Cause can be expressed in various ways in Romance languages, functionally (their meaning can be mainly causal, or not) and formally: there are simple, non analyzable conjunctions, analyzable conjunctions and conjunctional phrases. These paradigms greatly diverge from what Latin and Late Latin (see Väänänen 1963, Herman 1963) used to express cause. In this paper, we study the evolution linking those systems, and describe the renewal of causal conjunctions from Latin to Romance languages.
Grammaticalization theory predicts that the appearance of new grammatical items in a word class does not imply the loss of pre-existing elements, thanks to the process of layering (Hopper and Traugott 1993, Marchello-Nizia 2006). However, grammatical word classes do undergo progressive renewal. We will focus on two questions: exactly what are the phenomena are at stake in this renewal? And which semantic domains are used to reinforce the expression of cause?
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