the past”; on the other hand, Traugott
(1992: 196) does not refer to any OE attestation of a purely predictive use of should and seems
to imply that such meanings as “necessity”, “obligation” and “inevitability” can always be de-
tected with the past auxiliary construction; in a similar vein, Boland (2006: 163) explicitly states
that “[s]hould develops at first similar to shall, although it grammaticalizes a bit later as a fu-
ture marker, in Early Modern English” (cf. also Rissanen 1999: 235). At any rate, from the data
presented in Dossena (2002: 243) it can be concluded that intention may hardly have repre-
sented a separate stage in the grammatical evolution of should + INF/V: intention appears as
an extremely marginal function of the past auxiliary construction in late Middle English,
amounting to only 4% of the total occurrences as against 50% of deontic necessity and 26% of
purely temporal uses. It is also worth noting that intention raises to 14% in Early Modern Eng-
lish, at a time when prediction uses increase slightly in frequency and deontic ones drop to
35% of the total: again, this suggests that the volitional sense of the construction does not
derive from its original obligation meaning but rather results from the combination of a basi-
cally temporal function with controlled actions of animate (and especially first person) sub-
jects. As a matter of fact, this combination is found in all the examples of “volitional” should +
INF/V presented by Dossena.

Deontic necessity (Relative) Future Volition

shall + V 30% > 29% 54% > 50% 15% > 18%
should + V 50% > 35% 26% > 29% 4% > 14%

Table 2: Modal and temporal uses of shall/should + INF/V from late Middle English to Early Modern
English (data from Gotti 2002 and Dossena 2002).

It is also important to note that the values presented here for the volitional uses of
shall/should + INF/V may (and in my opinion must) be considered as an overrating of the actual
frequency of such meanings. In fact, both Gotti and Dossena classify promises and threats with
2nd and 3rd person subjects as expressions of the speaker’s volition, probably because “the
force of the speech act relies on the fact that the action will be performed or caused by the
speaker” (Gotti 2002: 208). In this sense, it may perhaps be argued that the events designated
by shall + V in such examples as (31) are in some way “desired” or “intended” by the speaker;
but this is clearly an inference that one may (at best) draw from the fact itself that the speaker
is threatening the addressee concerning the consequences of the latter’s actions, which, in a
way, implies assuming responsibility for those consequences. In any case, the semantic value
of shall + V in (31) can by no means be regarded as a volitional one. Rather, the construction

80
seems to express pure futurity (while possibly retaining an overtone of obligation in the third
occurrence).

(31) At on worde, Sir Andrew, y telle ƥe (…) ƥat ȝe shal be take and holde for a traitoure
(…) and in worse deth ȝe shul die, ƥan euer ded Knyght of Engeland (…) and ȝow
shal repent. (Gotti 2002: 209)

Another important conclusion to be drawn from Dossena’s data is that Boland’s (2006: 163)
claim – according to which a future-in-the-past use of should + V only arose in Early Modern
English – is probably an overstatement; nonetheless, when due consideration is paid to the
relative frequency of the deontic and temporal uses of shall and should in Middle English, it
does appear that the temporal function was much more commonly expressed by the former,
whereas should exhibits a higher degree of retention of the older modal meaning. In addition,
among Dossena’s examples of “predictive” should + INF/V, there are a number of occurrences
in conditional constructions where the periphrasis seems much more likely to express an irre-
alis meaning (either potential or counterfactual) rather than a purely temporal one. The actual
frequency of temporal should may thus be slightly lower than indicated in Table 2 (although
this is in part compensated by the confusion between volitional and purely temporal uses in
such contexts as (31)).
All the same, relative future undoubtedly was an inherent function of the past auxiliary
construction in Middle English, since one finds quite a number of examples in which no deontic
or deictic future interpretation is possible. This is certainly the case with the second occur-
rence of schulde come in (33):

(33) Whanne this hadde herd, that Jhesu schulde come fro Judee in to Galilee, he wente
to hym, and preiede hym, that he schulde come doun, and heele his sone; for he
bigan to die. (From Dossena 2002: 252)

Importantly, there is no evidence that the relative tense function of the construction may have
developed out of the absolute tense one, as I am aware of no Middle English attestation in
which should + INF/V is ambiguous between these two meanings. 77 By contrast, a significant
number of examples are found in which the ambiguity is between a deontic interpretation and
a future-in-the-past one, suggesting that the latter function has arisen from the former in very
much the same way as happened with the present tense auxiliary shall:

(33) And the Lord God sente hym out of paradijs of likyng, that he schulde worche the
erthe, of which he was takun. (From Dossena 2002: 249) 78

77
As would be the case in embedded clauses with past tense matrix verb in which the designated State-
of-Affairs could take place either before or after the time of speech. A few such contexts do occur, but,
whenever this is the case, a strong deontic sense of obligation is also present, e.g. Poul techeƥ here
Romayns, and so alle cristene men, how ƥei schulden kepe charite ƥat God ȝyueƥ (Dossena 2002: 254).
78
Note that, here, schulde also seems to convey a semantic nuance close to that of a (reported) opta-
tive, a meaning which was expressed by the morphological subjunctive in Old English and which often
provides a reasonable interpretation with (embedded) deontic markers.

81
 4.2.2.2. Discussion and implications

In all, the grammaticalization of shall/should + V presents two aspects that are potentially
problematic for the scope-increase hypothesis, as both the volitional and the relative tense
uses of the construction seem to have emerged later than the deictic future one: thus, in FDG
terms, we would have an (fc)-operator and an (e)-operator developing later than (and out of) a
higher-scope (ep)-operator.
With regard to intention, however, we have seen that this may hardly be regarded as a
grammatical meaning of the construction, since it never occurs in contexts in which a future
meaning is not available, while the opposite situation is well attested in Middle English data
(and possibly earlier, according to Traugott 1992 and Hogg 2002). The conclusion to be drawn
from the relative distribution of the two meanings is that future tense function of shall + INF/V
had reached full conventionalization as early as in Middle English, while the intention meaning
presupposed a basically temporal interpretation of the construction and arose as an inference
under precise circumstances (animate (especially 1st person) agent + controlled action): as
argued in the previous section, these conditioning factors define a bridging context for the
inference “future → intention”. From the theoretical point of view, this confirms that the
scope-increase constraint only holds insofar as grammatical meanings are concerned (cf.
4.2.1), whereas nothing prevents a lower-scope meaning from emerging as an inference from
a higher-scope one: the prediction, then, is that when this happens, the new, inferential mean-
ing will not develop beyond the bridging context stage.
Besides solving the problem of the seeming counterexamples represented by the inten-
tion meanings of shall + V, German werden + INF and all the other non-de-volitive futures
which exhibit such uses in the contemporary languages (see 4.2.1.1), this revised version of the
scope-increase hypothesis can also be very useful for understanding why so many students of
grammaticalization, following Bybee et al. (1991, 1994), have seen intention as an inevitable
stage in the development of all future markers. In fact, statements concerning a future, inten-
tional action of the speaker are extremely frequent, possibly representing the most common
way of talking about future events in every-day communication: therefore, it seems entirely to
be expected that, as soon as a former modal or aspectual marker acquires a “pure” future
tense function, it will (immediately) become available for use in such contexts. The extremely
high frequency of 1st person statements about controlled future actions may thus have created
the impression, among historical linguists, that intention is an inherent function of all newly
grammaticalized future tenses, an assumption which, however, is not tenable in the light of
the evidence presented in this chapter. The proposal, then, is that the high frequency of an
intention meaning (both cross-linguistically and in single languages) is in most cases an early
side-effect of the grammaticalization of future tense markers, rather than a necessary precon-
dition for it.
The relative chronology of the absolute and relative tense functions of shall/should +
INF/V also appears to be in contrast with FDG’s predictions, since, in principle, the higher rate
of purely temporal uses with present tense auxiliary indicates that the construction grammati-
calized first as an (ep)-operator Future and later as an (e)-operator Posterior. However, this
does not mean, by itself, that such a development as (fut ep) > (post e) ever took place, and we
have seen that no context of ambiguity between the two meanings is found in Middle English
data (except for a few cases in which a deontic interpretation seems prominent, see footnote

82
77), which would have lent support to the hypothesis that posterior tense diachronically de-
rives from future tense. Instead, the analysis of ambiguous contexts suggests that both the
relative and the absolute tense functions of shall/should + V/INF originated from the older
deontic meaning. Such a development is not at all surprising if one considers that the semantic
mechanism by which the two tense functions emerged is exactly the same, viz. the bleaching
of the modal meaning of obligation. Expressions of participant-oriented necessity, in fact, of-
ten imply that the event takes place after the temporal reference point: so, in past contexts,
where the auxiliary should was used, the bleaching of the modal meaning left only a posterior
tense interpretation available, whereas in present and future contexts, with shall, the result of
the bleaching was absolute time location in the future.
Summing up, the grammaticalization path followed by English shall/should + V up to Mid-
dle English can be represented as in (34), where intention is not included, since there is no
evidence that this meaning has ever reached full grammaticalization:

(34) ‘owe’ (lex) → (deo nec fc) → (post e)/(fut ep)

4.2.3. To future and beyond

In the previous section I have shown how a detailed case-specific analysis can shed light on the
unexpected developments which seemed to emerge from a less fine-tuned survey of the dia-
chronic literature, allowing us to make sense of (and defuse) the seeming counterexamples to
FDG’s scope-increase hypothesis. Let us now see how the findings of this analysis can be inte-
grated into the semantic map proposed in 4.2.1. The map will then be expanded on its right-
hand side to include the functions which most typically arise after the future tense stage. In
the discussion of these functions, I will no longer make reference to the past counterpart of
the constructions under analysis, which, after the future-in-the-past stage, start acquiring new
meanings which are not shared with the cognate future markers and are therefore irrelevant
to the grammaticalization of Future tense and its relations to other functional categories.
In the analysis of Middle English shall/should + V/INF, it was first proposed that the tem-
poral function of the construction does not derive from its volitional use but directly from the
older participant-oriented deontic meaning. Second, we have seen that there are reasons to
treat the development of posterior and future tense out of older modal (or aspectual) mean-
ings as a single semantic change, so that the diachronic priority of deictic future relative to
posterior tense cannot be regarded as a true counterexample to the scope-increase hypothe-
sis: in the only case in which such a situation holds (which is precisely that of English
shall/should + V), the higher-scope Future operator is not the origin of the lower-scope Poste-
rior operator but merely precedes it in time. Our map can therefore be refined as in Figure 11,
where a direct link is added between deontic necessity and future tense (a development which
was not included in Figures 9-10) and where future and posterior tense are represented as two
“portions” of one and the same semantic space. The three dotted arrows within this space
mean that constructions from deontic, volitive and ingressive sources can acquire a future
meaning either directly (as with shall + V, kommer att + INF, ću + INF/fin. clause and (ἐ)θέλω +
INF) or through a posterior tense stage (e.g. INF + habeo, ще + finite V and probably werden +
INF).

83
 (deo nec fc) (intent fc) (prosp fc)

(fac poss fc) (fac poss e) (post e) (fut ep)

(ingress fc)

Figure 11: The rise of future tense markers in Indo-European languages (revised proposal).

An overview of the uses of future tense markers in the contemporary languages also confirms
the scope-increase hypothesis, in that no lower-scope meanings are cited in the literature
which were not also attested at previous stages. The only possible exception is the ingressive
function of Dutch gaan + INF, exemplified in (35), for which I am not aware of any diachronic
attestation. This circumstance, however, may be simply due to the scarcity of the diachronic
literature consulted for this language, so that I do not at present find myself in a position to
assess the relative chronology of the temporal and aspectual functions of gaan + INF. The dia-
chronic relations between these meanings will certainly form an interesting topic to be investi-
gated in the final dissertation.

(35) Hij gaat nu duidelijk beter spelen.

he goes now clearly better play
“He’s really starting to play better now.” (Van Olmen, Mortelmans and van der
Auwera 2009)

All the other functions reported in the literature have higher scope than future tense, i.e. they
scope either over the Propositional Content (p), which is the highest layer of the Representa-
tional Level, or over some layer of the Interpersonal Level. Below is a brief survey of these
functions.

(i) Inferential evidentiality (infer p) and subjective epistemic modality (epist p)

These two meanings are often confused in the semantic literature, the reason being that
they are indeed quite difficult to disentangle, at least in many Indo-European languages.
They can be respectively defined as relating to the way of knowing and the likelihood of
the proposition expressed (see Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 153-ff.). A good example
of the indeterminacy between the two meanings is provided by Portuguese sentences
such as (14b) and (15a) in Section 3.3.3.3, where both interpretations seem to be availa-
ble. In my opinion, however, the Romance synthetic future is generally more adequately
described as a proposition-oriented epistemic marker than as an inferential one, as is
shown in (36), where only the epistemic modifier certamente sounds fully acceptable:

84
 (36) [Noticing that Paulo’s car is parked in front of his house:]
O Paulo estará certamente / ?evidentemente em casa.
“Paulo will definitely be home.”

Given the difficulty of distinguishing between the two meanings, in the analysis of authen-
tic corpus examples the decision will be made case by case.

(ii) Genericity (gen p)

Another very widespread use of future tense markers is what is usually referred to as
“gnomic aspect”, “general truth” or “generic truth” (see footnote 69 in Section 4.1.2.1).
An often cited example is the English idiom Boys will be boys, which shows how construc-
tions expressing this kind of meaning cannot be simply labeled as future markers. Alt-
hough such uses have not been studied in the FDG framework, they seem to be adequate-
ly captured by the notion of proposition-oriented genericity, which Hengeveld and Mac-
kenzie (2008: 156) define as “an evidential subcategory, since it characterizes a Proposi-
tional Content as being part of the body of common knowledge available within a certain
community.” This category must not be confused with event-oriented genericity, which is
one type of event quantification and is not normally encoded by future markers, but ra-
ther by present tense forms (e.g. Dogs bark, see Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 179-
180).

(iii) Mirativity (mir p)

In Hengeveld and Mackenzie (2008: 72) mirativity was described as a type of illocution by
means of which “the Speaker expresses his surprise about the Propositional Content […]”;
however, later research by Olbertz (2012) and Hengeveld and Olbertz (2012) has shown
that mirativity is better understood as a proposition-oriented category, basically because
it can combine with different types of illocution and occur in restrictive relative clauses
(which do not have illocutionary force of their own). The only interaction between future
tense and mirativity cited for the languages of the sample is the ability of Greek θα + finite
V to combine with mirative assertions, which is referred to by Chondrogianni (2009,
2010). However, the author shows that this is a general characteristic of Greek indicative
mood, which means that the mirative meaning is not actually conveyed by the future con-
struction itself, but simply results from the combination of indicative forms with a particu-
lar clausal template. 79 Less controversial examples of a mirative function of future tense
are found in Italian, although this meaning seems to undergo similar linguistic constraints
as are observed in Greek, and thus cannot probably be regarded as a grammatical func-

79
“Mirative uses […] are expressed in indicative, with the optional use of an exclamative, combined with
intonation pattern 3 [=content interrogative]. Optionally the particle θα might be used to place the
utterance in time (future)” (Chondrogianni 2010: 177). Compare Τι ωραίο φόρεμα είναι αυτό!, “What a
beautiful dress this is!” (Chondrogianni 2010: 73) and Τι ωραίο φόρεμα θα φορέσει το κορίτσι μου!,
“What a beautiful dress my girl will wear” (Chondrogianni 2009: 323): the difference between the two
examples only concerns the time location of the Episode, and not the propositional attitude of the
speaker.

