Grammaticalisation
Encyclopedia
In linguistics
, grammaticalization (also known as grammatization, grammaticization) is a process by which words representing objects and actions (ie. noun
s and verb
s) transform through sound change
and language migration to become grammatical objects (affix
es and prepositions, etc). Grammaticalization is a powerful aspect of language, as it creates new function words within language, by separating functions from their original inflection
al and bound constructions (ie. from content words). It is a field of research in historical linguistics
, in the wider study of language change
, which focuses on a particular process of lexical and grammatical change.
For an understanding of this process, a distinction needs to be made between lexical items, or content words, which carry specific lexical meaning, and grammatical items, or function words, with little or no lexical meaning which serve to express grammatical relationships between the different words within an utterance. Specifically, "the change whereby lexical terms and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions". Simply said, grammaticalization is the process in which a lexical word or a word cluster loses some or all of its lexical meaning and starts to fulfil a more grammatical function. It means that nouns and verbs which carry certain lexical meaning develop over time into grammatical items such as auxiliaries
, case markers
, inflection
s and sentence connectives.
A well-known example of grammaticalization is that of the process in which the lexical cluster let us, for example in the sentence "let us go", is reduced to a single word let's as in the sentence "let's you and me fight". The phrase has lost its lexical meaning of "allow us" and has changed into an auxiliary, while the pronoun 'us' reduced first to a suffix and then to an unanalyzed phoneme.
(1816), Schlegel (1818), Humboldt
(1825) and Gabelentz (1891). Humboldt, for instance, came up with the idea of evolutionary language. He suggested that in all languages grammatical structures evolved out of a language stage in which there were only words for concrete objects and ideas. In order to successfully communicate these ideas, grammatical structures slowly came into existence. Grammar slowly developed through four different stages, each in which the grammatical structure would be more developed. Though neo-grammarians like Brugmann
rejected the separation of language into distinct "stages" in favour of uniformitarian assumptions, they were positively inclined towards some of these earlier linguists' hypotheses.
The actual term "grammaticalization" was first coined by the French linguist Antoine Meillet
in his work L'évolution des Formes Grammaticales (1912) who first used it in the context in which it is still used today. Meillet's well known definition of grammaticalization was "the attribution of grammatical character to an erstwhile autonomous word". In this work Meillet showed that what was at issue was not the origins of grammatical forms but their transformations. He was thus able to present a notion of the creation of grammatical forms as a legitimate study for linguistics. Later studies in the field have further developed and altered Meillet's ideas and have introduced many other examples of grammaticalization.
During the second half of the twentieth century, grammaticalization became somewhat unfashionable. This is often said to be caused by the structuralist
ideas of language change
in which grammaticalization did not play a role. The field of linguistics
at the time was strongly concerned with synchronic
studies of language change, which marginalized historical approaches such as grammaticalization. It did however, mostly in Indo-European studies
, remain an instrument for explaining language change.
It was not until the 1970s, with the growth of interest in discourse analysis
and universals, that the interest for grammaticalization in linguistic studies began to grow again. A greatly influential work in the domain was Christian Lehmann's Thoughts on Grammaticalization (1982). This was the first work to emphasize the continuity of research from the earliest period to the present, and it provided a survey of the major work in the field. He also invented a set of 'parameters', a method along which grammaticality
could be measured both synchronically and diachronically.
Another important work was Heine
and Reh's Grammaticalization and Reanalysis in African Languages (1984). This work focussed on African languages
synchronically from the point of view of grammaticalization. They saw grammaticalization as an important tool for describing the workings of languages and their universal aspects and it provided an exhaustive list of the pathways of grammaticalization.
The great number of studies on grammaticalization in the last decade show grammaticalization remains a popular item and is regarded as an important field within linguistic studies in general. Among recent publications there is a wide range of descriptive studies trying to come up with umbrella definitions and exhaustive lists, while others tend to focus more on its nature and significance, questioning the opportunities and boundaries of grammaticalization. An important and popular topic which is still debated is the question of unidirectionality.
expression has changed from a lexical to a grammatical meaning (bleaching), it is likely to lose morphological
and syntactic elements that were characteristic of its initial category, but which are not relevant to the grammatical function
. This is called decategorialization
, or morphological reduction.
For example, the demonstrative
'that' as in "that book" comes to be used as a relative clause
marker, as in "the book that I know", or the change from category or number
('that' singular vs. 'those' plural) to the loss of number in "The things that I know".
is conventionalized as a grammatical marker, it tends to undergo erosion
; that is, the phonological substance is likely to be reduced in some way and to become more dependent on surrounding phonetic material". Heine
and Kuteva have also described different kinds of phonetic erosion:
1. Loss of phonetic segments, including loss of full syllables.
2. Loss of suprasegmental properties, such as stress, tone, or intonation.
3. Loss of phonetic autonomy and adaptation to adjacent phonetic units.
4. Phonetic simplification
'Going to' → 'gonna' and 'because' → 'coz' are examples of erosion in English. Another example is the change of the phrase "by the side of" to the preposition "beside". Some linguists retrace erosion to the speaker's tendency to follow the principle of least effort, while others think that erosion is a sign of changes taking place. However, phonetic erosion is not a necessary property of grammaticalization. It is a common process of language change in general, and occurs outside of grammaticalization as well.
