J'imagine as a verb and pragmatic marker: a diachronic analysis

The present study describes the pragmatics of the deverbal marker j'imagine by applying the concepts of diachronic construction grammar (see Hilpert 2013; Traugott & Trousdale 2013; Barodal & Gildea 2015; Lowrey 2018: 152-154). More precisely, first person singular present indicative instances of the French cognitive verb imaginer are examined in a corpus, namely the Frantext database, to find how and when j'imagine developed into a deverbal marker in the course of its evolution from Middle to Modern French. To trace the emergence of the marker construction, we first establish the set of the constructions in which j'imagine occurs (= its constructional network) and, in a second step, examine its chronological development.