From temporal meaning to relevance-oriented discourse function

Abstract

The aim of the present article is to contribute to the understanding of the process of pragmaticalization. We analyze discourse markers of the after all type in Russian, English, German, Swedish, and Italian. Previous research has shown that temporal adverbials may develop discursive meanings such as concessive and justificatory functions. The present study examines their potential to acquire an additional pragmatic value. Specifically, these markers may not only introduce the result of a line of reasoning, but also express the speaker’s evaluation of that result as the most relevant or optimal one. We refer to this development as the relevance-oriented function. Drawing on parallel corpora and language-specific corpora, we investigate the extent to which this pragmaticalization process is attested across languages. The analysis shows that while English, German, Russian, and Italian display relatively advanced stages of discourse-marker use, Swedish exhibits a more conservative pattern. More generally, the cross-linguistic comparison suggests that the universal aspect of this process lies not in uniform outcomes, but in the direction of change itself.