.
Although these 'parameters of grammaticalization' are often linked to the theory, linguists such as Bybee
et al. (1994) have acknowledged that independently, they are not essential to grammaticalization. In addition, most are not limited to grammaticalization but can be applied in the wider context of language change. Critics of the theory of grammaticalization have used these difficulties to claim that grammaticalization has no independent status of its own, that all processes involved can be described separately from the theory of grammaticalization. Janda, for example, wrote that "given that even writers on grammaticalization themselves freely acknowledge the involvement of several distinct processes in the larger set of phenomena, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the notion of grammaticalization, too, tends to represent an epiphenomenal telescoping. That is, it may involve certain typical "path(way)s", but the latter seem to be built out of separate stepping-stones which can often be seen in isolation and whose individual outlines are always distinctly recognizable".
), or more grammatical one. The overlapping stages of grammaticalization form a chain, or more often called a cline
. These shifts generally follow similar patterns in different languages. Linguists do not agree on the precise definition of a cline or on its precise characteristics in a given instance. It is believed that the exact points on the cline do not always have a fixed position, but may vary. However, Hopper and Traugott's famous pattern for the cline of grammaticalization is commonly accepted as a model in which the different stages of the form is shown:
This particular cline is called 'the cline of grammaticality', and it is a common one. In this cline every item to the right represents a more grammatical and less lexical form than the one to its left. It is very common that full verbs become auxiliaries
and eventually inflexional endings. An example of this phenomenon can be seen in the change from the Old English (OE) verb
willan ('to want/to wish') to an auxiliary
verb signifying intention in Middle English
(ME): In Present Day English (PDE) this form is even shortened to 'll. The PDE verb 'will' can be said to have less lexical meaning than its preceding form in OE.
An illustrative example of this cline is in the orthography of Japanese compound verb
s. Many Japanese words are formed by connecting two verbs, as in , and in Japanese orthography lexical items are generally written with kanji
(here 行く and 聞く), while grammatical items are written with hiragana
(as in the connecting て). Compound verbs are thus generally written with a kanji for each constituent verb, but some suffixes have become grammaticalized, and are written in hiragana, such as , from , as in .
In Grammaticalization (2003) Hopper and Traugott state that the cline of grammaticalization has both diachronic and synchronic implications. Diachronically (i.e. looking at changes over time), clines represent a natural path along which forms or words change over time. However, synchronically (i.e. looking at a single point in time), clines can be seen as an arrangement of forms along imaginary lines, with at one end a 'fuller' or lexical form and at the other a more 'reduced' or grammatical form. What Hopper and Traugott mean is that from a diachronic or historical point of view, changes of word forms is seen as a natural process, whereas synchronically, this process can be seen as inevitable instead of historical.
The studying and documentation of recurrent cline
s enable linguists to form general laws of grammaticalization and language change in general. It plays an important role in the reconstruction of older states of a language. Moreover, the documenting of changes can help to reveal the lines along which a language is likely to develop in the future.
is the idea that grammaticalization, the development of lexical elements into grammatical ones, or less grammatical into more grammatical, is the preferred direction of linguistic change, that a grammatical item is much less likely to move backwards rather than forwards on Hopper & Traugott's cline of grammaticalization.
In the words of Bernd Heine
, "grammaticalization is a unidirectional process, that is, it leads from less grammatical to more grammatical forms and constructions". This is one of the strongest claims about grammaticalization, and is often cited as one of its basic principles. In addition, unidirectionality refers to a general developmental orientation which all (or the large majority) of the cases of grammaticalization have in common, and which can be paraphrased in abstract, general terms, independent of any specific case.
The idea of unidirectionality is an important one when trying to predict language change
through grammaticalization (and for making the claim that grammaticalization can be predicted). Lessau notes that "unidirectionality in itself is a predictive assertion in that it selects the general type of possible development (it predicts the direction of any given incipient case)," and unidirectionality also rules out an entire range of development types that do not follow this principle, hereby limiting the amount of possible paths of development.
