Contexts and inferences: Hypotheses about pragmatics and grammaticalization

The goal of the talk is to put on the table for discussion ideas about the interaction between types of context and meaning change characteristic of grammaticalization. Specifically, to ask what – if any – pragmatic mechanisms facilitate the relaxation of selectional restrictions on grammaticalizing items/constructions, leading from ‘bridging contexts’ to ‘switch contexts’ (Heine 2002), i.e, from utterances with multiple available readings to utterances in which the older reading is unavailable.