In recent decades, diachronic semantics as a discipline has undergone a revolu-tion. Firstly, because the very concept of meaning has been broadened: whereas traditionally diachronic semantics focused on the study of lexicon, it is now agreed that not only the lexicon is a bearer of meaning, but also morphemes, phraseologi-cal units or grammatical constructions contain a semantic load. Consequently, this expansion of the field of study has been accompanied by a re-evaluation of the dis-cipline: diachronic semantics has gone from being on the periphery of the study of linguistic change to being considered a core subject. The importance that semantic change has acquired in the study of grammaticalization is paradigmatic of all this: Semantics and Pragmatics have become fundamental disciplines for explaining the origin of grammatical change and the context in which it occurs.
At first, studies on grammaticalization (see, for example, Lehmann 1995) focused on the description of the criteria defining the change and the semantic, morphosyntactic and phonological patterns involved. In these early studies, the role given to semantic change was minor, and it was mainly observed that gram-maticalization entailed a loss of meaning (semantic bleaching) between the source units and the grammaticalized units.
In a second stage, studies such as those by Traugott (1989, 2010, among oth-ers), Traugott & König (1991), Hopper & Traugott (1993) or Traugott & Dasher (2002) placed semantics and pragmatics at the center of interest. Along with the semantic bleaching associated with grammaticalization processes, it was pointed out how grammaticalization also entails the encoding of pragmatic values in the new grammaticalized units that the source units did not possess.
Moreover, cognitivist and, more generally, usage-based approaches have offered new answers to a fundamental question about the process of grammati-calization: Why does change occur? Along with the well-known formal reasons (such as the power of analogy), in recent decades the importance of the discursive context in the initiation of these phenomena of change has been emphasized. To this end, the pragmatic analysis of concrete communicative contexts and the application of concepts such as bridging context and invited inference, which E. C. Traugott integrates in the Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change (IITSC), are fun-damental. Grammaticalization, according to this theoretical framework, originates when the encoded meaning is enriched with pragmatic values that arise from con-crete communicative contexts as a result of invited inferences. The conventionaliza-tion of these new values, with the formal changes that this entails, opens the way to grammaticalization.
Within this context, this special issue explores the place of semantic change in grammaticalization and studies cases of grammatical change with a focus on semantic change. In this sense, a selection of studies is offered that combine works with a greater theoretical weight, which a) analyze the development of the concept of grammaticalization and the place attributed to semantic change, b) deal with the correlation between semantic change and other aspects of linguistic change (syntax, morphology, phonology) and c) analyze the intersection between grammaticalization and other patterns in linguistic change (phraseologization, constructionalization). These works of a theoretical nature are combined with case studies, mainly, but not only, focused on Romance languages (and specifically on Spanish and Catalan). These empirical studies are based, in all cases, on historical data from linguistic corpora or on interlinguistic comparison.