85
tion (which explains why the language-specific literature makes no explicit reference to
it). Differently from Greek, however, the contrast between the present and the future in-
dicative in Italian “exclamative” rhetorical questions is not a temporal one (see footnote),
but is only related to “the speaker’s emotional reaction to [a propositional] content” (see
Hengeveld et al. 2007):

(37) a. Ma quanto è bella Firenze!!

but how-much COP.PRES.3PS beautiful Florence
“How beautiful Florence is!”

b. Ma quanto sarà bella Firenze!! (Internet)

but how-much COP.FUT.3PS beautiful Florence
“Isn’t it impressive how beautiful Florence is?”

The expression in (37b) strongly reeks of true questions with the “epistemic future” (such
as Quanti anni avrà quel ragazzo?, “How old will that boy be?”), which explains why the
present/future opposition is neutralized in this type of structure. For this reason, my anal-
ysis of the mirative meaning of the Italian future will start from the hypothesis that this is
derived from the epistemic use of the construction and not directly from the future tense
one.

(iv) Reportative evidentiality (rep C)

Reportative evidentiality has been briefly remarked upon in 3.3.3.2, where we saw how
the Portuguese synthetic future can express this category under particular contextual
and/or co-textual circumstances (namely, genre and the presence of explicit lexemes). The
only other language in the sample in which a reportative use of a future marker is attested
is Swedish:

(38) Tony Blair ska ha gjort sin frus bästa vän (...) med barn.
Tony Blair FUT AUX.3S do.PTCP his wife.GEN.S best friend with child
“Tony Blair is said to have gotten his wife’s best friend pregnant.”
(Hilpert 2008a: 55)

(v) Imperative Illocution (F: IMP (F))

Grammaticalized Illocution markers are not the expression of operators but encode the
abstract head of the respective linguistic unit, i.e. precisely the Illocution layer (F) of the In-
terpersonal Level. That is to say, they do not qualify a linguistic unit which exists inde-
pendently (such as the Propositional Content in (36), which would be there even if no epis-
temic marker were used) but serve to specify the illocutionary value of the Discourse Act
they occur within: this is an obligatory operation, since there is no such thing as a “zero-
illocution” in natural languages. It is extremely common to use future markers to convey

86
 an imperative illocution, 80 although it is not clear whether Imperative occurs as a fully
grammaticalized function of any future tense construction in the languages of our sample
(see 3.3.3.1). Here is an example from Albanian:

(39) Ti do të shkosh vetë në Korçë, Demkë!

you FUT go.PRES.2S self PREP Korce Demke
“You will go to Korce yourself, Demke!” (Kramer 1994: 129)

(vi) Mitigated Illocution (mit F)

Unlike Illocution marking, which is obligatory for any Discourse Act, mitigation is an op-
tional operation which may be performed at the Illocution layer by means of grammatical
or lexical elements (i.e. by operators or modifiers, respectively). The so-called “politeness”
or “attenuating” uses of future markers belong to this category. Such uses are richly at-
tested for the future markers of the sample and can take scope either over declarative or
over directive Illocutions (or both), depending on the language. These two types of mitiga-
tion are exemplified below for Lithuanian and Russian respectively:

(40) Prisipažinsiu, kad tokio atsakymo nesitikejau (...).

confess.FUT.1S that this answer NEG.expect.PAST.1S
“I confess, this answer stuns me (…).” (M. Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita,
Parasol)

(41) Pit’ budete?

drink.INF.IPF FUT.2PL
“Will you have a drink?” (Trnavac 2006: 131)

Such examples show that the degree to which mitigative uses of future markers have
grammaticalized varies across languages. For instance, (41) seems to suggest a bridging-
context stage, as a future interpretation cannot be excluded, although a mitigated di-
rective act of offering undeniably provides a more plausible interpretation; by contrast,
(40) can hardly be interpreted as a statement about the future, since the State-of-Affairs
designated by the verb coincides with the speech act the speaker is executing.

(vii) Concession (A)Conc

Concession is a function which can be assigned to a subsidiary Discourse Act within a com-
bination of two or more Discourse Acts. Among the constructions considered here, it is on-
ly expressed by the Romance synthetic future (see Berretta 1997 and Paiva Boléo 1973)
and, like the reportative use of the Portuguese form, it is clearly derived from the older,
fully grammatical epistemic meaning (Bybee et al. 1994: 227; cf. also van der Auwera and
Plungian 1998: 96). (42) is an example from Italian:

80
According to Bybee et al. (1994: 273), imperative is cross-linguistically the most common alternative
use of future markers.

87
 (42) Avrà pure creato un impero televisivo. Ma non appena
AUX.FUT.3S also create.PRTCP a.M empire television-ADJ but as-soon-as
è andato al governo, ha messo in
AUX.PRES.3s go.PRTCP to-the.M government AUX.PRES.3S put.PRTCP in
mostra un’ incompetenza disastrosa
scene a.F incapacity catastrophic
“He may well have created a TV empire, but as soon as he entered the govern-
ment he proved to be catastrophically incompetent.”
(From Berretta 1997: 14, my translation)

Note that the clause containing the future tense form cannot be said to present the speak-
er’s assessment of the likelihood of the proposition expressed: this proposition is to all in-
tents and purposes a presupposition (i.e. it is assumed to be true), therefore the verb in-
flection can by no means be interpreted as an epistemic marker.

The meanings listed above can be incorporated into our map as in Figure 12:

(deo nec fc) (intent fc) (prosp fc)

(gen p)
(mir p)
(infer p)
(fac poss fc) (fac poss e) (post e) (fut ep) (epist p) (A)Conc

(rep C)
(ingress fc) (F: IMP (F))
(mit F)

Figure 12: To Future and beyond.

Note that the imperative and mirative functions are linked to the previous stages by dashed,
not solid, arrows: as in Figures 10-11, this is intended to suggest that the grammaticalization of
these meanings cannot be shown to have proceeded beyond the bridging-context stage in any
language. Such a development, however, is not excluded a priori, since both meanings have
higher scope than the grammatical functions they originate from. 81 Also note that the operator
representing the subjective epistemic uses of future tenses is left unspecified for modal force,
since this can vary from certainty (i.e. “strong necessity”) to “conjecture” (i.e. “weak possibil-
ity”) both across and within the languages whose future markers display epistemic meanings.
Due to limits of space, it is not possible to go into the details of the multifunctionality of
each construction in the contemporary languages – which anyway could not be done in an
exhaustive way at this point of the research. Nonetheless, this brief overview of the meanings
that can be conveyed by future tense markers in Indo-European languages has served to show
that the most recent developments of their semantics (and pragmatics, with the extension to
interpersonal functions) are generally consistent with their past evolution as grammatical con-

81
Here, imperative and mirative are only represented as FDG operators in order to render these scope
relations explicit.

88
structions: all of these developments apparently follow from the diachronic predictions of both
FDG and Semantic Maps, as presented in this chapter (see 4.2.1 and 4.2.2.2). The map in Fig-
ure 12 and the scope relations described in it can thus be taken as the point of departure for
the synchronic analysis to be undertaken in the next chapter, which will be entirely devoted to
investigating the multifunctionality of two constructions: Greek θα + non-past and Swedish ska
+ INF. The functional patterns exhibited by the two constructions in the contemporary lan-
guages will be described with examples and explained on the basis of the extended FDG model
outlined in Chapter 3; the synchronic relations between the separate meanings of these con-
struction will then be compared with the proposed diachrony-based map, which will allow us
to verify the predictions of the map itself and thus to assess its cross-linguistic validity.

5. Synchronic analysis: applying the extended FDG model to corpus data

5.1. A comparative analysis of Greek θα + non-past and Swedish ska + infinitive

The purpose of this chapter is to show how the model defined in Chapter 3 can be used in the
qualitative analysis of real synchronic data from different languages and constructions. With
this goal in mind, I will describe and categorize the possible uses of Greek θα + non-past finite
verb 82 and Swedish ska(ll) + INF. The various meanings that can be conveyed by the two con-
structions will be characterized in FDG terms and analyzed with respect to the linguistic and
contextual conditions necessary for their emergence, which will be done in a comparative vein
on the basis of their occurrences in two complete books (Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) plus six chapters of
Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (corresponding to roughly 80 pages). The trans-
lations are taken from the Parasol and Intercorp databases, with the exception of the Swedish
translation of The Master and Margarita, which was downloaded from the Internet. All trans-
lations are dated after 1965, so they ensure a quite up-to-date sample of the contemporary
languages. The main pivot-language used in this study is English, but comparison with transla-
tions into other languages will also be employed in doubtful cases, in order to identify the ex-
act meaning of the construction at stake or to assess the grammatical, “proto-grammatical” or
inferential status of that meaning (see Section 3.3.3.). As the main aim of the chapter is to
illustrate the working of the model, no numerical data will be presented as regards the fre-
quency of the two constructions and their respective meanings. These meanings will be pre-
sented and discussed in the following sections, starting from the lowest-scope ones, which
involve the Configurational Property layer of the Representational Level.

82
The system of Greek finite verbal forms is based on a temporal distinction and an aspectual one, each
of which includes two possible values: past/non-past and perfective/imperfective respectively. The
combination of the two distinctions results in four distinct forms, each of which can combine with a
range of particles, among which is the so-called “Future tense” marker θα. Since only the θα + non-past
forms can express future time reference, our analysis will be limited to the two constructions usually
labeled “Simple Future” (i.e. θα + non-past perfective) and “Continuous Future” (i.e. θα + non-past im-
perfective).

89
 5.1.1. Intention (intent fc)

It was argued in 4.2.2.2 that the cross-linguistic propensity of future tense markers to convey
intention meanings does not necessarily mean that this is a grammatical function of those
markers. This would undoubtedly be the case if an intention interpretation could emerge in
contexts in which a purely temporal one is not available (see footnote 76), but no such case
has been attested in the data consulted so far. The Greek and Swedish constructions which
form the topic of this chapter are no exception in this sense. Both can, however, convey an
intention meaning in bridging contexts, i.e. in contexts where a future interpretation is always
possible and which invariably present a precise bundle of enabling conditions. As is usual in
bridging contexts, these must be understood as necessary conditions and not as necessary and
sufficient ones.
Generally speaking, these enabling conditions are the controlled nature of the event des-
ignated by the main verb and the animacy of the participant bearing the Actor function. Both
are general conceptual notions which are not systematically reflected by the grammars of ei-
ther Greek or Swedish. Moreover, the latter factor, animacy of the Actor, requires some fur-
ther categorization: first, an intention meaning is much more common with first and second
person subjects than with third person ones; secondly, it is especially common in assertions
with first person subject and in questions with second person subject. This means that an addi-
tional, particularly strong enabling condition for the emergence of this meaning must be con-
sidered which is purely linguistic in nature: putting it in FDG terms, this additional condition is
that the Referential Subact corresponding to the Actor at the Interpersonal Level bears the
[+Speaker] feature in Declarative Discourse Acts and the [+Addressee] feature in Interrogative
ones. A very clear example of the former case is (42), from Greek, where the intention mean-
ing is strongly foregrounded by the second sentence:

(42) Απόψε, λοιπόν, θα περάσω την καταπακτή. Ό

tonight then FUT go-through.NONPAST.PFV.1S DET.FS.ACC hatch
τι κι αν πείτε εσείς οι δύο, δεν πρόκειται να με σταματήσετε!

“I'm going through that trapdoor tonight and nothing you two say is going to stop
me!”

Given the enabling conditions identified above, a formal representation of the process under-
lying the inferential reinterpretation of θα + non-past in (42) would be as in Figure 12 below.
The grammatical and extra-linguistic elements which contribute to the inferential mechanism
are highlighted in red within the Contextual Component, while the resulting meaning of inten-
tion is highlighted in bold font. In this configuration, it is not necessary to represent the anima-
cy condition explicitly, since this can be subsumed under the [+S] feature in the head of (RI)
(put simply, if the referent of this Subact is the speaker herself, it is obvious that this referent
will be an animate entity). 83

83
Inside the Grammatical Component, the IL and RL representations are aligned in order to make explic-
it the mapping relations between the relevant interpersonal and semantic units. At the Morphosyntactic
Level, περάσω is treated as a Verbal Word and not as a Verb Phrase because non-past perfective forms
never occur on their own, but must necessarily be preceded by a particle. In order to facilitate the read-

90
 Grammatical Component
IL: (AI: [(FI: DECL (FI)) ... (CI: [ ... (RI [+S] (RI)) ... ] (CI))] (AI))
c
RL: (pi: (fut epi: (ei: (f i: [ ... (xi)A ... ]... (pi))

ML: (Lei: ... (Vpi: [(Gwi: θα (Gwi)) (Vwi:–Περ-ά-σ-ω–(Vwi))] ((Vpi)) ... (Lei))

Long-term knowledge
Contextual Component

Controlled Event 1 Discoursal information

(“περνώ”)
IL: (AI:[(FI: DECL (FI))...(CI[... (RI [+S] (RI)...] (CI))] (AI))
RL: (pi: (fut epi: (ei: (fci: [... (xi)A ...]... (pi))

(ei) = Controlled Event 1

Inferred information
RL: (pi: (epi: (ei: (intent fci: […]) (ei)) (epi)) (pi))

Figure 12: Intention interpretation of Greek θα + non-past perfective in Απόψε, λοιπόν, θα περάσω την
καταπακτή.

Before leaving the intention meaning of the Greek θα + non-past and Swedish ska + INF, it will
be interesting to note that the latter is often referred to as the preferred choice for the ex-
pression of intention, when compared with the concurrent construction kommer att + INF (see
Holmes and Serin 1990: 98-99 and Hilpert 2006, 2008a). Our data confirm that, in the division
of labor between these two constructions, ska + INF is indeed much more commonly used with
verbs denoting volitional actions. This is evident in the fact that Swedish is, together with Lith-
uanian, the only language in my dataset in which a future tense marker is used to translate the
passage corresponding to (17), repeated here as (43); as mentioned in 3.3.3.4, all the other
languages employ a lexical volitional verb in that passage (including the original language of
the book, Russian).

(43) Det är priset för ens lögner, och jag skall aldrig
3NS COP.PRES price.DEF for INDEF.GEN lie.INDEF.PL and I FUT never
ljuga mer.
lie.INF more

“This is how one pays for lying – she said – and I don’t want to lie anymore”

ing of the grammatical representations, I omit all the units, operators and modifiers which are not strict-
ly necessary for the reinterpretation of the future marker.

91
Nonetheless, there is no evidence whatsoever that ska + INF is a grammaticalized intention
markers in Swedish, since, as said above, it is not encountered in any context in which a future
tense interpretation is unavailable, or even simply unlikely.
On the other hand, the distinction between ska + INF and kommer att + INF is not as neat
with third person subjects as it is when the speaker is talking about her own future actions or
enquiring about the addressee’s intentions. Actually, although this contrast is not mentioned
in the literature consulted, the data analyzed for this study suggest that quite the opposite
situation may hold, that is, kommer att + INF is used more than ska + INF for referring to the
intentions of a third person referent. A good example to illustrate this opposition is (44),
where the two constructions appear side by side: a volitional interpretation is ostensibly more
prominent with the de-venitive future than with the de-obligative one, as this conveys a sense
of scheduling (which may be considered as a sub-type of future tense marking) rather than one
of intention:

(44) Snape ska vara domare den här gången, och han kommer att leta
Snape FUT COP.INF referee DET.S here time.DEF
efter minstaförevändning att knipa bort poäng från Gryffindor!

