ABSTRACT
In terms of methodology, current directions in work on grammaticalisation and pragmatics involve a combination of corpus research and qualitative analyses of pragmatic factors, such as pragmatic inferences, context, and genre. The term grammaticalisation seems to have been coined by the French Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet at the beginning of the twentieth century, interesting insights into the origin of grammatical forms can also be found in the work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers. There are also a great many journal articles dealing with grammaticalisation and related processes of language change, including lexicalisation, degrammaticalisation, analogy, and (inter-)subjectification, these in different domains, different languages and language families, and from different approaches and perspectives. Grammaticalisation can be regarded as a 'cross-componential' or global change which affects different components of linguistic analysis, from phonology and morphosyntax to semantics and pragmatics. The unidirectionality hypothesis is probably the most commonly discussed of all the problems raised by critics of grammaticalisation theory.
