Mechanisms and paths of grammaticalization and reanalysis in Romance

The present discussion takes a broader perspective on grammaticalization, which is viewed as involving different types and degrees of ‘tightness’ affecting linguistic expressions in all grammatical domains (Haspelmath 1998a: 318; Wiemer & Bisang 2004: 4; Carlier, De Mulder & Lamiroy 2012: 293, among others). Thus, not only changes from ‘more to less lexical or from less to more grammatical’ (Börjars & Vincent 2011: 163) will be considered, but also changes concerning the higher ‘internal’ dependency among constituents (Haspelmath 2004: 10), such as the fixing of word order (Lehmann 1992; Ledgeway 2011c: 727-728 and Sitaridou 2012: 596-598 for Romance) and the degree of syntactic cohesion between the matrix causative verb and its dependent infinitive with causatives (Soares da Silva 2012; Vincent 2016a). The study also addresses processes of reanalysis, with which grammaticalization interacts (Hopper & Traugott 2003: 59; Traugott 2011: 21, with a discussion of different aspects and definitions of the relationship between grammaticalization and reanalysis and related references).