Abstract

In Modern English, however has four distinct functions: a marker of concessive conditionals; a marker of concessive conjunctions; a paragraph connector; and a topic shifter.
In my research, I analyze the examples of however taken from novels, essays, electric texts, the Helsinki corpus, the electric form of OED², and other corpora, group them into three functional-semantic components(i. e. the propositional, the textual, and the expressive)proposed by Traugott(1982), and then demonstrate that in the 16 th century, however was dominantly used on the propositional level as a marker of concessive conditionals, in the 17 th and the 18 th centuries, however developed into a marker of concessive conjuncts and a paragraph connector, both of which were used on the textual level, and in the 19 th century, however came to function as a topic shifter on the expressive level. Furthermore, my findings show that the series of this development is a case of grammaticalization in which, in line with general hypotheses of grammaticalization, unidirectionality and subjectification are combined, and that the factors to contribute to this development are pragmatic inferencing and reanalysis.