Recurrent processes in the evolution of concessive subordinators in Spanish and Catalan

Concessive conjunctions show a tendency to be often recycled and replaced along certain specific grammaticalisation patterns. Here, after examining those general properties of concessive conjunctions that explain their historical instability, we focus on the history of two such elements in Spanish and Catalan. First, we trace the semantic development of Spanish aunque/Catalan encara que from conditional concessive ('even if ') to purely concessive ('although') and even, in some contexts, adversative ('but'). Secondly, we consider the trajectory of Spanish puesto que, which is first attested with conditional concessive value ('provided that', 'even if ') and only later became a causal conjunction ('since'), apparently at odds with the standard pattern of development that we see in other cases.