Conjonc­tions et gram­ma­ti­ca­li­sation : le cas des langues romanes.

The process of grammaticalization, defined by Meillet (1912), has led to a renewal of historical linguistics in the last decades (Marchello-Nizia 2006: 14). It seems to concern languages universally, regardless of period, family or conditions of appearance (e.g. creoles or pidgins vs other types of language). However, it has been said that, inside a group of languages, one could grammaticalize faster than the others: French with respect to other Romance languages (Lamiroy 1999, Carlier 2007, De Mulder 2001), English with respect to other Germanic languages (König & Gast 2007). We analyze the paradigm of subordinating conjunctions in Romance in order to check the validity of this hypothesis: did French renew the Latin paradigm more than others? Is it possible to speak of different speeds of renewal