From a relatively early point on, the term ‘pragmaticalization’ (or ‘pragmaticization’) appears in research on grammaticalization. This specific research area is beset with conceptual problems which essentially stem from dissense over the concept of pragmatics in linguistics. It will therefore be defined here in order to then assess proposals of pragmaticalization found in the literature.

Pragmatics deals with discourse. Its relation to the language system is visualized in the diagram seen before:

Language system and discourse

Encyclopedic knowledge and social conventions are comprised by the concept world knowledge. With respect to this diagram, pragmatics s.l. covers everything except the language system. It is therefore a rather heterogeneous notion.

The sense of an utterance develops in discourse. It is based on the significatum, which is provided by semantics, which is part of the language system. However, the sense goes far beyond the significatum. Since discourse is the actualization of the system, the sense of an utterance comprises two kinds of meaning components:

• the significatum of the sentence (and of other constructions) underlying the utterance such as provided by the semantics of the language in question
• information kept and processed in the anchorage spaces of referents and made use of in sense construal.

These anchorage spaces are displayed in the following diagram:

Anchorage spaces of referents

Of the resources used in sense-construal, world knowledge shares with the language system its virtual status. Encyclopedic knowledge is linked to lexical semantics; social conventions are linked with the functional domain of communicative relations (see below). The components which are proper to discourse and, thus, to pragmatics s.s. are then the speech situation, the universe of discourse and shared experience. More on this on the page on significatum and sense.

The language system comprises a set of functional domains which provide an interface to pragmatics:

• The functional domain of reference comprises the above set of anchorage spaces for referents which are served by dedicated subsystems:
• the subsystem of determination, which contributes to the individuation of referents
• the subsystem of deixis, which mediates access to the speech situation and its components
• the subsystem of endophora, which mediates the contact with referents in the universe of discourse and in shared experience.
• The functional domain of communicative relations, which provides a link to social conventions, comprises the formation of speech acts with their illocutionary forces, which are conveyed by the subsystem of sentence types.
• The functional domain of discourse structure comprises a subsystem of discourse particles which orient about the role of propositions in the universe of discourse, and a subsystem of information structure, which orients about the thematic or rhematic status of its components.

Now while those anchorage spaces themselves are outside the language system, the interfaces linking up to them are subsystems of the language system and consequently not part of pragmatics.

The delimitation of pragmatics against semantics is based on the premise that every aspect of the sense of an utterance that is coded in the language signs being used is provided by the semantics, not by pragmatics. In a methodological perspective, this implies that everything that the descriptive linguist can say about a sign without regard to its use in a particular utterance is not proper of pragmatics. To give an example: The first person pronoun I signifies ‘the current speaker’. This information is part of the semantics of the language and may therefore be provided by a dictionary. The question of who this person is – linguistically speaking, what the expression I in an utterance refers to – depends, of course, on the particular speech situation. The problem of how one may identify, in a particular situation, the current speaker is a topic for pragmatics.

Finally, some descriptive models (e.g. Functional Discourse Grammar) include information structure in pragmatics. However, the information structure of sentences is coded in their grammatical structure. Consequently, this is a subdomain of the functional domain of discourse structure which may have an interface to pragmatics, but is not outside the language system.