, however, advocates often minimize the counterexamples or redefine them as not being part of the grammaticalization cline. He gives the example of Hopper
and Traugott (1993) who treat some putative counterexamples as cases of lexicalization, where a grammatical form is incorporated into a lexical item but does not itself become a lexical item. An example is the phrase to up the ante, which incorporates the preposition up (a function word) in a verb (a content word), though without up becoming a verb outside of this lexical item. Since it is the entire phrase to up the ante which is the verb, Hopper and Traugott argue that the word up itself cannot be said to have degrammaticalized.
Examples which are not confined to a specific lexical item are less common. One is the English genitive -'s, which in Old English was a suffix but in Modern English
is a clitic. As Jespersen (1894) put it,
Traugott cites a counterexample from function to content word proposed by Kate Burridge
(1998): the development in Pennsylvania German of the auxiliary wotte of the preterite subjunctive modal
welle 'would' (from 'wanted') into a full verb 'to wish, to desire'.
There are very few counterexamples that proceed further, and they required special circumstances to occur. One is found in the development of Irish Gaelic with the origin of the first-person-plural pronoun muid (a function word) from the inflectional suffix -mid (as in táimid "we are"), due to a reanalysis based on the verb–pronoun order of the other persons of the verb.
Since then, the study of grammaticalization has become broader, and linguists have extended the term into various directions.
From 90 years, studies on grammaticalization became incorporated in the Brazilian universities. Two exponents of Brazilian southeastern are: Maria Luiza Braga, in Rio de Janeiro, and Teixeira Ataliba Castilho, in Sao Paulo. Both graduate young researchers, who became active in this line of research. In all parts of Brazil, studies advanced and today, the interaction between grammar and cognition has become increasingly evident stronger even involving interdisciplinary work between psychology and linguistics. Related works:
Gonçalves, Carlos Sebastian et al. Introduction to grammaticalization, Publisher: Parabola, 2007.
Lima-Hernandes, Maria Célia. Interface Sociolinguistics grammaticalization, Publisher: Edusp, 2011.
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, grammaticalization (also known as grammatization, grammaticization) is a process by which words representing objects and actions (ie. noun
Noun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
s and verb
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
s) transform through sound change
Sound change
Sound change includes any processes of language change that affect pronunciation or sound system structures...
and language migration to become grammatical objects (affix
Affix
An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...
es and prepositions, etc). Grammaticalization is a powerful aspect of language, as it creates new function words within language, by separating functions from their original inflection
Inflection
In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
al and bound constructions (ie. from content words). It is a field of research in historical linguistics
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
, in the wider study of language change
Language change
Language change is the phenomenon whereby phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features of language vary over time. The effect on language over time is known as diachronic change. Two linguistic disciplines in particular concern themselves with studying language change:...
, which focuses on a particular process of lexical and grammatical change.
For an understanding of this process, a distinction needs to be made between lexical items, or content words, which carry specific lexical meaning, and grammatical items, or function words, with little or no lexical meaning which serve to express grammatical relationships between the different words within an utterance. Specifically, "the change whereby lexical terms and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions". Simply said, grammaticalization is the process in which a lexical word or a word cluster loses some or all of its lexical meaning and starts to fulfil a more grammatical function. It means that nouns and verbs which carry certain lexical meaning develop over time into grammatical items such as auxiliaries
Auxiliary verb
In linguistics, an auxiliary verb is a verb that gives further semantic or syntactic information about a main or full verb. In English, the extra meaning provided by an auxiliary verb alters the basic meaning of the main verb to make it have one or more of the following functions: passive voice,...
, case markers
Marker (linguistics)
In linguistics, a marker is a free or bound morpheme that indicates the grammatical function of the marked word, phrase, or sentence. In analytic languages and agglutinative languages, markers are generally easily distinguished. In fusional languages and polysynthetic languages, this is often not...
, inflection
Inflection
In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
s and sentence connectives.
A well-known example of grammaticalization is that of the process in which the lexical cluster let us, for example in the sentence "let us go", is reduced to a single word let's as in the sentence "let's you and me fight". The phrase has lost its lexical meaning of "allow us" and has changed into an auxiliary, while the pronoun 'us' reduced first to a suffix and then to an unanalyzed phoneme.
History
Before the term "grammaticalization" was first coined, the concept had already been developed in the works of BoppFranz Bopp
Franz Bopp was a German linguist known for extensive comparative work on Indo-European languages.-Biography:...
(1816), Schlegel (1818), Humboldt
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Humboldt was a German philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of Humboldt Universität. He is especially remembered as a linguist who made important contributions to the philosophy of language and to the theory and practice...
