Refining secondary grammaticalization by looking at subprocesses of change

•Secondary grammaticalization is grammaticalization with a grammatical item as input.•Two distinct sets of case studies have been analysed under this description.•Cases of consecutive, new grammaticalization processes or grammaticalization paths.•Cases of semantic change within the same grammaticalization process.•Both sets of cases are characterized by different subprocesses.

Secondary grammaticalization is often intuitively defined as grammaticalization with an already grammatical item as input. This paper investigates the question whether secondary grammaticalization is also characterized by different subprocesses of change, with the aim of refining our understanding of the notion. Based on a survey of case studies of secondary grammaticalization from the literature, it is proposed that there are in fact two types of changes that have a grammatical input: one in which the development of a new grammatical function goes together with morphosyntactic reconfiguration, which is true secondary grammaticalization in the sense of Givón (1991), and one in which there is a semantico-functional change in which the grammatical input item sheds earlier pragmatic and subjective connotations and becomes an obligatory grammatical marker. The latter development is more appropriately analysed as an extension within the original grammaticalization process.