Snape's refereeing this time, and he'll be looking for any excuse to knock points off
Gryffindor!

5.1.2. Obligation (deo nec fc)

Participant-oriented obligation is another very common function of future tense markers. As

with intention, the logical link between future time reference and obligation is fairly evident
(to the extent that some authors see both volitional and deontic modality as inherently future-
oriented or “future-projecting”, see Ziegeler 2008: 44): in time-specific (i.e. non-generic) situa-
tions, a statement or question about the duties of a participant generally implies that “the
predicated action will logically be carried out, if it is to be carried out at all, at some future (or
posterior) moment” (Fleischman 1982: 59). On the one hand, this logical link lies at the basis of
the diachronic development of future markers out of obligation ones; on the other, it makes it
possible to use full-fledged future markers to insist on the realization of the action in contexts
which, by themselves, make it clear that this action is an obligatory one. This is how future
tense markers come to be used to convey a sense of obligation, by implicature, in bridging
contexts. For this to be possible, the only inescapable requirement is that there is a source of
authority which imposes the realization of the State-of-Affairs. This authority may or may not
coincide with one of the speech participants but, in any it case, the speaker must assume it to
be represented in the Contextual Component in order to use a future tense marker as an ex-
pression of obligation. One example is (45), from the Greek translation of Harry Potter, where
the speaker is not the source of the authority but is reminding the addressee of the punish-
ment he has been given for infringing the school rules:

(45) A – “Αρνούμαι να πάω στο δάσος!” είπε κατηγορηματικά. […]

92
 B – “Θα πας, αν θέλεις να
FUT go.NONPAST.2S if want.NONPAST.IPF.2S SBJV
μείνεις στο ‘Χόγκουαρτς’!”
stay.NONPAST.PFV.2PS PREP+DET.MS Hogwarts

A – “I'm not going in that forest, he said […].”

B – “Yeh are if yeh want ter stay at Hogwarts […].”

One may argue that, in (45), the future marker is used to give an order rather than to convey
obligation. In such contexts as (45) there is undeniably some ambiguity in this respect, alt-
hough neither the imperative nor the deontic interpretation is incompatible with the future
tense one (which confirms that the latter is the underlying grammatical function of θα + non-
past in this kind of contexts); but no such ambiguity arises in (46), where the speaker, who is
the source of authority, is warning the addressee about a punishment he may be given:

(46) […]σε προειδοποιώ, λέω, πως αν κάνεις

2S.OBJ warn.NONPAST.1S say.NONPAST.IPF.1S COMPL if do.NONPAST.2S
τίποτα, έστω και το παραμικρό, θα μείνεις
anything even and DET.NS smallest.NS FUT stay.NON-PAST.PFV.2PS
στην αποθήκη από τώρα ως τα Χριστούγεννα!
PREP+DET.FS.ACC cupboard PREP now PREP DET.N.PL Christmas

“I'm warning you now, boy – any funny business, anything at all – and you'll be in
that cupboard from now until Christmas.”

Although many similar contexts are found in the Swedish data, the situation here is quite dif-
ferent, since ska + INF does not only occur in bridging contexts such as (45)-(46) but appears as
a fully grammaticalized marker of obligation (and of non-epistemic necessity in general, as we
will see below). This is evident in examples such as (47), where no prediction that the desig-
nated situation will hold can be attributed to the speaker (Alice), since the latter is complaining
about an event (the behavior of a living wicket during the famous croquet match with the
Queen) precisely because this event prevents her from accomplishing the action denoted by
the ska-construction: 84

(47) Där på andra sidan planen går till exempel som

there PREP other side.DEF ground.DEF go.PRES PREP example REL
bågen jag ska igenom nästa gang.
arch.DEF I MOD PREP next time

“For instance, there's the arch I've got to go through next walking about at the oth-
er end of the ground.”

84
(47) is also noteworthy in that it exemplifies a particular use of ska, which can express motion in space
when combining with certain prepositions (as igenom, ‘through’), even if no verb of movement is pre-
sent. This process may represent a case of degrammaticalization (cf. Norde 2009: 126-ff. for some pos-
sibly similar cases in the Germanic family) and will not be discussed here.

93
Although in this case ska + INF cannot be interpreted as a future marker, if one were to as-
sume that the deontic meaning of the construction diachronically derives from the future
tense one, (47) could theoretically be seen as a switch context, because the rules of the game
represent an external authority imposing the realization of the event denoted by the main
verb. An analogous example is (48), from Harry Potter: 85

(48) [...]men håll inte på å babbla om de här inne, de[=det] e[=är] inte meningen
DEF.NS COP.PRES not purport.DEF
att eleverna ska veta om de[=det]
COMPL student.DEF.PL MOD know.INF PREP DEF.NS

“[…] but don’ go rabbitin’ about it in here, students aren’ s’pposed ter know.” [lit.
“the idea is not that students should know”]

Ska + INF is also used in several idioms, among which the following three examples:

(49) ‘Den lille rackaren vill ha valuta för pengarna, precis som far sin. Så ska det
so MOD DEF.3NS
låta, Dudley!’ Han rufsade Dudley i håret.
sound.INF

‘Little tyke wants his money's worth, just like his father. ‘Atta boy, Dudley!’ He ruf-
fled Dudley's hair. [lit. “that’s what that should sound like”]

(50) Tror han va[=var] riktigt glad å bli av

think.PRES 3S.NOM COP.PAST really gad COMPL COP.INF without
me[=med] de[=det], om jag ska va[=vara] ärlig.
PREP 3S.OBJ if I MOD COP.INF honest

“Think he was quite glad ter get rid of it, ter be honest.” [lit. ‘if I have to be honest’]

(51) Tack ska du ha, sade Alice.

thank MOD 2S.NOM have.INF say.PAST Alice

“‘Thank you,’ said Alice.” [lit. “you must receive thanks”, “you are to be thanked”]

All these formulaic expressions have different (and unrelated) interpersonal meanings as such,
but ska + INF arguably functions as an obligation marker in all of them. Note that in such cases
no obvious source of authority can be assumed to be represented in the Contextual Compo-
nent at the time of the utterance (except possibly in (49), where a father is talking to his son),
which means that the obligation meaning of the construction is not subject to the contextual
constraint which licenses a deontic interpretation in bridging contexts such as (45)-(46).

85
In the English original, the character speaking in this passage speaks with a local accent, which has
been reproduced by the Swedish translator. Here, the correct spelling is given between brackets, when
necessary, in order to make each word recognizable.

94
 In other cases, the modal meaning expressed by the construction does not seem to be
participant-oriented, but rather event-oriented in scope. This further uses of Swedish ska + INF
will be the object of the next section.

5.1.3. Event-oriented necessity (nec e)

As is common for participant-oriented modal markers (see van der Auwera and Plungian
1998), ska + INF has extended its functional range by taking up event-oriented meanings as
well.
Deontic event-oriented necessity (deo nec e) contrasts with its participant-oriented coun-
terpart in that “the obligations expressed by means of deontic event-oriented modality do not
rest upon a particular participant, but represent general rules of conduct. This sense of general
applicability can most clearly be identified in impersonal expressions […]” (Hengeveld and
Mackenzie 2008: 176). In Swedish, this meaning is most evident in examples such as the fol-
lowing (a pun invented by the translator to render Carroll’s one):

(52) Det kallas lektioner […] därför att man ska leka
DEF.NS call.PASS lection.INDEF.PL because INDEF MOD play.INF
på dem.
PREP DEF.PL.OBJ

“That’s the reason they’re called lessons, […] because they lessen from day to day.”
[lit. “because one must play on them”]

Neither a participant-oriented nor a future tense reading is possible in (52), since the stated
“rule of conduct” does not apply to a specific participant, but is presented as a generally valid
one; accordingly, the State-of-Affairs denoted by ska leka can only be interpreted as express-
ing generic time reference. Note that time reference is also generic in (48) above, which how-
ever expresses participant-oriented, not event-oriented modality, as the obligation is imposed
on one particular set of individuals (the students of the “Hogwarts” school).
Ska + INF also displays event-oriented uses which cannot be classified as deontic but seem
to express facultative event-oriented necessity (fac nec e). In FDG, this type of modality corre-
sponds to what is more commonly referred to as “root”, “circumstantial” or “non-deontic par-
ticipant-external” necessity (see Coates 1983, Kratzer 1991 and van der Auwera and Plungian
1998 respectively): 86 it “characterizes States-of-Affairs in terms of the physical or circumstan-
tial enabling conditions on their occurrence” (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 176). This
meaning may be detected in Greek examples such as (52), again from Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland:

86
The term “facultative” aims to encompass both this meaning and its participant-oriented counterpart,
which comprises such values as ability (i.e. participant-internal facultative possibility) and “internal
need” (i.e. participant-internal facultative necessity). On the one hand, these cannot be defined as “cir-
cumstantial” in any sense, as they relate to the inherent capacities and needs of the target participant;
as for “root modality”, the confusion about this term in the literature is such that it seems preferable to
avoid it entirely.

95
 (52) Ω Ποντικέ, μήπως ξέρεις πώς θα βγούμε
oh Mouse.AFF perhaps know.NONPAST.2S how FUT exit.NONPAST.PFV.1PL
απ αυτήν την λίμνη;
PREP this.FS DET.FS lake

“O Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool?” [lit. “how we will get out”]

It must be noted, however, that neither a future interpretation of θα + non-past nor an event-
oriented possibility interpretation can be ruled out in this context. Moreover, the rarity of such
uses of the construction – this is the only case attested in our data – suggests that no faculta-
tive event-oriented function is associated with the Greek future marker except very sporadical-
ly, which, in keeping with the criteria presented in 3.3.3.1, should therefore not be regarded as
bridging contexts (see criteria (i) and (ii) in particular).
Again, the situation is much different in Swedish. Compare (52) and (53), which is the
Swedish translation of the same English sentence:

(53) O, råtta, vet du hur man ska komma upp ur

oh mouse know.PRES 2S.NOM how INDEF.NOM MOD come.INF PREP PREP
den här sjön?
DET.S here lake.DEF

Lit. “how one must come up out of this lake.”

As in (51) above, the indefinite marker man makes it clear that the speaker is not referring to
the hic et nunc of the current situation but to the general, time-stable conditions to which the
realization of the denoted event is subject: as a consequence, future tense is not a possible
interpretation of ska + INF in this context. At the same time, indefinite reference excludes any
interpretation in terms of participant-oriented modality. However, indeterminacy of the sub-
ject is not a strictly necessary condition for the emergence of the event-oriented functions of
ska + INF, which suggests that we are not dealing with a switch-context meaning here, but with
a fully conventionalized one – which, as such, is not subject to particular linguistic or situation-
al constraints, see 3.3.3.3. This can be observed in (54) (expressing facultative necessity),
where the subject is definite and identifiable.

(54) A – Allt vi behöver finns här, på det här papperet. Sju flaskor: tre är gift; två är vin;
en kommer att ta oss oskadda genom den svarta elden och en kommer att ta
oss tillbaka genom den purpurröda.
B – Men hur vet vi vilka vi ska dricka?
but how know.PRES 1PL.NOM which.PL 1PL.NOM MOD drink.INF

A – “Everything we need is here on this paper. Seven bottles: three are poison; two
are wine; three are poison; two are wine; one will get us safely through the
black fire, and one will get us back through the purple.”
B – “But how do we know which to drink?” [lit. “which we must drink”]

96
Although both the matrix verb and the structure of the embedded clause are exactly the same
as in the Greek example (52), in (54) a future tense interpretation would be quite nonsensical.
As a matter of fact, of the other 13 translations in the corpus, 5 (including the Greek one) use
an explicit necessity marker in this passage and 7 employ a different subordinate construction
which, in the given context, can also convey a “covert” modal meaning of necessity (such as
the corresponding embedded infinitives in English, Portuguese and Russian): 87 no translator
uses an explicit future marker. The reason for this is that in (54) the speaker is enquiring about
the object of the intentional action (to drink) which he and the addressee must perform in
order to obtain a certain result (namely to get past the black fire): in this context, asking “How
do we know which we will drink?” would somehow suggest that this action is not (or not en-
tirely) under the control of the Actor, which is obviously not the case. In (52), by contrast, the
speaker does not mention the controlled action(s) to be performed in order to attain her goal,
but directly asks “how” (πώς) the goal-situation will come about – which legitimates the ad-
dressee’s inferring a question about the actions that must (or can) be carried out in pursuing
that goal. Thus, differently from (54), a question in the future indicative (“Do you know how
we will get out of this pool?”) provides a perfectly adequate paraphrase of the original sen-
tence: this is precisely because the modal meaning is not grammatically expressed by the
Greek construction but can only be inferred from its temporal meaning in the adequate con-
text.

5.1.4. Future tense (fut ep)

Future tense is the overwhelmingly dominant function of both θα + non-past and ska + INF. It
should be acknowledged, however, that the frequency of this function is much higher with the
Greek construction than with the Swedish one. The reason for this is twofold: on the one hand,
the other grammaticalized meanings of ska + INF occur with a remarkably high frequency,
when compared to those of θα + non-past (which will be introduced in the following sections);
on the other, Swedish speakers have a striking variety of markers at their disposal for the ex-
pression of simple future (ska + INF, kommer att + INF, får + INF, the present indicative and
the future copula blir), 88 while the functional opposition between θα + non-past and the other
Greek constructions which can convey future-referring (or “future-oriented”) meanings re-
flects a much neater division of labor.
In the previous sections, we have seen a few examples of bridging contexts in which a
basically temporal use of a future marker invites an inference foregrounding a modal interpre-
tation; we have also seen that the meanings emerging in such contexts (intention and, for
Greek θα + non-past, obligation) are never found in contexts in which a future tense reading of
the construction under analysis can be reasonably ruled out. Given these presuppositions, one
may expect to find many occurrences of future tense markers in which no additional reading
or overtone can be detected; but, in practice, finding uncontroversial examples of this kind is
not an easy task. This is doubtless the reason why so many different approaches have found
their way into the discussion on the semantics of future tenses (from “purely modal” accounts

87
The Romanian translation stands alone in choosing the possibility marker a putea.
88
With no prejudice to the fact that each of these constructions also has other uses, which are not al-
ways compatible with a future tense interpretation.

97
such as Giannakidou 2012 on Greek θα + finite verb to “purely temporal” ones such as Kissine
2008 on English will + V). At any rate, as far as I can see, there is not one single meaning which
is co-present with future time reference in all (or even in most) occurrences of such markers as
those considered here, which, in our model, would have meant that these constructions do
not have Future tense among their grammatical functions.
The following two examples are among the corpus tokens of θα + non-past and ska + INF
which come closest to an ideal “neutral” future type. Both come from Harry Potter transla-
tions. In (55), the teacher is communicating to a pupil a decision she has just made, but a voli-
tional interpretation must definitely be excluded, since the subject of the Vp headed by θα is
an inanimate one. In (56) the speaker makes reference to an oracle’s prophecy, thus express-
ing a type of future time reference which, in principle, should not be liable to any interpreta-
tion other than pure “prediction” (unless one considers that “predestination” is a modal notion
belonging to the category of “alethic” modality, as is argued by Kronning 1990, 1996, 2001 and
Bourova and Tasmowski 2007). 89

(55) ‘Δεσποινίς Γκρέιντζερ’, συνέχισε η καθηγήτρια σε

miss Granger continue.PAST.PFV.3S DET.FS teacher.FS PREP
αυστηρό τόνο , ‘πέντε βαθμοί θ’ αφαιρεθούν
strict intonation five point.PL FUT be-subtracted.NONPAST.PFV.3PL
απ’ το Γκρίφιντορ για τούτη την περιπέτεια.’
PREP DET.NS Gryffindor PREP this.FS DEF.FS.OBJ adventure

“ ‘Miss Granger, five points will be taken from Gryffindor for this’, said Professor
McGonagall.”

