This paper describes the meanings and uses of "afinal" in contemporary European Portuguese. The data were collected from a newspaper corpus, available on-line (http://acdc.linguateca.pt). Within a cognitive-functional framework, I argue that there is a basic prototypical temporal meaning from which emerge other meanings, pragmatically motivated. "Afinal" undergoes a grammaticalization process, which involves syntactic reanalysis (adverb > discourse marker) and semantic change (a shift from a contentful function to procedural ones). Throughout the paper, I check the possibility of replacing "afinal" by "ao fim e ao cabo" and "no fim de contas", in order to highlight their functional differences.
