An evolutionary approach to semasiological change: Overt influence attempts through the development of the Mandarin 吧-ba particle Vittorio Tantucci C87, Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, United Kingdom 1 Received 19 March 2017; received in revised form 16 August 2017; accepted 22 August 2017 Abstract This paper focuses on the pragmatics of overt influence attempts (cf. Reich, 2011, 2012; Tantucci, 2016a) and their cognitive relationship with semasiological change. As a case study, the present analysis is centred on the recent history of the Mandarin 吧-ba sentence-final particle, starting from the Qing Dynasty (1644--1911) up to its present day usage. Corpus-based data from the CCL Peking corpus highlight a progressive shift from an original directive usage towards a later assertive employment. In the latter case, speaker/ writer ‘invites’ addressee/reader to agree with his/her statement on the basis of what is ‘socially’ or ‘interpersonally’ expected to be true/ sensible. The cooperatively ‘expected action’ originally prompted by the particle, will then turn into cooperatively ‘expected certainty’ in later usages. From an evolutionary-psychological angle, at every stage of the cline it emerges the speaker/writer's consistent attempt to exert social influence on addressee/reader in the form of an ‘interested’ co-act proposal (cf. Reich, 2011; Tantucci, 2016b). Crown Copyright © 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Overt influence attempt; Intersubjectification; Co-actionality; Enactment; Semasiology 1. Introduction This paper proposes an evolutionary approach to address semasiological change (cf. Traugott and Dasher, 2002). Drawing on the so-called ‘pragmatic-turn’ in cognitive science (i.e. Varela et al., 1992; Noë, 2004; Bowles, 2006; Clark, 2008) I argue that one important trigger of semasiological reanalysis is the speaker/writer's (Sp/w) attempt to exert influence on the addressee/reader (Ad/r) in the form of a co-action. This entails that the constructional/semasiological changes that intersect with the illocutionary force of a speech act are not merely symbolic, but crucially ‘enactive’ (cf. Engel et al., 2014), viz. dynamically aimed at exerting cognitive and social influence (cf. Reich, 2011, 2012; Tantucci, 2016a). Clearly, this does not entail a teleological motivation (cf. Croft, 2000) for language change, but rather unveils cases where reanalysis occurs in contexts of overt influence attempts (OIA) (i.e. Reich, 2011) from Sp/w in the direction to Ad/r. This approach complements existing evolutionary models of language change (i.e. Croft, 2000; Beckner et al., 2009) as it distinctively tackles Ad/r's agency as a decisive element of language innovation. www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics 120 (2017) 35--53 E-mail address: v.tantucci@lancs.ac.uk. 1 http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/linguistics/about-us/people/vittorio-tantucci. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2017.08.006 0378-2166/Crown Copyright © 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.