Current Trends in Diachronic Semantics and Pragmatics Edited by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Jacqueline Visconti r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited. All rights reserved. 1 CURRENT TRENDS IN DIACHRONIC SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Jacqueline Visconti 1. THE ROLE OF PRAGMATIC INFERENCING IN MEANING CHANGE Research on semantic change has gained considerable momentum from the idea that pragmatic factors are a driving force in the process. The idea, first suggested by Grice (1989 [1975]: 39), that ‘‘it may not be impossible for what starts life, so to speak, as a conversational implicature to become conventionalized’’, was systematized in Traugott’s Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change (IITSC) (Traugott, 1999; Traugott and Dasher, 2002). More precisely, semantic change is seen as ‘‘arising out of the pragmatic uses to which speakers or writers and addressees or readers put language, and most especially out of the preferred strategies that speakers/writers use in communicating with addressees’’ (Traugott and Dasher, 2002: xi). The model, which is based on Levinson’s theory of generalized conversational implicature (GCIs) (Levinson, 2000), in particular on the distinction between ‘‘coded’’, ‘‘utterance-type’’and ‘‘utterance-token’’ levels of meaning (Levinson, 1995), is represented in Figure 1.1 (from Traugott and Dasher, 2002: 38). In this model, assuming that the meaning M 1 of a lexeme L is linked to the conceptual structure C a at stage I, innovation may be produced by speakers/writers employing L in a particular, ‘‘utterance-token’’, use. Should such a use spread to more contexts and become salient in the community, it acquires the status of a ‘‘generalized invited inference’’ and may eventually become semanticized as a new coded meaning M 2 for L at stage II. The IITSC arose in the context of reflection on replicated cross-linguistic regularities in semantic change, which the theory explained by assuming that they are the outcome of similar cognitive and communicative processes across languages. This has a number of consequences, 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37