(56) […] han talade om att lägga sig i vad

3FS.NOM speak.PAST PREP COMPL put.INF REFL PREP what
planeterna sager ska hända…
planet.PL.DEF say.PRES FUT happen.INF

“[…] he was talking about interfering with what the planets say is going to hap-
pen....”

5.1.5. Past posterior (past ep: (post e) ep))

We saw in 4.1.2.1 that Ancient Greek (ἐ)θέλω + INF is among the few constructions which
seem to have developed from a participant-internal volitive marker directly into a marker of
future tense, “bypassing” the relative tense stage. Given this presupposition, it is, in principle,
quite surprising to ascertain that the modern future marker θα + non-past, which derives from
that Ancient Greek construction, can express a future-in-the-past meaning, although very spo-
radically, in two of the three books in our sample. In fact, while the overwhelming majority of

89
Note that in the English original a go-future is used for the reported prophecy in (56), which lends
support to the idea that this construction can function as a full-fledged future marker in present-day
English (see 4.1.2.1).

98
the future-in-the-past contexts are rendered in Greek with the θα + past construction, there
also is a small number of uncontroversial examples in which θα + non-past is used for this
function. Of these, four are attested in Harry Potter and five in The Master and Margarita.
These are cases in which the event denoted by the main verb is located posterior to a co-
textually given reference time but prior to the time of speech and in which the speaker knows
with certainty that this event has indeed taken place:

(57) Εγώ προσωπικά το ‘ξερα πως θα

I personally DEF.NS know.PAST.PFV.1S COMPL PAST.POST
‘χουν κακό τέλος.
have.NONPAST.3PL bad.NS end.NS

“[I] always knew they'd come to a sticky end.”

(58) Ό Πιλάτο πρόσθεσε πώς θά επιστρέψει

DET.MS Pilate.MS add.PAST.PFV.3S COMPL PAST.POST return.NONPAST.PFV.3S
αμέσω καί ό ϊδιος […].
Immediately and DET.MS self.MS

“To this Pilate added that he himself would come out to the garden at once”

Given that θα + non-past does not appear to have any grammaticalized meaning with lower
semantic scope than future tense and that future in the past is not attested as a function of
the construction at previous stages of its development, this meaning can only be logically as-
sumed to have developed out of the future tense one. But this does not mean that such a de-
velopment, if it has indeed taken place, should represent a counterexample to the scope-
increase hypothesis. In fact, all of the nine future-in-the-past uses of θα + non-past in our cor-
pus occur in subordinate clauses embedded under declarative or epistemic predicate: in FDG,
the complement of such predicates is analyzed as a Propositional Content (p), and not only a
State-of-Affairs (e). 90 This means that the representational configuration encoded in the struc-
tures in which θα + non-past functions as a future in the past always contains an episode, and,
as a matter of fact, in such contexts the construction does not merely serve to indicate that the
State-of-Affairs is posterior to that denoted by the matrix predicate, but also to locate the epi-
sode containing that State-of-Affairs in the past relative to the moment of speech. Conse-
quently, the construction should be characterized as (past ep: (post e) ep)) and not simply as
(post e), which entails that no scope narrowing is involved in the passage from future tense to
future in the past: this development would rather consist in the acquisition of absolute-relative
tense functions (see 4.1.2.1) on the part of a construction that could formerly only express
absolute tense.
Given the obvious logical link between future and posteriority, it will not be surprising
that a development such as (fut ep) > (past ep: (post e) ep)) can take place in natural lan-
guages. What is somewhat unexpected about this semantic extension is that the absolute time

90
The reason for this analysis is that the complement of most epistemic and declarative predicates can
contain proposition-oriented adverb such as maybe, perhaps, evidently, etc. (see Hengeveld and Mac-
kenzie 2008: 363-364).

99
location function of θα + non-past is completely reversed from future to past. However, if ade-
quate contexts for this evolution can be identified in authentic data, I do not see any real theo-
retical problem with such a reversal. Now, as noted above, all the corpus occurrences in which
θα + non-past undeniably functions as a future-in-the-past are found in the same syntactico-
semantic environment – the complement clause of a declarative or epistemic predicate –
which suggests that the developmental stage reached by this meaning may be considered to
be that of switch contexts. There also are a few cases in which, in this same structure, the
meaning of the construction is ambiguous between a future-in-the-past reading and a simple
future one, i.e., in which the embedded event could be interpreted as taking place either in the
past or in the future, or even, with atelic State-of-Affairs, as beginning in the past and continu-
ing into the future. In my opinion, it is possible that such contexts have functioned as a bridg-
ing context, since they allow for both a simple future and a future-in-the-past interpretation.
One example would be (59), with the “future continuous” (i.e. θα + non-past imperfective),
where the speaker is referring to an action which arguably began in the past and which he
plans to be performing also in the future:

(59) Ναι, αυτό είναι το καλύτερο... Δε θα κάνουμε τίποτα![…] Δεν ορκιστήκαμε,

not swear.PAST.PFV.1PL
όταν τον πήραμε στο σπίτι , πως δε
when DEF.M.ACC take.PAST.PFV.1PL PREP+DET.NS home.NS COMPL not
θ' ανεχόμαστε καμιά απ’ αυτές
PAST.POST tolerate.NONPAST.IPF.1PL by-no-means PREP DEF.F.PL.ACC
τις επικίνδυνες ανοησίες;
DET.F.PL.ACC dangerous.F.PL.ACC rubbish.F.PL.ACC

“Yes, that's best... we won't do anything… […] Didn't we swear when we took him in
we'd stamp out that dangerous nonsense?” [lit. “we would/will not be tolerating”]

5.1.6. Epistemic proposition-oriented modality (epist p) and inferential evidentiality

(infer p)

Contrary to the deontic and facultative necessity meanings seen in 5.1.2-5.1.3, which are
found as fully grammatical functions with Swedish ska + INF but not with Greek θα + non-past,
only the latter seems to have grammaticalized proposition-oriented meanings.
Ska + INF is sometimes used in contexts which allow an inference foregrounding an epis-
temic sense of conjecture or probability. One such case is when the construction is accompa-
nied by proposition-oriented modifiers such as maybe, perhaps, possibly, etc. or is embedded
under an epistemic predicate such as think, wonder, etc.

(60) Eller måhända ni i Slytherin ni era vänner

or maybe 2PL.NOM PREP Slytherin 2PL.NOM your.PL friend.INDEF.PL
ska finna, där sluga rävar nyttjar alla knep att sina mål vinna.
FUT find.INF

100
 “Or perhaps in Slytherin / You’ll make your real friends, / Those cunning folk use
any means / To achieve their ends.”

Linguistic variables such as the presence of epistemic adverbials or matrix predicates may rep-
resent the defining elements of one possible bridging context for the rise of true epistemic
markers out of future tense ones. At any rate, in our corpus, ska + INF is only found in combi-
nation with such elements in contexts in which the designated State-of-Affairs undoubtedly
takes place in the future.
Clearer cases of bridging context are those in which a State-of-Affairs which is predicted
to occur in the future can be interpreted as already holding at the moment of speech. It goes
without saying that one linguistic requirement for such an interpretation is that the predicate
occurring with the future marker is an atelic one. In addition, this kind of context appears to be
invariantly characterized by another enabling condition, namely that the truth of the proposi-
tion expressed will be verified in the future (so that the construction could be paraphrased as
“will turn out to V”). This is evidently not a linguistic variable but one that lies in the short-term
episodic knowledge of the speech participants about the designated event. Corpus data show
that such contexts are quite common for Greek θα + non-past, as can be seen in the following
example, where Alice, talking to herself, is weighing the possible reasons for visiting either the
Hatter or the March Hare:

(61) Έχω ξαναδεί καπελάδες, είπε μέσα της· ο Μαρτιάτικος

DEF.MS.NOM March.ADJ.MS.NOM
Λαγός Θα είναι πολύ πιο ενδιαφέρων […].
hare.MS.NOM FUT/MOD COP.NONPAST.3S much more interesting.MS.NOM

“‘I've seen hatters before,’ she said to herself: ‘the March Hare will be much the
most interesting […].’”

A similar case is (62), where the speaker is talking about a cake he and the addressee are about
to eat:

(62) Μπορεί να ζουλήχτηκε λίγο, αλλά η γεύση

can.NONPAST.IPF3S SBJV squeeze.PASS.PAST.PFV a bit but DET.FS taste.FS
θα είναι εντάξει…
FUT/MOD COP.NONPAST.3S ok

“I mighta sat on it at some point, but it'll taste all right.” [lit. “the taste will be all-
right”]

It must be noted, however, that the bridging-context status of such examples is not clear in
languages like Greek, in which the future tense marker also has fully conventionalized epistem-
ic functions (see below): in fact, if θα + non-past is truly polysemous – i.e. if it has both future
tense and epistemic modality as grammatical meanings – it could also be argued that the con-
struction is used as an epistemic marker in (61)-(62), while the fact that the situation also holds

101
in the future may be inferred from the stative nature of the predicates ενδιαφέρων (‘interest-
ing’) and εντάξει (‘OK’). 91
In the semantics literature, it has been proposed that the future verification of the truth
of a proposition represents the inherent grammatical meaning of future-derived epistemic
markers such as English will + V (Boland 2006: 146) and the French synthetic future (see Rocci
2000: 249-250). My analysis is different in this respect, as I would rather see the future verifi-
cation of the proposition expressed as a necessary condition for the emergence of an epistem-
ic meaning, not only in bridging contexts of the type of (58)-(59), but also in switch contexts
such as (63)-(64):

(63) Φαντάζομαι όμως πως θα το ξέρετε

suppose.NONPAST.IPF.1S however COMPL MOD DET.NS know.NONPAST.2PL
ήδη κι αυτό.
already and DEF.NS

“I s’ppose yeh’ve worked that out an’ all?” [lit. “that you will already know”]

(64) A – Κοίταξε, όμως, ποια κάρτα είναι μέσα στο κουτί. Μου λείπει ο Αγρίππας και…
B – Ποιος σου λείπει;
A – Α, ναι, ξέχασα πως εσύ δε θα το
oh yes forget.PAST.PFV.1S COMPL 2S.NOM not MOD DEF.NS
ξέρεις. Οι σοκολατένιοι βάτραχοι, λοιπόν,έχουν μέσα σε
know.NONPAST.2S
κάθε κουτί μια κάρτα με τη φωτογραφία κάποιου διάσημου μάγου [...]

A – “But see what the card is. I'm missing Agrippa.

B – What?
A – Oh, of course, you wouldn't know – Chocolate Frogs have cards, inside them,
you know, to collect – famous witches and wizards.” [lit “I forgot that you will
not know”]

In both these examples a future interpretation is excluded. In (63), it is ruled out by the pres-
ence of the adverbial ήδη (‘already’); in (64) the State-of-Affairs denoted by the main predicate
ξέρω (‘know’) cannot be understood as continuing after the time of speech, since the speaker
immediately begins the explanation of what he assumes the addressee does not know. In both
cases, however, there is the assumption that the proposition expressed by the clause contain-
ing the future marker will be verified immediately after the production of the speech act, since
in this kind of statements the addressee is expected (or even requested) to confirm or deny
the truth of that proposition.
In many other cases, however, there is no expectation that the proposition expressed may
ever be verified, and this is the reason why we can affirm that the epistemic function is a fully

91
It is because of this ambiguity that θα is glossed as “FUT/MOD” in the two examples.

102
grammaticalized one for θα + non-past. One example is (65), from The Master and Margari-
ta: 92

(65) Μά είναι τόσο ωραία τώρα στήν Κλιάζμα, κέντρισε τούς παρόντες ό ‘Πηδαλιούχος
Ζώρζ’, ξέροντας πώς οί βίλες τών συγγραφέων στό Περελίγκινο, στήν Κλιάζμα,
αποτελούσαν τό ευαίσθητο σημείο δλων . Τώρα πού θά
Now REL MOD
κελαϊδούν καί τ’ αηδόνια έκεϊ.
sing.NONPAST.IPF.3PL and DEF.N.PL nightingale.N.PL there

“ ‘It's nice now on the Klyazma,’ Bos’n George needled those present, knowing that
Perelygino on the Klyazma, the country colony for writers, was everybody's sore
spot. ‘There's nightingales singing already.’ ” [lit. “now even the nightingales will be
singing there”]

As in the switch contexts in (63), a present-referring adverbial (τώρα, ‘now’) leaves no doubt
about the time reference of the construction, which cannot be interpreted as future; but in
this case there is also no possibility of a future verification of the proposition expressed, both
because of the adverbial itself and because the speaker is describing a place which is far away
from the scene of the dialogue and which the speech participants are not expected to be visit-
ing (at least, not soon enough to verify whether there are nightingales singing at the moment
of the utterance).
As for the modal force of the epistemic uses of θα + non-past, this is quite high in all the
examples seen so far. This is in accordance with Giannakidou’s (2012: 54) conclusion that “tha
behaves like a high-end necessity epistemic modal”, although this statement actually seems a
bit too strong when one is confronted with such cases as (61) above, where the speaker has no
real evidence about the truth of the proposition expressed. Generally speaking, however, epis-
temic proposition-oriented necessity (epist nec p) seems to be an adequate characterization of
the modal meaning of θα + non-past, which would thus be a stronger epistemic marker than,
for instance, English will + V or the Romance synthetic future. This is also confirmed by the
comparison with the English books in our corpus, which, in a number of contexts, have a
strong epistemic marker – or no epistemic marker at all – where Greek translators use θα +
non-past:

(66) Δεν μπορεί. Θ’ αστειεύεσαι!

not can.NONPAST.IPF.3S MOD joke.NONPAST.IPF.2S

“You’re joking.”

92
The Russian original is Теперь уж соловьи, наверно, поют, where the verb петь (‘sing’) is in the pre-
sent imperfective and the adverb наверно (‘probably’), which is not translated in English, conveys the
epistemic meaning rendered in Greek with θα + non-past.

103
 (67) Είστε μιά πολύ έξυπνη γυναίκα καί θά
COP.NONPAST.2PL INDEF.FS much smart woman.FS and MOD
‘χετε πιά μαντέψει ποιος είναι.
AUX.NONPAST.2PL yet guess.PAST.PRTCP who COP.NONPAST.3S
ό κύριος μας.
DET.MS.NOM master.MS 1PL.GENDAT

“You’re quite an intelligent woman, and of course have already guessed who our
host is.”

