The Devil is in the details: where verum words come from

This conference presentation addresses the origin and grammaticalization paths of verum words, with focus on Russian discourse word КОНКРЕТНО 'specifically', 'exactly', 'in details' which develops the meaning 'really' in modern colloquial Russian along with other non-trivial uses. In the first part of my talk, I outline a theory of communicative structure and explain the status of verum markers. In the second part, I provide a classification of the uses of Russian КОНКРЕТНО and discuss two possible scenarios for the development of the new verum word.