Contact-induced grammaticalization and discourse traditions.
The case of ‘promise’ and ‘threaten’
Bert Cornillie (University of Leuven)
The verbs ‘promise’ and ‘threaten’ combine lexical and grammaticalized uses in many
European languages, e.g. German, English, French, Dutch or Spanish, (cf. Traugott 1997,
Verhagen 2000, Diewald & Smirnova 2010, Heine & Kuteva 2006, Vliegen 2006, Cornillie
2007). The grammaticalized uses of ‘promise’ and ‘threaten’ have undergone a process of auxiliation, involving decategorialization and subjectification. The subjective uses express that the speaker has some evidence to suggest that it is likely that something (un)desirable will happen, whereas the lexical uses express a promise or a threat to some kind of participant.
Since the geographic diffusion of these constructions is limited to the languages of
Europe, it begs the question whether the linguistic changes that these verbs underwent are externally induced (via language contact) or whether they are the result of a (shared) internal development. The above-mentioned languages all have lexical and grammaticalized uses, which suggests that the new uses are instances of functional borrowing rather than formal borrowing. Yet, the very fact that the lexical uses of ‘promise’ and ‘threaten’ were attested several centuries before the subjective ones may be considered evidence for a path of shared grammaticalization without borrowing, i.e. as an internal development in the respective languages.
Yet, Heine & Kuteva (2006:94) argue that grammaticalization in itself does not provide a comprehensive explanation of the presence of these verbs in many different
European languages and attribute its timing (15 th
and 16 th
centuries), its diffusion (the geographically contiguous area of western Europe) and its exclusivity (no examples in languages in other parts of the world) to French influence. However, their account does not detail the contact between French and the other languages.
Elaborating on Heine & Kuteva’s (2006) analysis, my paper will refine the external factors that they proposed and determine the pace of the internal changes for several languages, with a focus on Spanish, Dutch and English. The main claims will be that language contact leads to the functional borrowing of the new subjective use and that the pace of the extension of the construction depends on the specific discourse traditions in which the new constructions showed up most frequently (Kabatek 2008, Pons Rodríguez 2010).
On the basis of new empirical data of Spanish and Dutch ‘threaten’ in the 15 th
and 16 th century, I will show that translations play a key role, no so much because of direct borrowings, but in terms of a creative process of using different constructions enhancing the syntactic productivity of the verb. The first Spanish subjective ‘threaten’ construction with an infinitival complement is found in the Spanish translation of Bartolomeus Anglicus’s widely known medieval encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum , which was published in 1494 in
Toulouse (France). Interestingly, the subjective ‘threaten’ construction does not show up in the French (1372) nor in the Latin (1240) version. Moreover, several other examples come from Castilian texts written in Aragon, which was in close contact with France.

Thus, the proposed contact-linguistic account revisits previous cognitive-pragmatic accounts of the different historical evolution of ‘promise’ and ‘threaten’ (Verhagen 2000;
Cornillie 2007).
References:
Cornillie, Bert 2007. Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality in Spanish (Semi-)Auxiliaries. A
Cognitive-Functional Approach . Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Diewald, Gabriele & Elena Smirnova 2010. Evidentiality in German. Linguistic Realization and Regularities in Grammaticalization. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Heine, Bernd & Tania Kuteva. 2006. The changing languages of Europe. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Kabatek, Johannes (ed.) 2008.
Sintaxis histórica del español y cambio lingüístico: Nuevas perspectivas desde las Tradiciones Discursivas, Frankfurt/ Madrid: Vervuert/
Iberoamericana.
Pons Rodríguez, Lola 2010. La historia de los marcadores discursivos en español. In Los estudios sobre marcadores del discurso en español, hoy
, Óscar Loureda & Esperanza
Acín (eds.), 523-615. Madrid: Arco / Libros.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 1997. Subjectification and the Development of Epistemic Meaning:
The Case of Promise and Threaten . In Modality in Germanic Languages , Toril Swan and Olaf Jansen Westvik (eds.), 185-210.
Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Verhagen, Arie. 2000. 'The girl that promised to become something': An exploration into diachronic subjectification in Dutch. In The Berkeley Conference on Dutch Linguistics
1997: the Dutch Language at the Millennium, Thomas F. Shannon and Johan P.
Snapper (eds.), 197-208. Lanham MD: University Press of America.
Vliegen, Maurice. 2006. The relation between lexical and epistemic readings: the equivalents of promise and threaten in Dutch and German. In Topics in subjectification and modalization . Bert Cornillie and Nicole Delbecque (eds.), 73-95. Amsterdam,
Philadelphia: Benjamins