Volition ascription to the addressee in a diachronic perspective

Abstract Pragmatic studies have recently shown that volition ascription to the addressee corresponds to specific strategies and deserves more attention. This paper discusses a series of post-volitional developments attested by second-person forms of the Latin verb uolo (‘I want’). Whilst these grammaticalisation phenomena — some of which are also attested cross-linguistically — have mainly been dealt with separately, this paper shows that they can be treated in a unified manner, as all originall