Note that in (67), with the future perfect, the writer does not only present a subjective evalua-
tion of the proposition expressed, but also indicates on which evidence this evaluation is based
(namely, the addressee’s being an intelligent woman). This suggests that inferential evidential-
ity (infer p) may also be counted among the grammatical meanings of θα + non-past.
A final remark is in order on the relation between the epistemic/inferential uses of the
Greek future and the aspectual profile of the State-of-Affairs denoted by the predicate. The
reader may have noticed that in all the examples in this section, the verb combining with θα
has imperfective morphology or is undetermined for aspect. 93 As we saw in 3.3.3.3 when dis-
cussing the Portuguese “epistemic future”, a strong association with atelic – and particularly
with stative – predicates is a general characteristic of epistemic markers. In my opinion, how-
ever, this should not be considered a necessary condition for the accessibility of an epistemic
(or inferential) interpretation of either the Portuguese or the Greek future. First, the associa-
tion between the telic nature of the predicate and the temporal interpretation of the construc-
tion can be overridden by morphosyntactic means: that is to say, the application of a perfect
or progressive marker to a telic predicate, by inducing an “Aktionsart shift”, can (and usually
does) strongly favor a modal interpretation of the future morpheme (see (64) above for Greek
and (14b), in 3.3.3.3, for Portuguese). Secondly, the fact that telic predicates bearing future
morphology are normally interpreted as taking place in the future does not mean that an epis-
temic reading cannot be simultaneously present, provided that this function is one of those
that can be expressed by the marker at stake. 94 This is not easy to demonstrate on the basis of
the available corpus data, since the ambiguity between the temporal and the epistem-
ic/inferential reading is highest when the State-of-Affairs takes place in the future. It is howev-
er my contention that an epistemic reading is strongly favored in such instances as (68), from
the Greek translation of The Master and Margarita, where the speaker seems to be voicing a
conjecture or expectation about what the addressee is about to say. The viability of this inter-

93
When aspect is not specified in the glosses, it is because the verb belongs to a restricted group of
verbs, such as είμαι, ‘be’ and ξέρω, ‘know’, which do not operate an aspectual distinction in the non-
past forms.
94
As regards temporal reference, the epistemic/inferential uses of such constructions as θα + non-past
or the Romance synthetic future are non-past markers, which means that whether the designated State-
of-Affairs takes place in the present or in the future is not “told” by the construction itself, but results
from the Aktionsart of the main predicate plus contextual and long-term knowledge factors, when rele-
vant.

104
pretation is confirmed beyond any doubt by one of the two English translations made available
by the ASPAC corpus.95

(68) Θά μου πεϊς ίσως, Φωκά, ότι πέρκες

FUT/MOD 1S.GENDAT say.NONPAST.PFV.2S maybe Fokas COMPL perch.F.PL
μπορείς νά βρεις καί στό
can.NONPAST.IPF.2S COMPL find.NONPAST.PFV.2S and PREP+DET.NS
‘Κολοσσαίο’.
Coliseum

“Now I suppose you're going to say that you can get perch at the Coliseum.”

5.1.7. Generic evidentiality (gen p)

As noted in 4.2.3, those particular uses of future markers which go under the name of “generic
truth”, “timeless truth” and the like have not been the object of any previous investigation
within the framework of FDG, as far as I can tell. With respect to this meaning, the idea de-
fended in this work is that it should be characterized in terms of the category Hengeveld and
Mackenzie (2008: 156) term genericity. According to the FDG designers’ definition, this is “an
evidential subcategory, since it characterizes a Propositional Content as being part of the body
of common knowledge available within a certain community.”
Unfortunately, Hengeveld and Mackenzie do not present any example to illustrate exactly
what semantic clusters fall under this evidential category. Nonetheless, I believe their defini-
tion captures the sense of general (or “gnomic”) truth which is most prominent in proverbs
and idioms such as Boys will be boys, as well as in scientific definitions such as the following,
from Old English and Ancient Greek respectively:

(69) Elpendes hyd wille drincan wætan. (Traugott 1992: 197)

elephant.GEN hide EVID.3S drink.INF wet.SBSTV

(70) θέλει γὰρ εἶναι διμερὴς ὁ πλεύμων

EVID PART COP.INF.PRES two-sided.S.NOM DET.MS.NOM lung.MS.NOM
ἐν ἄπασι τοῖς ἔχουσιν αὐτόν
PREP all.DAT.PL DET.M.PL.DAT have.PRES.3PL DEF.MS.ACC

“for the lung has two parts in all those [animals] which have it.”
(Markopoulos 2009: 40)

95
Also note that no epistemic marker, predicate or adverbial is present in the Russian original, where
the lexical verb of volition хотеть (‘want’) is used: Ты хочешь сказать, Фока, что судачки можно
встрет. While in the Greek and English translations reported in (65) the sentence is freely adapted and
reformulated, the second English translation in ASPAC is closer to the original, as it renders this passage
as You mean to say, Foka, that perch can be met with at the Coliseum as well.

105
The speaker’s commitment to the truth of the proposition is tangibly stronger in such exam-
ples as (69)-(70) than it is with statements in the generic present such as Dogs bark, Birds fly,
etc.: this is because the truth of the Propositional Content is not simply asserted, nor is it the
object of a subjective evaluation on the part of the speaker (as with epistemic modality or in-
ferential evidentiality) but is ensured by what Hengeveld and Mackenzie felicitously refer to as
“the body of common knowledge available within a certain community.” It is precisely in this
way that the proposition in the scope of the generic operator is understood as a “universally”
valid one.
While Ziegeler (2006a-b) argues that examples such as (69) surface in Old English before
the establishment of a purely temporal meaning of future tense, Markopoulos (2009: 43)
claims that for Ancient Greek (ἐ)θέλω + INF the relative chronology of these two functions is
the opposite, i.e. that future tense precedes (and lies at the basis of) the generic truth mean-
ing. The latter hypothesis appears to be consistent with cross-linguistic evidence: generic truth
is attested as a function of full-fledged future markers for many contemporary languages, 96
while almost no reference to this meaning is found in the diachronic literature on the evolu-
tion of future tense in the same languages. A notable exception is constituted by Ultan’s semi-
nal work on the evolution of future markers, where it is confirmed that “future > gnomic” is a
cross-linguistically likely semantic change, while the opposite development is explicitly denied
– although not categorically excluded (Ultan 1978: 115).
If the diachronic origins of generic evidentiality are to be sought in a pre-existing future
tense function, one should be able to identify the semantic mechanism underlying this evolu-
tion and to explain it in terms of necessary conditions. Some useful indications in this sense are
found in examples (69)-(70) above: first, both sentences have a generic referent as subject
(Elephant’s trunk, The lung); second, (70) contains a universal quantifier (ἄπασι, ‘all’). These
certainly are linguistic (namely, representational) elements which can foreground an interpre-
tation of “general truth” of the proposition expressed, and may well have represented the
defining features of the contexts in which the semantic change from future to genericity took
place. A number of contexts are found in our data where an arguably generic use of Modern
Greek θα + non-past co-occurs with either one or both of these linguistic elements: in most
cases, no future interpretation seems to be accessible, so that the contexts in question are
likely to be regarded as switch contexts. Note however that the subject need not be a generic
entity, but can also be marked as indefinite (i.e. non-identifiable, which for FDG is a feature of
Referential Subacts at the Interpersonal Level), as in (71); in addition, a general truth meaning
is also encountered with second person singular subjects, provided that these are interpreted
as “generic you” (that is, again, as non-identifiable) as in (72):

(71) Ένα τούβλο στά καλά καθούμενα, διέκοψε

INDEF.NS.NOM brick.NS.NOM out-of-the-blue interrupt.PAST.PFV.3S
ό άγνωστος μέ σοβαρότητα, σέ κανέναν καί
DET.MS.NOM stranger.MS.NOM with seriousness.FS PREP anyone.ACC and
ποτέ δέ θά πέσει.
ever not EVID fall.NONPAST.PFV.3S

96
E.g. Rocci (2000) on Italian, Hilpert (2008a: 130-131) on Swedish kommer att + INF, Trnavac (2006) on
Russian and Serbian and Ultan (1978) on a number of languages, among which Lithuanian.

106
 “ ‘No brick,’ the stranger interrupted imposingly , ‘will ever fall on anyone ‘s head
just out of the blue.’ ”

(72) A – ‘Γιατί είναι τρελός όποιος προσπαθεί να ληστέψει την τράπεζα ‘Γκρίνγκοτς’;
ρώτησε κατόπιν ο Χάρι.
B – ‘Ξόρκια... κατάρες...’ αποκρίθηκε αφηρημένα ο Χάγκριντ […]. “Αένε πως έχουν
δράκους για να φυλάνε τα μεγάλα χρηματοκιβώτια... Κι έπειτα, δεν είναι
καθόλου εύκολο να φτάσεις στην "Γκρίνγκοτς"· τα γραφεία της απλώνονται
ολόκληρα χιλιόμετρα κάτω απ' το Αονδίνο! […]. Ακόμη κι αν
even and if
καταφέρεις να φτάσεις ως εκεί,
manage.NONPAST.PFV.2S SBJV arrive.NONPAST.PFV.2PS PREP something
θα πεθάνεις από την πείνα,
EVID die.NONPAST.PFV.2S PREP DET.FS.ACC hunger.FS
προσπαθώντας να βγεις έξω...’
try.PRTCP.PRES SBJV exit.NONPAST.PFV.2S out

A – “‘Why would you be mad to try and rob Gringotts?’ Harry asked.
B – ‘Spells - enchantments,’ said Hagrid […]. ‘They say there’s dragons guardin’ the
high security vaults. […] And then yeh gotta find yer way – Gringotts is hundreds of
miles under London, see. […] Yeh’d die of hunger tryin’ ter get out, even if yeh did
manage ter get yer hands on summat.” [lit. “you will die from the hunger”]

In (71) a strictly temporal interpretation of θά πέσει (‘will fall’) makes very little sense, because
the object of the discussion is an event which has already taken place (and the reasons that
may have caused it), and not one which is expected or somehow foreseen to happen in the
future. In (72), the second person subject cannot be interpreted as referring to the addressee
himself, since the hypothesis of the latter actually trying to accomplish the dangerous enter-
prise described by the speaker has never been at issue (cf. Harry’s question, whose literal
translation would be “Why is he mad whoever tries to rob the ‘Gringotts’ bank?”).
(71) is also noteworthy in another respect, namely that the future (or rather, the generic
evidentiality) marker occurs in the apodosis of a conditional construction. Interestingly, an
analysis in terms of a “hidden conditional structure” is proposed by Rocci (2000: 268, my trans-
lation) in his account of the Italian and French “futur gnomique ou de vérité genérale”. Accord-
ing to Rocci, such uses of the Romance future as in Une jolie femme sera toujours plus jolie nue
que vêtue de pourpre would be adequately paraphrased as Si une femme est jolie → elle sera
toujours plus jolie nue que vêtue de pourpre. On the whole, it is probably not the case that a
reductive paraphrase of the type proposed by Rocci can always be felicitously used as a criteri-
on for identifying the generic uses of future markers, since this test is only applicable when the
subject is restricted by a modifier, as jolie (‘pretty’) in the French example – compare the ex-
amples above, where no modifier is present. Nonetheless, the elements highlighted by Rocci
may indeed be crucial for the emergence of the generic meaning of future tenses: as a matter
of fact, a conditional subordinate occurs in four of the nine plausible switch contexts I have
identified in the Greek corpus, as well as in three of the six occurrences which seem to repre-

107
sent a bridging context; 97 furthermore, a lexical or clausal modifier of the subject participant is
found in a significant number of cases, both in switch and in bridging contexts. 98 The latter are
contexts in which the State-of-Affairs denoted by the main verb could be interpreted either as
taking place in the future or as being tenseless, in which case a generic evidentiality interpreta-
tion is foregrounded:

(73) […] καί τό χειρότερο, κανείς δέ σοϋ εγγυάται ότι

άν πάς
if go.NONPAST.2S
στό ‘Κολοσσαίο’ ό πρώτος τυχόντας
PREP+DET.NS Coliseum DET.MS.NOM first.MS happen.PRES.PRTCP.NOM
νεαρός πού θά ξεπεταχτεί άπό τήν
youngster.MS REL FUT pop-out.NONPAST.PFV.3S PREP DET.FS.ACC
πάροδο τού θεάτρου δέ θά σοϋ
side-street.FS.ACC DET.NS.GENDAT theater.NS.GENDAT not FUT 2S.GENDAT
πετάξει στά μούτρα ένα τσαμπί
throw.NONPAST.PFV.3S PREP+DET.NPL face.NPL INDEF.NS cluster.NS
σταφύλι.
grape.NS

[…] “and, besides, there’s no guarantee you won’t get slapped in the mug with a
bunch of grapes at the Coliseum by the first young man who bursts in from Theatre
Alley.” [lit. “nobody guarantees that, if you go to the Coliseum, the first young man
… will not throw a cluster of grapes to your face”]

(74) Σ’ αυτό το δάσος δε ζει τίποτα που

PREP DET.MS DEF.MS forest.NS not live.NONPAST.IPF.3S nothing REL
θα μπορέσει να σου κάνει κακό, αν
FUT can.NONPAST.PFV.3S SBJV 2S.OBJ do.NONPAST.3S bad.NS if
είσαι μαζί μου, ή με τον Φανγκ.
COP.NONPAST.2S PREP 1S.GENDAT or PREP DET.MS.ACC Fang

“ ‘There’s nothin’ that lives in the forest that’ll hurt yeh if yer with me or Fang,’ said
Hagrid.” [lit. “nothing lives in the forest which will be able to hurt you if…”]

Note that both the examples below have non-identifiable subjects, although the second per-
son in (73) only receives a generic interpretation in the evidential reading. But differently from

97
It should be noted, in addition, that two other possible instances of bridging context can only be un-
derstood in terms of an implicit conditional structure. This can also be seen in the English original: One
side will make you grow taller [if you eat it], and the other side will make you grow shorter [if you eat it]
– Greek: Η μια πλευρά θα σε κάνει να ψηλώσεις, η άλλη πλευρά θα σε κάνει να μικρύνεις.
98
Accordingly, in the sixth and last case of bridging context found in the Greek data the same function as
that of a conditional clause seems to be fulfilled by a restrictive relative clause: Όπως σου είπα, θα
πρέπει να είναι τρελός όποιος προσπαθήσει να ληστέψει αυτή την τράπεζα, lit. “As I told you, he will
have to be mad he who tries to rob this bank.”

108
(72), where a deictic interpretation of the second person subject is not available, in (70) this
remains a possible (although disfavored) reading, because the speech participants are compar-
ing the pros and cons of two restaurants they both usually frequent (and thus will presumably
also frequent in the future); it is thus possible to understand the conditional clause as a future-
referring realis hypothesis, which entails that the future marker in the apodosis will receive a
temporal interpretation, instead of a generic one. In (74), a future interpretation is also possi-
ble, since the speaker and the addressee are really about to go into the forest together – which
however does not at all preclude an interpretation of θα + non-past as describing the charac-
teristic behavior of the subject participant, as known by the speaker in the light of the body of
knowledge shared by the inhabitants of the place.
Summing up, the conditions favoring the emergence of the generic evidential use of
Greek θα + non-past are, in order of frequency, (i) the generic or indefinite reference of a par-
ticipant (usually the subject), (ii) the presence of a conditional clause, (iii) the presence of a
universal quantifier over events or individuals and (iv) the presence of a lexical or clausal modi-
fier of the subject participant. Several combinations of these conditions appear in both bridg-
ing and switch contexts, the difference between the two stages consisting, as usual, in the
(un)availability of a future tense interpretation. But the corpus also includes at least one occur-
rence of θα + non-past where, in my opinion, the construction should be regarded as a fully
grammaticalized marker of genericity, as it displays none of the above-listed conditions:

(75) Όσο για τον Χάγκριντ, θα προτιμήσει να πεθάνει παρά να προδώσει την
εμπιστοσύνη του Ντάμπλντορ.

