Abstract From the perspective of language change, grammaticalization is generally viewed as the process whereby ‘a lexical item or construction in certain uses takes on grammatical characteristics’. Roberts and Roussou (1999) account for this type of change as resulting from the reanalysis of lexical heads into functional heads. This chapter discusses the diachronic changes that do not fall under this definition, viewed as exemplifying a type of grammaticalization whereby illocutionary features come to be associated with distinct functional heads. It analyses the changes in the clausal organization of Old French as following from the fact that the Topic/Focus functional head common to all clause types of the first stage gives way to a system with a number of separate illocutionary heads. The chapter argues that the weakening of the Tobler–Mussafia (TM) constraint excluding object clitic pronouns from initial position in main clauses in Old French (OF) results from a gradual replacement of a common representation for V1 initial clauses by a new system where (1) satisfaction of a discourse-related [Top]/[Foc] feature by V is minimized, and (2) there is a reanalysis of the CP layer, with grammaticalization of illocutionary type features.
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