Resumen de Diachronic change in procedural semantic content
Saussure (2011) has claimed that procedural expressions facilitate the search for a relevant inference and therefore tend not to be elided. Nicolle (1998, 2011) similarly argues that procedural expressions serve to reduce processing effort, with the result that, while conceptual information may be replaced by procedural information during grammaticalization, the reverse never happens. However, there is ample evidence that procedural expressions (such as tense and aspect markers) may undergo further semantic change or may be lost all together from a language. This paper investigates what motivates changes in – or loss of – procedural semantic content.
