ABSTRACT
THIS CONCLUDING CHAPTER revisits and resumes discussion of issues raised in above chapters concerning historical paths in the development of modem functions of ACQUIRE. I first summarise some findings of the semantic and pragmatic investigation, and see where semantic/pragmatic analysis can lead us in working out historical developments of grammatical polyfunctionality. Then we consider further possible directions of 'system-internal' functional development, as weIl as 'system-external' scenarios of borrowing and calquing. This includes discussion of 'typological poise', the notion that possible or likely developments in a language depend on, and emerge from, existing grammaticaVtypological structure, making typologically similar languages more likely to independently follow similar paths of development.
