This paper investigates the influence of discourse context on the historical development of discourse particles. In particular, it examines the role of the rhetorical relations between idea units in generating implicatures that eventually crystallize into new discourse meanings. Many discourse markers/particles can be seen to have developed from extant lexemes or phrases. The semantic change involved is in the direction of greater subjectification, increased discourse function and increased scope. It claims that the emergence of discourse particles out of certain English adverbials is conditioned by the co-occurrence of the adverbial expression with particular sequences of rhetorical relations and corresponding patterns of information structure. This is illustrated by the history of of course and its discourse contexts. Of course is traced, via successive functional splits and reanalyses, from proposition-level adverbial in Early Modern English to multifunctional particle in present-day English. Current usage, it is argued, has resulted from discourse-level rhetorical dependencies. Analysis of present-day English patterns of use suggests possible future directions of functional split.
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