“And Neville will play Quidditch for England before Hagrid lets Dumbledore down.”
[lit. “as for Hagrid, he will prefer to die than betray Dumbledore’s trust”]

Differently from the switch contexts in (71)-(72), this time the subject is a highly identifiable
one and no conditional clause or universal quantifier is present. Nonetheless, a future inter-
pretation can safely be excluded, since the speaker is not foreseeing a concrete situation in
which Hagrid will (or may) have to decide between dying and betraying Dumbledore’s trust,
but is using an extreme image in order to describe the character’s personality. This example
shows well how reference to a body of shared knowledge (specifically, the knowledge available
to all Hagrid’s good friends) can be used to create a sense of intimacy or “camaraderie” with
the addressee.
Another token of θα + non-past which might probably represent a fully conventionalized
generic meaning is the following. The context is exactly the same as described for (73) above –
in fact, the passage immediately precedes the one reported in (73), following that in (68):

(76) Aλλά στό ‘Κολοσσαίο’ μιά μερίδα στοιχίζει δεκατρία ρούβλια καί τριάντα πέντε
καπίκια, ένώ έδώ πέντε καί πενήντα παρακαλώ! Κι έξαλλου στό
and moreover PREP+DET.NS
‘Κολοσσαίο’ οί πέρκες θά ναι
Coliseum DET.NS.NOM perch.MPL MOD/EVID COP.NONPAST.3PL
τριών ήμερων, καί τό χειρότερο [...].
three.GENDAT day.PL.GENDAT and DET.NS worst.NS

109
 “But at the Coliseum a portion of perch costs thirteen roubles fifteen kopecks, and
here – five-fifty! Besides, at the Coliseum they serve three-day-old perch, and, be-
sides […].” [lit. “the perches will be three days old”]

However, as shown in the gloss, the possibility should be considered that the Greek translator
is using the construction as an epistemic marker here, since an interpretation in terms of a
tentative estimation could also make sense in this context. In any case, a future reading does
not seem admissible. This is therefore an example of ambiguity between two fully grammatical
proposition-oriented meanings of θα + non-past.
As in the previous section, it is important to add a note on the aspect of the verb entering
the θα-construction, when this is used as a generic evidentiality marker. In virtually all the ex-
amples given in this section, the verb bears perfective morphology: although this should prob-
ably not be interpreted as a restriction on the availability of the generic meaning, the preferen-
tial association with telic States-of-Affairs is probably significant with respect to the genesis of
this meaning. In fact, differently from other authors, who regard “general truth” as an epis-
temic category (e.g. Hilpert 2008a: 130-131), I believe that the inference through which a ge-
neric reading becomes available in bridging contexts not only involves (a combination of) the
four enabling conditions identified above, but also crucially requires a basically temporal inter-
pretation of the future marker – which is prominent when the described situation is a telic
one, see 3.3.3.3 and 5.1.6. That is to say, a statement in the simple future such as, for instance,
(74) would be reinterpreted as a “universally” valid truth through a mechanism that can be
rendered explicit as follows:

(77) whenever [conditionality + universal quantification] one [–identifiability] is with

me or Fang → nothing that lives in the forest WILL [future tense] hurt him.

While genericity is a highly conventionalized category for θα + non-past, as I hope to have

shown in this section, Swedish ska + INF does not seem to have developed generic meanings to
any considerable extent. It is significant, in this sense, that none of the sentences in which this
function surfaces in Greek has been rendered with a future tense in the Swedish translations in
our corpus (where the most common choice is by far the present tense, the irrealis marker
skulle being also used twice and the possibility marker kan once). There is, however, one prob-
able instance of switch context:

(78) Måhända är ert hem det visa Ravenclaw, Ty den som lärd och kvicktänkt är Och har
ett gott och klart förstånd Skall alltid sina likar finna där.

Or yet in wise old Ravenclaw, if you've a ready mind, Where those of wit and learn-
ing, Will always find their kind.” [lit. “for he who is learned and quick-witted and has
a good and clear understanding will always find his peers there”]

Note that, as in most Greek examples, the subject is a non-identifiable one and the clause in
which the future marker occurs also contains a universal quantifier alltid (‘always’) and an em-
bedded clausal modifier (som… förstånd). Again, the sentence could be paraphrased as
“whenever one is learned and quick-witted (…), he will find there his peers.” Another context

110
in which the Swedish future may possibly express generic evidentiality is (52), with the indefi-
nite marker man, which is repeated and re-numbered below:

(79) Det kallas lektioner […] därför att man ska leka
DEF.NS call.PASS lection.INDEF.PL because INDEF MOD play.INF
på dem.
PREP DEF.PL.OBJ

“That’s the reason they’re called lessons, […] because they lessen from day to day.”
[lit. “because one must play on them”]

However, as we saw in 5.1.3, event-oriented deontic modality also provides a very plausible
interpretation in this context: so, given that the latter function is extremely common in the
Swedish corpus while genericity is definitely not, one would in principle be inclined to consider
(79) as an instance of deontic ska + INF.
The data also include a possible case of bridging context with a conditional clause:

(80) Två av oss ska hjälpa er, om ni finner vilka

two PREP 1PL.OBJ FUT help.INF 2PL.OBJ if 2PL.NOM find.PRES which.PL
bara.
only

“Two of us will help you, which ever you would find”

Note finally that (78) and (80), both from Harry Potter, occur in two distinct rhymes, which
certainly do not represent prototypical examples of the more colloquial register characterizing
the rest of the book (cf. the conservative allomorph skall in (78)). This circumstance confirms
that generic evidentiality is a very marginal (though undeniably existent) function of the Swe-
dish future.

5.1.8. Imperative Illocution (F: IMP (F)) and Hortative Illocution (F: HORT (F))

Cross-linguistically, it is hard to find any future tense marker that cannot be used to give an
order to the addressee. It is thus quite expectable that both the Swedish and the Greek con-
struction under analysis in this chapter can also be used in this way. On the whole, the “imper-
ative” use is rather more frequent with θα + non-past tha with ska + INF.
In 5.1.2, it was noted that contexts such as (45), repeated below as (81), are liable to show
some ambiguity between an obligation and an imperative interpretation of the future marker.
It was also argued, however, that in any case a future tense interpretation is always available
in such contexts, which should therefore be characterized as bridging contexts.

(81) A – “Αρνούμαι να πάω στο δάσος!” είπε κατηγορηματικά. […]

111
 B – “Θα πας, αν θέλεις να
FUT go.NONPAST.2S if want.NONPAST.IPF.2S SBJV
μείνεις στο ‘Χόγκουαρτς’!”
stay.NONPAST.PFV.2PS PREP+DET.MS Hogwarts

A – “I'm not going in that forest, he said […].”

B – “Yeh are if yeh want ter stay at Hogwarts […].”

As shown in 5.1.2, there also are contexts in which a deontic interpretation is possible but an
imperative one is not (cf. (46) above). On the other hand, it is not easy to find contexts in
which, besides future, only imperative provides a reasonable reading. In fact, it could be ar-
gued that when the speaker orders the addressee to do something, the former is in a sense
imposing an obligation on the latter, while the contrary is not true: asserting that an obligation
rests on someone does not entail a command. In principle, this could be regarded as an indica-
tion that the imperative meaning of the Greek future diachronically derives from a participant-
oriented meaning of obligation: but, as we have seen, this function is not a grammatical one
for θα + non-past (it has not even reached the switch-context phase, as far as can be conclud-
ed from the data), so that such a development is not a possible one. Future tense is then left
as the only possible candidate to be the source meaning of the imperative function of the con-
struction. As argued in 3.3.3.1 in presenting the analogous use of English will + V in such sen-
tences as You will eat all of your soup!, the basic requirements defining the bridging context
for the imperative meaning of future tenses are (i) that the verbal form be in the second per-
son (i.e. that the Referential Subact corresponding to the subject at IL bears the [+Addressee]
feature) and (ii) that the social relation between the speech participant be an informal or
asymmetric one. It should be added that, in many languages, imperative uses of future mark-
ers tend to be accompanied by an intonation which resembles that of “true” Imperatives more
than that of Declarative Discourse Acts. In writing, this is usually represented by an exclama-
tion mark:

(82) A – ‘Κυρία καθηγήτρια... σας παρακαλώ... Μα δεν μπορείτε...’

B – ‘Πότερ, δε θα μου πεις εσύ τι
Potter not FUT 1S.GENDAT say.NONPAST.PFV.2S 2S.NOM what
μπορώ και τι δεν μπορώ!’
can.NONPAST.IPF.1S and what not can.NONPAST.IPF.1S

A – “‘Professor – please ‘You CAN'T’

B – ‘Don't tell me what I can and can't do, Potter.’” [lit. “you will not tell me … !”]

In Swedish, contrary to Greek, the future marker ska + INF does have a grammaticalized mean-
ing of obligation. The corpus data include a number of contexts in which this is an equally plau-
sible interpretation as is imperative: in practice, these are all the contexts in which the two
conditions mentioned above are met, except for those contexts in which only a future tense
reading makes sense (i.e., when the speaker is asserting that the addressee will perform a cer-
tain action and is not referring to (or acting as) a source of authority which imposes on the
addressee an obligation to do so). As noted above, an obligation resting on the addressee is

112
arguably present in any situation in which it makes sense to interpret a linguistic expression as
an order; on the other hand, whenever an order is issued, the event being imposed necessarily
takes place in the future. In a word, an imperative interpretation of a grammatical construction
is always theoretically compatible with both a future and a deontic participant-oriented read-
ing: so, as both of these are fully grammatical meanings of ska + INF, it is simply impossible to
decide which of the two lies at the basis of the inference that foregrounds an imperative inter-
pretation of the construction. In my opinion, it is also perfectly possible that both serve as
source meanings in this case, and in exactly the same type of bridging context. In fact, there
are cases in which the grammatical function of ska + INF is absolutely ambiguous between
future tense and obligation: whenever this happens in a context which satisfies the two defin-
ing requirements indicated above, an imperative reading becomes available. An example is
(83):

(83) Du ska göra nåt nyttigt eller också åker du ut!

“Yeh'll do summat useful or Yeh'll get out.”

By changing one of the two conditions defining the bridging context for the imperative use of
future markers, a further possible interpretation emerges: all things being equal, if the subject
of the construction is in the first person plural (i.e. if the corresponding (R) contains the
[+Speaker] feature and the corresponding participant (x) at RL bears a plural operator), a hor-
tative meaning will be inferred. A Hortative Illocution is characterized in FDG as a communica-
tive action through which “the Speaker encourages himself or an Addressee together with
himself to carry out the action evoked by the Communicated Content”, as is the case with Eng-
lish Let’s + V (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 72-73). All that has been said above for the im-
perative interpretation also holds true for this function of Greek θα + non-past and Swedish
ska + INF: both constructions can only convey a hortative meaning in bridging contexts, the
source meaning necessarily being future tense in Greek and either future or obligation (or
both) in Swedish. Again, θα + non-past is slightly more frequent in this use than is ska + INF, to
which the Swedish translators generally prefer the simple present for the expression of indi-
rect hortative speech acts.

(84) Εντάξει, λοιπόν! Τώρα, θα χωριστούμε σε δυο ομάδες και θ' ακολουθήσουμε το
μονοπάτι από διαφορετικές κατευθύνσεις.

“Right, now, we're gonna split inter two parties an' follow the trail in diff'rent direc-
tions.”

(85) Jag vill att ni allesammans ska vara tillbaka här om fem minuter färdiga att ge er av.
Vi ska fara härifrån.

“I want you all back here in five minutes ready to leave. We're going away.”

A further illocutionary function which both construction may serve is that of imposing the real-
ization of a State-of-Affairs to a participant that does not coincide (nor include) either the

113
speaker or the addressee. 99 As will be obvious, such a meaning is found with third person sub-
jects:

(86) ‘Όποιος ακούει τ’όνομα του!’ φώναξε, ‘θα βάζει στο κεφάλι του το καπέλο και θα
κάθεται στο σκαμνί, για να γίνει η επιλογή του.’

“When I call your name, you will put on the hat and sit on the stool to be sorted
[…].” [lit. “anyone who hears his name will put the hat on his head and will sit on
the stool”]

(87) ‘Har jag inte sagt åt er att han inte ska gå där?’ väste han. ‘Han ska gå i Stonewall
High och det kommer han att vara tacksam för.’

“Haven’t I told you he’s not going? He’s going to Stonewall High and he’ll be grate-
ful for it.”

This interpersonal function is not recognized as an autonomous type of Illocution in FDG, pre-
sumably because it is very seldom expressed through specialized grammatical means in the
languages of the world but tends to be grouped together with either Optative or Imperative
Illocutions. Some languages, however, do have special forms for marking this illocutionary
category, so that it may be useful for FDG to adopt a corresponding grammatical label. 100 At
any rate, it is not necessary to propose a definition (and an FDG representation) of this further
functional cluster for either Greek or Swedish, since this meaning cannot be argued to have
developed beyond the inferential stage of bridging contexts in either language. In fact, all that
has been said about the imperative and hortative uses above is also true of (86) and (87): first,
a simple future interpretation is perfectly sensible in both cases; moreover, as regards Swe-
dish, the possibility that the basic meaning of ska + INF in (87) is deontic rather than future can
by no means be excluded.

5.1.9. Mitigation (mit F: ILL (F))

The grammars of many languages include mitigative operators of several kinds. Whereas cer-
tain mitigative operators have scope over the whole Discourse Act and thus can combine with
different types of Illocution, there also are mitigative operators which apply at the layer of the
Illocution itself: in this case, they tend to be specialized in attenuating the force of one specific
type of Illocution (see Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 83). Future tense markers can develop
Illocution-oriented mitigative functions, although they rarely seem to attain full grammatical
status in this use.
In the Greek data, three cases are found in which θα + non-past seems to convey a miti-
gated Imperative Illocution, where the Discourse Act is interpreted as a request rather than as

99
Although in some cases there may be a partial overlap between the target of the imposition and the
addressee, if this is not a single person but a group of two or more individuals.
100
One convincing proposal is found in Dobrushina (2012), who argues in favor of the term “Jussive” for
certain Caucasian languages.

114
an order. In all of these cases, the speech act is formally an interrogative one with second per-
son subject and with a controlled State-of-Affairs, as in (88) below. As shown in the previous
sections, the first two factors concern the Interpersonal Level of FDG, while the latter should
rather be considered as long-term information which is stored in the extra-linguistic
knowledge of the speech participant (since [±control] is not a grammatically explicit feature of
States-of-Affairs in Greek).

(88) Ισια, καί θά βγήτε όπου πρέπει. Λέ θά μού δώσετε κάτι γιά τή συμβουλή, γιά ένα
τεταρτάκι τού λίτρου...

“Straight on and you’ll get where you’re re going. How about a little pint pot for my
information…” [lit. “will you give me something for the advice”]

This use of the Greek future can also serve to request that the addressee perform the desig-
nated action in situations in which the speaker is apparently irritated with the addressee’s
behaviour, which may suggest that the speaker’s intention is actually not that of issuing a miti-
gated command. Even in such contexts, however, the use of θα + non-past represents an al-
ternative to the morphological imperative (just like English Will you…?), which is the over-
whelmingly predominant choice for translating “plain”, i.e. non-mitigated directive speech
acts. This is evident in (89), from The Master and Margarita, which nicely exemplifies the con-
trast between the imperative mood and the immediately following interrogative with θα +
non-past. Note that, as in the English translation, the request is reinforced by a tag-question:

(89) Γιά αφήστε με! - είπε ό Ίβάν στους νοσοκόμους, πού τού είχαν φράξει τό δρόμο
πρός τήν έξοδο, θά μέ αφήσετε νά περάσω ή όχι;

“‘Let me pass,’ Ivan said to the orderlies, who closed ranks at the door. ‘Will you let
me pass or not?’”

