37.2698, Confs: Panel at IPC20 - Subjectification, Intersubjectification, and Textualization: Evidence from Asian Languages (Finland)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2698. Tue Aug 18 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2698, Confs: Panel at IPC20 - Subjectification, Intersubjectification, and Textualization: Evidence from Asian Languages (Finland)

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Date: 17-Aug-2026
From: Michiko Kaneyasu [kaneyasu at humnet.ucla.edu]
Subject: Panel at IPC20 - Subjectification, Intersubjectification, and Textualization: Evidence from Asian Languages


Panel at IPC20 - Subjectification, Intersubjectification, and
Textualization: Evidence from Asian Languages
Short Title: IPrA Conference in Helsinki

Date: 27-Jun-2027 - 02-Jul-2027
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Meeting URL: https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP2027

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Pragmatics

Submission Deadline: 15-Oct-2026

For decades, the question of developmental ordering among
subjectification, intersubjectification, and related processes has
driven one of the most productive debates in grammaticalization
research and historical linguistics. In the foundational stages of
grammaticalization theory, Traugott (1982) proposed that meanings tend
to shift from propositional (truth-conditional and referential)
through textual functions of discourse cohesion, and finally toward
expressive meanings encoding the speaker’s attitude and stance. This
pathway was subsequently refined into the more articulated concepts of
subjectification—the increasing orientation of meaning toward the
speaker’s own perspective—and intersubjectification—the increasing
orientation toward the addressee’s cognitive stance and social
identity (Traugott & Dasher 2002; Traugott 2003, 2010, 2014).
Crucially, Traugott (2003) argued that these two processes follow a
developmental order, with subjectification necessarily preceding
intersubjectification.
This ordering hypothesis, however, has not gone unchallenged. Adamson
(1995) demonstrated that "de-subjectivisation" is attested; Cornillie
(2008) showed that intersubjectification can precede subjectification;
and Narrog (2014) introduced text/discourse orientation as a third
process and proposed an alternative ordering. Collectively, these
critiques raised a broader theoretical question: is there any
generalizable developmental sequence at all?
In a striking recent reversal, Traugott has rescinded her earlier
ordering proposals altogether. Introducing the concept of
textualization—defined as a shift in how speakers attend to
text-connectivity and invite addressees to interpret connective
relationships—Traugott (2022, 2024) now argues that there is no
generalizable developmental sequence among subjectification,
intersubjectification and textualization. This new position draws
heavily on English discourse structuring markers: she proposes that
when adverbial phrases develop into discourse structuring markers,
textualization, weak subjectification, and weak intersubjectification
occur concurrently by default, leaving no generalizable diachronic
sequence among them.
This panel asks whether this new conclusion holds beyond Indo-European
languages. Asian languages offer a compelling, typologically distinct
testing ground. Korean and Japanese, in particular, possess
exceptionally rich inventories of sentence-final particles, evidential
markers, and honorific systems that inherently encode subjectivity and
intersubjectivity. While both processes have been identified as major
drivers of semantic-functional change in these languages (e.g., Rhee
2012; Kim 2021, 2025), their precise diachronic trajectories vis-à-vis
textualization remain undertheorized.
Bringing together specialists in Asian linguistics, this panel
examines a diverse range of grammaticalizing constructions—including
discourse structuring markers, modal expressions, and stance markers
in Korean, Japanese, and other Asian languages. The panel therefore
invites contributions that examine these and related types of markers
and constructions across different Asian languages. Our collective
objective is to test whether these developmental paths support or
challenge Traugott's revised claims, and to investigate whether the
evolution of discourse structuring markers universally involves these
three processes concurrently. By drawing on longitudinal corpus data,
cross-linguistic comparison, and fine-grained semantic analysis, this
panel aims to move the debate beyond its Indo-European foundations and
toward a more typologically grounded account of how subjectification,
intersubjectification, and textualization unfold across the world’s
languages.
Selected References:
Traugott, E. C. 2022. Discourse structuring markers in English: A
historical constructionalist perspective on pragmatics (Constructional
Approaches to Language, 33). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
Traugott, E. C. 2024. Rethinking the relationship between
subjectification, intersubjectification, and textualization from a
constructionalist perspective. Cognitive Semantics 10(1): 1–32.



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