Secondary grammaticalization in clause combining: from adverbial subordination to complementation in English María José López-Couso * , Belén Méndez-Naya 1 Department of English and German, University of Santiago de Compostela, Avda. Castelao s/n, E-15782 Santiago de Compostela, Spain article info Article history: Available online xxx Keywords: Secondary grammaticalization Clause combining Adverbial subordination Complementation Complementizer Epistemicity abstract In this article we look at a case of secondary grammaticalization in English which entails the development of originally adverbial subordinators into complement-clause connec- tives. The study systematizes our earlier findings regarding the adverbial links but, if, though, lest, as if, as though, and like, which over time have come to realize a subsidiary function as equivalents (or near-equivalents) of the major declarative complementizers that and zero in certain specific contexts. We show that minor declarative complementi- zers are typically associated with the expression of subjectivity and irreality. As such, they are usually attested in complementation structures in which subjectivity is also at hand (e.g. they are complements to specific predicate-types occurring in non-assertive envi- ronments). The development discussed here illustrates grammaticalization both at the level of clause links and at the level of clause-combining. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Setting the scene Secondary grammaticalization, understood as those cases in which an already grammatical marker acquires a new, more grammatical function (cf. Kurylowicz, 1965, p. 52; Givón, 1991 , p. 305; Brinton and Traugott, 2005, p. 77) has received less attention in the literature on grammaticalization than the shift from lexis to grammar. A possible case of secondary gram- maticalization entails the development of originally adverbial subordinators into complement-clause connectives, a tendency attested across languages and language families. In this article we look at the use of originally adverbial links as complement-clause connectives in English. In spite of their long recorded history, ‘minor declarative complementizers’ (López-Couso and Méndez-Naya, 1998) have received very little attention in reference grammars of Present-day English as well as in the literature on complementation. Over the last few years we have addressed several of these links in the history of the English language, namely but, if, though, lest, as if, as though, and like. Taking as a starting point the standard corpora covering the history of English (Helsinki Corpus and ARCHER) and the contemporary language (e.g. the Brown family of corpora (see Hofland et al., 1999) and the Diachronic Corpus of Present-day Spoken English (Aarts and Wallis, 2006)), we have, in a number of publications (López-Couso, 2007; López-Couso and Méndez-Naya, 1998, 2001, 2012a, 2012b, 2014), examined the use of these adverbial connectives in the complementation domain, where they have come to serve as equivalents (or near-equivalents) of the major declarative complementizers that and zero. In our present contribution we aim to systematize the main results of our previous work in order to deal with the * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ34 881 811 891. E-mail addresses: mjlopez.couso@usc.es, mjlcouso@gmail.com (M.J. López-Couso), belen.mendez@usc.es (B. Méndez-Naya). 1 Tel.: þ34 881 811 902. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Language Sciences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2014.07.003 0388-0001/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Language Sciences xxx (2014) 1–11 Please cite this article in press as: López-Couso, M.J., Méndez-Naya, B., Secondary grammaticalization in clause combining: from adverbial subordination to complementation in English, Language Sciences (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.langsci.2014.07.003