Questions displaying a mitigated directive use of θα + non-past ostensibly represent indirect

speech acts, falling within one of the six categories of “sentences ‘conventionally’ used in the
performance of indirect directives” described by Searle (“Group 3: Sentences concerning
H[earer]’s doing A[ction]”, 1975: 65). In such contexts, a future tense interpretation is in prin-
ciple always available, which is arguably the reason why a tag question such as ή όχι (“or
not?”) can be added in (89) – while the same is usually impossible with morphological impera-
tives. 101 We are therefore dealing with yet one case of bridging context – defined by the three
necessary conditions singled out above – and not with a grammatical function of the construc-
tion.
Importantly, we do not find any corresponding use of Swedish ska + INF. This construction
too, however, can be used in mitigated Behavioural Illocutions (i.e. “those that have to do with

101
A further test for assessing whether (88)-(89) can be interpreted as direct speech acts (i.e. as true
Interrogatives with a future tense operator) is to see whether the addressee can only answer by accept-
ing/rejecting the speaker’s request or would also be entitled to respond with a Declarative Illocution, by
predicting his own future actions. The latter seems to be the case here: cf. Will you let me pass? –
OK/No, but also Will you let me pass? – Yes, I will/No, I won’t.

115
influencing behavior” rather than with exchanging information, see Hengeveld and Mackenzie
2008: 74-75). This happens three times in Alice in Wonderland. Note that, as in the Greek ex-
amples above, the Discourse Act is formally an Interrogative:

(90) Ska vi ta en annan tur i hummerkadriljen?

“Shall we try another figure of the Lobster-Quadrille?”

(91) Du undrar väl, varför jag inte lägger armen om ditt liv, sade hertiginnan efter en
stunds tystnad. […] Ska jag våga försöka?

“I dare say you’re wondering why I don’t put my arm round your waist […]. Shall I
try the experiment?”

(92) Var ska jag börja, Ers Majestät?

“Where shall I begin, please your majesty?”

(90) functions as a polite proposal (i.e. as a mitigated Hortative Illocution) and has a first per-
son inclusive subject (which encodes a Referential Subact specified as [+S, +A] at the Interper-
sonal Level). In (91)-(92), with the first person singular, the speaker is offering to perform the
action referred to by the main verb, which may possibly be classified as a mitigated variant of
Commissive Illocution: the speaker commits herself to performing the action, provided that
the addressee grants permission. Note that, while a simple future interpretation may still be
available in (92) – presumably as an effect of the presupposition implied by wh- questions –
(90)-(91) can in no sense receive the same reading. 102 If one assumes that future tense is the
source meaning behind the mitigated illocutionary uses of ska + INF, this would mean that (92)
represents the bridging context for this functional evolution, while (90)-(91) would be better
understood as switch contexts. However, as in the case of the “imperative” and “hortative”
uses of the Swedish construction (see 5.1.8) one cannot be sure whether the source meaning
is actually that of future tense: in fact, in all three examples an obligation meaning also seems
to provide an admissible interpretation, since the speaker is arguably attributing to the ad-
dressee the authority to impose the realization of the designated State-of-Affairs. Consequent-
ly, if obligation (rather than future) is to be seen as the source meaning underlying the mitiga-
tive uses of ska + INF, then (90)-(92) should all be characterized as bridging contexts.
It will be clear that, while the mitigated illocutionary values of the de-volitive future θα +
non-past concern the addressee’s doing something, those of de-obligative ska + INF invariably
involve an action to be performed by the speaker (or by the speaker and the addressee to-
gether). Interestingly, the same distributional pattern is observed in English, a language which
has both a de-volitive and a de-obligative future: de-volitive will + V behaves like θα + non-
past, de-obligative shall + V like ska + INF. This may suggest that these mitigative meanings
never derive from future tense but evolve directly out of the pre-existing modal functions of
the different types of constructions. However, the comparison with other languages shows
that mitigated directive Illocutions such as those conveyed by θα + non-past and will + V can

102
Compare Shall we try another figure of the Lobster-Quadrille? – OK/No, but ??Yes, we shall/??No, we
shan’t. The constrast is possibly even more dramatic with first-person subject proposals: Shall I try the
experiment? would definitely not admit an answer such as *Yes you shall/*No, you shan’t.

116
also be found with futures arising from different sources, 103 while the same does not seem to
be true of the mitigated Hortative and Commissive uses of ska+ INF and shall + V – which are
not mentioned in the literature for any other construction in the sample. If a conclusion may
be drawn from these facts, it is that a hypothetical modal-to-mitigative path represents a via-
ble option for de-obligative ska + INF and shall + V but probably not for de-volitive θα + non-
past and will + V. As to the origins of the (mitigated) illocutionary meanings of Swedish and
English de-obligative constructions, the problem can only be properly solved by means of ex-
tensive diachronic data analysis, which it is not possible to carry out here. The possibility of a
future > mitigative evolution thus also represents a legitimate hypothesis for ska + INF and
shall + V. 104 If this is the case, the fact that the observed distributional patterns are cross-
linguistically coherent with the modal origins of de-volitive and de-obligative futures would
mean that a certain degree of retention of those original meanings plays a fundamental role in
determining which type(s) of mitigative function can be acquired by full-fledged future tense
markers.
One last type of mitigative use must be considered before leaving this section. In the uses
seen so far, the combination of a future tense form with an Interrogative Illocution template
and intonation serves the double function of indicating a different type of indirect illocution,
on the one hand, and of mitigating the force of this derived illocution, on the other. There is,
however, a type of mitigation in which a future marker combines with a special class of predi-
cates, which in FDG are called “performative verbs” (see Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008: 69-
70, 129). These are lexemes such as English inform, declare, promise, confess, order, ask, beg,
etc., which are inserted at the Interpersonal Level, occupying the head of the Illocution layer:
their function is thus not to designate an entity of the real world, as do the units of the Repre-
sentational Level, but to specify the illocutionary value of the Discourse Act. 105 In several lan-
guages, a future tense marker can be used to mitigate the force of the Illocution expressed by
means of such predicates (which speakers may wish to do for a number of different reasons,
e.g. when considering that the content of the speech act may displease, shock or scandalize
the addressee). This also happens in English, e.g. in I will admit that this isn't the best figure to
grace the Transformers toy line (Internet), which sounds somewhat attenuated when com-
pared with I admit that this isn't the best figure to grace the Transformers toy line. This particu-
lar mitigating function of future markers occurs three times in the Greek data (namely in The
Master and Margarita), always with the verb παρακαλώ, ‘beg’:

(93) Θά σάς παρακαλέσω νά σωπάσετε γιά ένα λεπτό.

“I beg you to be silent for a moment.” [lit. “I will beg you”]

103
Cf. Portuguese Que vou eu fazer para Angola? Não me dirá? (Cunha and Cintra 1984) and Russian Pit’
budete? (Trnavac 2006: 131, see 4.2.3).
104
For shall + V, this view may be supported by the fact that Gotti (2002: 205) finds no attestation of an
th th
offering/proposing function of Shall I/we…? in his 14 -15 corpus.
105
As far as FDG is concerned, there is no need to group performative verbs into the same abstract Il-
locution types (Declarative, Interrogative, etc.) which can receive morphosyntactic and/or phonological
encoding in the languages of the world. Whereas the latter necessarily form a closed set, lexical mean-
ing is by definition far more specific than grammatically expressed meaning, so, every predicate which
can be used as a performative verb may be said to constitute a distinct type of Illocution.

117
Although no such use of ska + INF is found in our corpus, a comparable example is reported by
Brumark (2003: 12), again with a verb meaning ‘to beg’:

(94) Jag ska be att få Y.

“approximately: ‘I am asking if I could have Y.’ or ‘I would like to have Y.’”

[lit. “I will beg to have Y”]

In both examples, the function of the future marker is obviously not that of localizing the beg-
ging event in the future but that of attenuating the illocutionary force expressed by the per-
formative predicate, thereby making the request more polite. This is very clearly seen in the
two translations proposed by Brukard for example (94). The correct FDG representation of
such uses of θα + non-past and ska + INF is, at the Interpersonal Level, (mit F: Παρακαλώ/Be
(F)), while no separate representation of either the predicate or the construction will be re-
quired at the Representational Level, since neither functions at that Level. However, neither
the Greek nor the Swedish construction can be described as a fully grammaticalized mitigative
operator, not only because of the limited frequency of such uses, but essentially because both
markers can only serve this function when combining with specific performative verbs: this is
thus to be regarded as the necessary condition defining a switch context for the passage from
future tense to illocution mitigation. 106

5.1.10. Reportative Evidentialiy (rep C)

It has been observed in 4.2.3 that Swedish is, with Portuguese, the only language in my dataset
in which a future tense marker seems to have at least partly grammaticalized reportative uses.
This was shown with the aid of an example taken from Hilpert (2008a: 55), which, just like the
Portuguese Ensino do Português estará ameaçado no Canadá (Squartini 2004: 83, see 3.3.3.2),
is the title of a newspaper article:

(95) Tony Blair ska ha gjort sin frus bästa vän (...) med barn.

“Tony Blair is said to have gotten his wife’s best friend pregnant.”

106
It is only when a construction can mitigate the force of an Illocution which is expressed grammatically
(i.e. by the sole means of morphosyntactic and/or phonological templates) that we can consider that
construction to have evolved beyond the switch-context stage. The only such case I can cite is found in
the Lithuanian translation of The Master and Margarita, where one reads: Atleiskit, nepatikėsiu, — tarė
Volandas, — negalimas daiktas. (“‘Forgive me, but I don’t believe you,’ Woland replied, ‘that cannot
be.’”, lit. “Forgive (me), I will not believe”). The verb patikėti, ‘believe’, cannot be considered a per-
formative predicate, since it does not refer to any specific type of communicative action (thus, it is in-
serted at the Representational Level and not at the Interpersonal Level): in the Lithuanian sentence a
Declarative illocution is expressed morphosyntactically (by word order) and phonologically (the intona-
st
tion being indicated graphically by a full stop), while the 1 person future morpheme -siu appears as a
full-fledged mitigative operator with scope over the Declarative Illocution (or, possibly, over the whole
Discourse Act).

118
The genre of journalistic reports may thus constitute a switch context for the reportative
meaning of Swedish ska + INF as well as for the Portuguese synthetic future. But a few clear
instances of this function are also found in our sources, which belong to a very different genre:

(96) A – Och vilka är det där? sade drottningen […].

B – Hur ska JAG veta det? sade Alice, förvånad över sitt eget mod. Det är inte MIN
sak.

A – “‘And who are THESE?’ said the Queen […].

B – ‘How should I know?’ said Alice, surprised at her own courage. ‘It's no business
of mine.’”

(97) ‘Förbaskade grej’, sade Snape. ‘Hur ska man kunna hålla ögonen på alla tre huvu-
dena på en gång?’

“‘Blasted thing,’ Snape was saying. ‘How are you supposed to keep your eyes on all
three heads at once?’” [lit. “how should one be able to keep…”]

Although the genre requirement is clearly not satisfied here, it is immediately seen that the
two examples above (from two different books) share exactly the same features: both are
content interrogatives with hur (‘how’) concerning an expectation which is already represent-
ed within what the speaker assumes to be the common ground of the ongoing interaction. This
expectation can be expressed by (or inferred from) a preceding Discourse Act – as with the
Queen’s question in (96) – or retrieved from the extra-linguistic knowledge relevant to the
current communicative situation, as in (97). In either case, it is clear that the speaker is treat-
ing this expectation as given (i.e. shared) information and attributing it to a source which does
not coincide with the speaker herself: were it not so, it would make very little sense to ask
such a question as (96) or (97). The given information status of the proposition expressed and
the Content Interrogative illocutionary value of the Discourse Act can therefore be conceived
as the enabling conditions defining a second type of context in which the reportative function
of Swedish ska + INF becomes available.
There is, however, a substantial difference between Swedish and Portuguese as regards
the reportative function of the respective future markers. As we have seen in 3.3.3.2, in Portu-
guese the reportative meaning most probably derives from the epistemic one, since this is a
cross-linguistically well attested diachronic change, while a direct evolution from future tense
to reportative evidentiality is not. 107 But a development from subjective epistemic modality or
inference to reportativity cannot have taken place in Swedish, for the simple reason that ska +
INF does not display any of those proposition-oriented meanings. On the other hand, diachron-
ic changes from participant-external necessity to reportative evidentiality are common in the
languages of the world (see Andersen 1986: 289-ff., Bybee et al. 1994: 203 and van der Au-
wera and Plungian 1998: 109-110) and, as argued in 5.1.3 above, ska + INF does have partici-

107
The only possible reference to such a development to my knowledge is a short note on Abkhaz in
Aikhenvald (2004: 109), which however does not exclude that even in this language the diachronic de-
velopment from future to “non-firsthand evidential” has taken place through an epistemic or inferential
intermediate phase.

119
pant-external necessity meaning. So, when the Swedish situation is taken together with the
above-mentioned cross-linguistic evidence, the most likely hypothesis about the genesis of the
reportative function of ska + INF is precisely that this function has developed out of a partici-
pant external necessity meaning. If we now look at the corpus examples above with this as-
sumption in mind, it will be noticed that an event-oriented meaning of necessity (either deon-
tic or facultative) is in principle admissible in both of them (cf. the similarity with examples
(53)-(54) in 5.1.3), although this is arguably a much less pertinent interpretation than the evi-
dential one in the given contexts. Therefore, given the coherence of these contexts with re-
spect to the two enabling conditions proposed above and the availability of the hypothesized
source meaning of event-oriented necessity, both (96) and (97) are likely to represent a bridg-
ing context for the rise of the reportative function of the Swedish construction. Interestingly,
the viability of an event-oriented interpretation is somewhat more questionable in other two
undoubted occurrences of reportative ska + INF (both from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland):

(98) Sitt ned båda två, men säg inte ett ord förrän jag har slutat. […]. Alice tänkte: Hur
ska hon kunna sluta, om hon aldrig börjar?

“‘Sit down, both of you, and don't speak a word till I've finished.’ […] Alice thought
to herself ‘I don't see how he can EVER finish, if he doesn't begin.’” [lit. “how should
she be able to finish if she never starts?”]

(99) Vad ska det vara bra för att läsa upp allt det där, sade den falska sköldpaddan, om
du inte förklarar vad det betyder?

“‘What IS the use of repeating all that stuff’ the Mock Turtle interrupted, ‘if you
don't explain it as you go on?’” [lit. “what should it be good for to read... ?”]

Once more, we are dealing with content interrogatives in which an expectation about the de-
noted State-of-Affairs is retrieved from the immediate communicative situation and attributed
to an entity which does not coincide with the speaker. But this time it is not obvious whether
these States-of-Affairs are being characterized in terms of the participant-external circum-
stances or authorities imposing their realization. Perhaps a facultative event-oriented reading
may still be possible in (98), but in (99) it seems really quite hard to detect any such meaning.
If this is so, (99) would have to be classified as a second type of context (besides journalistic
reports) in which the source meaning is not available, 108 while the status of (98) remains
somewhat uncertain between the bridging-context and the switch-context phase. The fact that
a future tense interpretation is ruled out in (96)-(97) but not in (98)-(99) is irrelevant here,
since the proposal is that this meaning is not involved in the development of the evidential
function.
As to Greek θα + non-past, this is never acknowledged to cover a reportative function in
the literature consulted. In our data, however, there seems to be one very specific kind of con-
text in which the construction can be interpreted as a reportative marker: this context is pro-

108
Also note that this is the only one of the four examples presented in which the wh-word is not hur
(‘how’) but vad (‘what’).

