Pragmatic aspects of grammaticalization: scilicet in Early Latin comedy

Abstract

This study aims to describe the grammaticalization path of scilicet in the Latin comedy of Plautus and Terence. Adopting the theoretical framework of the Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld & Mackenzie 2008), the analysis of the occurrences of scilicet in the Early Latin comedy allows us to identify four different readings of the same lexical item: (i) as a main verb of the sentence meaning ‘it is obvious’, which governs both past and future infinitival clauses; (ii) as a focalizer meaning ‘certainly’, which singles out and highlights a specific constituent of the sentence; (iii) as an epistemic modal adverb meaning ‘certainly’, which encodes the speaker’s commitment to the truth of the propositional content (‘subjectification’); (iv) at the discourse level, as both an illocutionary modifier, which reinforces the directive force of the sentence, and a discourse marker meaning ‘yes, of course’, which encodes the speaker’s affirmative answer to previous directives or questions of the addressee (‘intersubjectification’). In the latter case scilicet acquires a pragmatic-textual value that guarantees the fluidity and cohesion of the discourse act. The distribution of the different functions of scilicet in Plautus and Terence allow us to hypothesize an ‘evolutionary’ continuum in a diachronic perspective, which involves a grammaticalization process from the original impersonal verb to the epistemic modal adverb, and then to the discursive-pragmatic marker.