Crosslinguistically, the development of the verb go into a future tense is a common path of grammaticalization. In contrast, the past meaning of the go-periphrasis in Catalan is unexpected. Detges (2004) claims that the process of grammaticalization of the Catalan periphrastic perfect went from inchoative to foregrounding to past. We compare data from the Corpus informatitzat del Català antic with modern Sicilian, where a similar go-periphrasis is used with a foregrounding function that resembles that of Old Catalan. This comparison confirms a foregrounding usage but fails to support the origin in an inchoative usage. We propose that the grammaticalization from movement to foregrounding does not require an intermediate inchoative stage, but that it rather results from a modal implicature of surprise and unexpectedness that was associated with the construction. Indeed, the function of go to foreground and express surprise or noteworthiness can be inferentially viewed as movement away from the speaker’s expectations. Under this usage, Catalan go-periphrasis was employed to refer to ‘surprising’ events that took place in the past. Once this additional meaning was lost, the reference to the past was generalized beyond the implicature.

Preface

In this article, I investigate the diachronic development of a construction in Modern Spanish. It consists of an epistemic or evidential modifier followed by the complementizer (hence Adv+C) that heads root clauses (Seguro Adv que C viene ‘Surely he/she will come’). I demonstrate that the distributional, semantic, and pragmatic properties support a monoclausal analysis for Modern Spanish Adv+C as well as for its historical source construction. I propose a cartographic analysis associating Adv+C and the source construction with a low position in Rizzi’s split CP. Supported by corpus data, I identify a verum focus construction (Aff+C) as the origin of Adv+C. I claim that the loss of the verum interpretation triggers the reanalysis of the construction. This ultimately gives rise to its productive extension to other epistemic and evidential modifiers.

This article argues in favor of the idea that verum can result from focus marking on sentence mood. The empirical base are verum strategies in Spanish, English and German. It is shown that all of them result from stress on sentence mood, even though the strategies to express verum in the three languages appear unrelated on a superficial level: German and English rely on stress on a finite verb, Spanish inserts a particle. In the article, a semantic and syntactic account complete each other. The semantic approach is a revised version of Lohnstein’s sentence mood theory of verum focus. The effect of verum in different sentence moods is derived by the function each mood has and the alternatives that focus on them generates. The syntactic analysis is modeled in a cartographic framework (Rizzi 1997 et seq.) and motivates a projection in the lower section of the left periphery dedicated to sentence mood. A focus feature in this projection results in the verum interpretation of the proposition. The principal argument developed in this article is that the superficial differences across languages and clause types result from the fact that the focused mood feature is checked in different configurations.