120
vided by the idiom Τι θα πει? (“What does it mean?”), which occurs twice in Harry Potter and
the Philosopher’s Stone:

(100) A – Η κουκουβάγια σας πρέπει να βρίσκεται εδώ το αργότερο ως τις 31 Ιουλίου.’

[…]
B – Τι θα πει… πως περιμένουν
what EVID say.NONPAST.PFV.3S COMPL wait.NONPAST.IPF.3PL
την κουκουβάγια μου;
DET.FS.ACC owl.FS 1S.GENDAT

A – “We await your owl by no later than July 31. […]

B – What does it mean, they await my owl?”

(101) A – Είμαι σίγουρος πως ο Φιρέντσε έκανε αυτό που νόμιζε καλύτερο’ […].
B – Τι θα πει ‘έκανε το καλύτερο’;
what EVID say.NONPAST.PFV.3S do.PAST.3S DET.NS best.NS

A – “I'm sure Firenze thought he was acting for the best […].
B – For the best!” [lit. “what would it mean ‘he did the best’?”]

Note that the same characteristic features detected in the Swedish examples above also hold
in (100)-(101), since both are content interrogatives about a proposition which is retrieved
from the preceding discourse. This would in principle be problematic for the account proposed
here, since the source meaning cannot be assumed to be the same in the two languages: the
Greek future does not have grammaticalized event-oriented meanings such as those that lie at
the basis of the reportative use of Swedish ska + INF, therefore for θα + non-past the origins of
this function can only reside in the proposition-oriented meaning of epistemic necessity
(which, as said above, is also a cross-linguistically common source for reportative markers).
Given the distinct origins of the reportative meaning, one would expect the enabling condition
for its appearance to be also different.
There is, however, an element that crucially distinguishes the Swedish and the Greek ex-
amples seen in this section. While in the former the object of the expectation questioned by
the speaker is invariantly an event of the real world (i.e. a State-of-Affairs), the Greek idiom is
a metalinguistic expression concerning the meaning of a previous Discourse Act: that is to say,
by asking Τι θα πει ... ? the speaker is requesting that the interlocutor clarify the Propositional
Content expressed by the preceding utterance. On the one hand, this contrast correlates nicely
with the event-oriented vs. proposition-oriented nature of the source meaning in Swedish and
Greek, respectively; on the other, it may shed some light on the concrete mechanism through
which epistemic markers develop into reportative evidentials. In fact, any wh- question with a
proposition-oriented epistemic marker may in principle be interpreted as a bridging context
for the emergence of a reportative function of that marker: first, in questions the source of the
information is, by definition, external to the speaker; second, wh- questions generally “intro-
duce the presuppositions obtained by replacing the wh-word by the appropriate existentially
quantified variables” (Levinson 1983: 184), so here too the question concerns presupposed

121
information which is retrieved from the common ground; third, as with reportative evidentials,
a question with an epistemic marker does not interrogate a proposition which is deemed true
by the speaker but rather requests that the addressee assumes responsibility for that proposi-
tion. As a consequence, both the epistemic and the reportative reading can be simultaneously
present in such questions.
If this reasoning is correct, in keeping with the basic criteria of our model we could talk
about a switch context (and attribute a proto-grammatical status to the emergent reportative
meaning) in case an epistemic interpretation ceases to be available. This is precisely what
seems to happen in (100)-(101), since in both cases a question is being directed to someone
the speaker assumes to be informed about the meaning of the complement of τι θα πει (a
messenger in (100), the original speaker of the quoted clause in (101)): consequently, an epis-
temic interpretation makes no sense, because the speaker is not asking for the addressee’s
subjective evaluation of the truth of a proposition, as with real epistemic markers, but is re-
questing a “plain” piece of information that the addressee undoubtedly possesses, while dis-
tancing herself from the truth of the presupposed proposition. The speaker’s assumptions
about the addressee’s state of information can thus be taken as a criterion for distinguishing
bridging contexts from switch contexts in the rise of reportative markers out of proposition-
oriented epistemic ones: a request for an opinion, which demands an inference or conjecture
on the part of the addressee, will count as a bridging context; a request for a piece of infor-
mation the addressee is assumed to already possess will potentially constitute a switch con-
text. This distinction, however, is not at all sufficient to define the switch-context phase for
Greek θα + non-past, since, as we have seen, the only plausible switch contexts occurring in
our data consist in a particular metalinguistic expression. Thus, this idiom itself, together with
the speaker’s assumption that the addressee is informed about the interrogated proposition,
defines the one, extremely specific switch context which can be identified on the basis of our
data for the epistemic-to-reportative development of θα + non-past. A detailed description of
this particular type of switch context in terms of enabling conditions would be as follows:

(i) Content Interrogative (Grammatical Component: IL);

(ii) 3rd person subject (Grammatical Component: IL);
(iii) verb λέω, ‘say’ (Grammatical Component: RL);
(iv) the question is used, metalinguistically, to request a clarification about a previous Dis-
course Act (Conceptual Component: communicative intention);
(v) this Discourse Act has been produced by a speech participant other than the speaker
(Contextual Component: discoursal context);
(vi) the speaker assumes that the addressee is informed about the object of the question
(extra-linguistic stochastic model of the other’s mind).

To conclude, the reportative function is much more developed for Swedish ska + INF than for
Greek θα + non-past: in Swedish, it derives from event-oriented necessity and occurs in two
separate types of contexts in which the source meaning is not available (each with its own
characteristic configuration of enabling conditions); in Greek, it derives from proposition-
oriented epistemic necessity and occurs only sporadically in one, extremely specific switch
context.

122
5.2. Results and Discussion

Of the ten different functions – or groups of functions – surveyed in 5.1, three are fully gram-
maticalized for Greek θα + non-past (future tense, epistemic necessity and generic evidentiali-
ty) while three seem to have reached the switch context stage (absolute-relative past posterior
tense, illocution mitigation and reportative evidentiality). As predicted by the scope-increase
hypothesis, all of these functions have equal or wider scope than the functions they diachroni-
cally derive from. Among the fully grammatical meanings of the construction, future and epis-
temic necessity are extremely frequent, while generic evidentiality occurs fewer than twenty
times in our corpus: of these attestations, nine can be characterized as switch contexts, while
only in one or (possibly) two examples does the construction represent a full-fledged generici-
ty marker. This is arguably not to be taken as an indication that the conventionalization of this
meaning is particularly recent in Greek, since, as noted in 5.1.7, generic evidentiality could
already be expressed by the de-volitive future in Classical Greek. It seems much more reason-
able to think that the lower frequency of this function when compared to future tense and
epistemic necessity is simply due to the fact that the latter are central semantic clusters in
everyday communication, while the same can probably not be said of generic evidentiality.
The multifunctionality of Contemporary Greek θα + non-past can be represented as in
Figure 13, where only the functions listed above are taken into account, since these are the
only functions of the construction which are at least partially grammaticalized (i.e. have at
least reached switch contexts). Fully grammatical functions are highlighted in bold to distin-
guish them from the “proto-grammatical” meanings occurring in switch contexts.

(past ep: (post e) ep)) (gen p)

(epist nec p) / (rep C)

(fut ep)
(infer p)

(mit F: Lex (F))

Figure 13: The grammatical multifunctionality of θα + non-past in Contemporary Greek

One notable aspect of the Greek situation is that it that it reveals a possible development, (fut
ep) > (past ep: (post e) ep)), which is not recognized for any language in the diachronic litera-
ture consulted. Thus, the picture above not only confirms the cross-linguistic validity of the
general map proposed in Figure 11 but also suggests that absolute-relative tense should be
added to the number of the functions which can be taken over by fully grammaticalized future
markers. As noted in 5.1.5, such a development does not run counter the hypothesis – it in-
volves no narrowing in scope – but is nonetheless somewhat unexpected, in that it presuppos-
es a dramatic reversal of the episode-oriented temporal function of the marker. One possible
explanation for this rare semantically anomalous change is that Greek may have been influ-
enced by the bordering languages of the so-called Balkan Sprachbund (see Heine and Kuteva
2005: 187ff.), a group of languages which are characterized by a striking homogeneity in many

123
respects, having undergone a number of parallel evolutions, through the centuries, as a result
of the intense contact between their speakers. Interestingly enough, the use of future tense
constructions to express the future in the past is not only well established in languages such as
Bulgarian, whose de-volitive future developed out of a posterior tense marker in the Middle
Ages (see 4.1.2.1), but is also found in languages such as Greek and Serbo-Croatian, whose
future tenses are more likely to derive “directly” from participant-oriented volitive modals,
having bypassed the relative tense stage.
The revised version of the scope-increase hypothesis proposed in 4.2.2.2 is also confirmed
as regards the prediction that meanings with lower scope than the grammatical function they
derive from can arise as inferences in specific bridging contexts, but will not develop beyond
this stage. The bridging-context meanings attested in our corpus for θα + non-past are, on the
one hand, participant oriented volitive and deontic modality (i.e. intention and obligation) and,
on the other, imperative, hortative and mitigated imperative illocution. All of these meanings
have been shown to require a basically futural interpretation of the marker, but while partici-
pant-oriented modality has lower scope than future tense, Illocution marking and mitigation
have wider scope, functioning at the Interpersonal Level. The prediction can thus be stated
that intention and obligation will not evolve into grammatical functions of θα + non-past, while
nothing, in principle, prevents the (mitigated) illocutionary meanings of the construction from
doing so in the future.
Turning to Swedish, the analysis has revealed a very different situation from what is ob-
served with the Greek future. Ska + INF displays at least four grammatical functions, all of
which are very frequent in our corpus: deontic participant-oriented necessity, deontic and
facultative event-oriented necessity and future tense. One major difference with respect to
Greek θα + non-past is that no fully grammaticalized function seems to have developed out of
future tense – which is quite surprising when one considers that this meaning of ska + INF was
already well established in Old Norse (see 4.1.1.1). Obligation is the most ancient grammatical
function of the construction and has been retained to the present day, giving rise to future
tense, on the one hand, and to event-oriented necessity, on the other. Theoretically, it would
also be possible for event-oriented necessity to have constituted an intermediate stage be-
tween obligation and future tense, as it has wider scope than the former but narrower scope
than the latter. Event-oriented modality, however, is never cited in the diachronic literature on
the evolution of ska + INF, so it seems much safer to assume that the two semantic clusters of
event-oriented necessity and future tense independently originated from the earlier meaning
of participant-oriented obligation. As to the relative chronology of the deontic and facultative
event-oriented functions, cross-linguistic evidence suggests that the former precedes the latter
(see van der Auwera and Plungian 1998: 95).
Another important difference between Greek and Swedish concerns reportative evidenti-
ality (see 5.1.10). The source meaning underlying the acquisition of this function is different in
the two languages (and, consequently, so is the mechanism through which the reportative
meaning arises): in Greek it derives from proposition-oriented epistemic necessity, in Swedish
from event-oriented necessity (either deontic and/or facultative). In addition, it must be ob-
served that the reportative meaning of ska + INF is much more frequent than that of θα + non-
past, which only occurs in one extremely specific type of switch context, consisting in a particu-
lar idiomatic expression. In Swedish, by contrast, ska + INF expresses reportative evidentiality
in two different types of context, which are clearly distinguished from each other as regards

124
the nature and number of the (linguistic and) contextual conditions favoring the emergence of
the reportative function. In our corpus, only one of these contexts is encountered, which is
characterized by two constant factors: the Interrogative Illocution of the Discourse Act and the
givenness of the proposition expressed. The other context in which ska + INF can be used as a
reportative marker is represented by the genre of journalistic reports, which, by itself, provides
the necessary condition for the availability of the reportative interpretation. Since this context
is much more frequent and much less specific than that attested in our corpus, it should prob-
ably be conceived of as a conventionalization context rather than as a switch context (see
3.3.3.3): in keeping with the principles of our model, then, reportative evidentiality may be
regarded as a fifth fully grammatical meaning of ska + INF – one whose complete conventional-
ization is arguably a relatively recent phenomenon.
As regards switch-context meanings, it has been noted that both the generic evidentiality
and the mitigative functions are generally much rarer with ska + INF than with the Greek fu-
ture (see 5.1.7-5.1.9). It should be added that, in Swedish, the mitigated directive illocution
meanings (i.e. mitigated Hortative and mitigated Commissive) can only be said to have reached
switch contexts if they are assumed to derive from the future tense function of the marker; if,
conversely, they derive from participant-oriented obligation (which cannot be excluded on the
basis of synchronic data), they would be better understood as inferential – i.e. bridging-
context – meanings (see 5.1.9).
In the light of the above, the multifunctionality of ska + INF in Contemporary Swedish may
be represented as in Figure 14:

(gen p)

(mit F: Lex (F)) /

(deo nec fc) (fut ep)
(mit F: HORT/COMM (F)) ?

(deo nec e) /
(rep C)
(fac nec e)

Figure 14: The grammatical multifunctionality of ska + INF in Contemporary Swedish

Again, the predictions of both the scope-increase hypothesis and the general map in Figure 11
are validated: all the functional developments captured by the map are compatible with the
scope-increase hypothesis, and all those involving future tense are also represented in Figure
11.

The analysis developed in 5.1 has shown how each function of a given grammatical con-
struction can be understood as belonging to one of the three context-stages presented in
Chapter 3. In the course of the analysis, we have seen that bridging and switch contexts can be
identified on the basis of the necessary conditions for the rise of the target meaning and that
these conditions can be systematically characterized with respect to the model outlined in
Chapter 3. Moreover, I hope to have demonstrated how the linguistic and extra-linguistic fac-

125
tors characteristic of each context-stage can be fruitfully used to illustrate the semantic and
context-pragmatic mechanisms which govern each single functional development in the evolu-
tion of grammatical constructions. As expected, fully grammaticalized functions turn out to be
much less context-dependent than the meanings occurring in the previous stages, to the ex-
tent that it does not seem possible to characterize the contexts in which they occur in terms of
one precise set of enabling conditions.
In this section, the results of the synchronic analysis have been brought together and
compared in order to test the predictions of both FDG and Semantic Maps, as presented in
Chapter 4 (see 4.2.1 and 4.2.2.2 in particular). As far as I can see, all the theory-driven hypoth-
eses elaborated in the preceding chapters are fully confirmed by the real data analysis con-
ducted on Greek θα + non-past and Swedish ska + INF. This case study has not suggested any
major refinement of the proposed model, which will thus hopefully provide a suitable basis for
the analysis of the remaining future markers in our dataset.

Abbreviations

ACC accusative NEG negative

ADJ adjective NOM nominative
AFF affective NONPAST non-past
COMPL complementizer OBJ object
COP copula PART particle
CONC concessive PASS passive
DAT dative PAST past
DEF definite PFV perfective
DET determiner PL plural
EVID evidential POST posterior
F feminine PREP preposition
FUT future PRES present
FUT/MOD future or modal PRTCP participle
GEN genitive REL relative
GENDAT genitive/dative S singular
INDEF indefinite SBJV subjunctive
INF infinitive SBSTV substantivized
IPF imperfective 1 1st person
M masculine 2 2nd person
MOD modal 3 3rd person
N neuter

126
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