Beyond grammaticalization: The evolution of «no obstant això» in Catalan

Abstract

The aim of this piece of work is to analyse the emergence of the discursive marker no obstant això ‘however’ in Catalan. This evolution allows us to emphasize that not every change in grammar should be studied from the point of view of Theory of Grammaticalization. At the same time, the grammatical history of no obstant això highlights the need to analyse the syntactic changes within the social and cultural context in which they occurred. In the case of no obstant això, a careful study of its first occurrences in Catalan shows that, far from being the result of a grammaticalization, this marker arose as a result of the grammatical loaning of a particle originating in Medieval Latin.