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Traditionally, grammaticalisation has been described as being based on phenomena specific to language such as metaphorical extension or reanalysis. This characterisation is somewhat in contrast to claims that grammaticalisation is involved in the much more general process of the initial emergence of language. In this article, we provide a unified analysis of both the metaphor-based and the reanalysis-based account of grammaticalisation which is grounded in the cognitive mechanisms underlying ostensive-inferential communication. We are thus able to show that the process of grammaticalisation is an instantiation of a domain-general pre-linguistic phenomenon.