(1825) and Gabelentz (1891). Humboldt, for instance, came up with the idea of evolutionary language. He suggested that in all languages grammatical structures evolved out of a language stage in which there were only words for concrete objects and ideas. In order to successfully communicate these ideas, grammatical structures slowly came into existence. Grammar slowly developed through four different stages, each in which the grammatical structure would be more developed. Though neo-grammarians like Brugmann
Karl Brugmann
Karl Brugmann was a German linguist. He is a towering figure in Indo-European linguistics.-Biography:He was educated at Halle and Leipzig. He was instructor in the gymnasium at Wiesbaden and at Leipzig, and in 1872-77 was assistant at the Russian Institute of Classical Philology at the latter place...
rejected the separation of language into distinct "stages" in favour of uniformitarian assumptions, they were positively inclined towards some of these earlier linguists' hypotheses.
The actual term "grammaticalization" was first coined by the French linguist Antoine Meillet
Antoine Meillet
Paul Jules Antoine Meillet was one of the most important French linguists of the early 20th century. Meillet began his studies at the Sorbonne, where he was influenced by Michel Bréal, Ferdinand de Saussure, and the members of the Année Sociologique. In 1890 he was part of a research trip to the...
in his work L'évolution des Formes Grammaticales (1912) who first used it in the context in which it is still used today. Meillet's well known definition of grammaticalization was "the attribution of grammatical character to an erstwhile autonomous word". In this work Meillet showed that what was at issue was not the origins of grammatical forms but their transformations. He was thus able to present a notion of the creation of grammatical forms as a legitimate study for linguistics. Later studies in the field have further developed and altered Meillet's ideas and have introduced many other examples of grammaticalization.
During the second half of the twentieth century, grammaticalization became somewhat unfashionable. This is often said to be caused by the structuralist
Structural Linguistics
Structural linguistics is an approach to linguistics originating from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. De Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a static system of interconnected units...
ideas of language change
Language change
Language change is the phenomenon whereby phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features of language vary over time. The effect on language over time is known as diachronic change. Two linguistic disciplines in particular concern themselves with studying language change:...
in which grammaticalization did not play a role. The field of linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
at the time was strongly concerned with synchronic
Synchronic analysis
In linguistics, a synchronic analysis is one that views linguistic phenomena only at one point in time, usually the present, though a synchronic analysis of a historical language form is also possible. This may be distinguished from diachronics, which regards a phenomenon in terms of developments...
studies of language change, which marginalized historical approaches such as grammaticalization. It did however, mostly in Indo-European studies
Indo-European studies
Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. Its goal is to amass information about the hypothetical proto-language from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbed Proto-Indo-European , and its speakers, the...
, remain an instrument for explaining language change.
It was not until the 1970s, with the growth of interest in discourse analysis
Discourse analysis
Discourse analysis , or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken, signed language use or any significant semiotic event....
and universals, that the interest for grammaticalization in linguistic studies began to grow again. A greatly influential work in the domain was Christian Lehmann's Thoughts on Grammaticalization (1982). This was the first work to emphasize the continuity of research from the earliest period to the present, and it provided a survey of the major work in the field. He also invented a set of 'parameters', a method along which grammaticality
Grammaticality
In theoretical linguistics, grammaticality is the quality of a linguistic utterance of being grammatically well-formed. An * before a form is a mark that the cited form is ungrammatical....
could be measured both synchronically and diachronically.
Another important work was Heine
Bernd Heine
Bernd Heine is a German linguist and specialist in African studies.From 1978 to 2004 Heine held the chair for African Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany. His main focal points in research and teaching are African linguistics, language sociology, grammaticalization theory and language...
and Reh's Grammaticalization and Reanalysis in African Languages (1984). This work focussed on African languages
African languages
There are over 2100 and by some counts over 3000 languages spoken natively in Africa in several major language families:*Afro-Asiatic spread throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel...
synchronically from the point of view of grammaticalization. They saw grammaticalization as an important tool for describing the workings of languages and their universal aspects and it provided an exhaustive list of the pathways of grammaticalization.
The great number of studies on grammaticalization in the last decade show grammaticalization remains a popular item and is regarded as an important field within linguistic studies in general. Among recent publications there is a wide range of descriptive studies trying to come up with umbrella definitions and exhaustive lists, while others tend to focus more on its nature and significance, questioning the opportunities and boundaries of grammaticalization. An important and popular topic which is still debated is the question of unidirectionality.
Mechanisms
It is difficult to capture the term "grammaticalization" in one clear definition (see the 'various views on grammaticalization' section below). However, there are some processes that are often linked to grammaticalization. These are semantic bleaching, phonetic erosion, morphological reduction and obligatorification.Semantic bleaching
Semantic bleaching, or desemanticization, has been seen from early on as a characteristic of grammaticalization. It can be described as the loss of semantic content. More specifically, with reference to grammaticalization, bleaching refers to the loss of all (or most) lexical content of an entity while only its grammatical content is retained , for example Matisoff described bleaching as "the partial effacement of a morpheme's semantic features, the stripping away of some of its precise content so it can be used in an abstracter, grammatical-hardware-like way". Hainman wrote that "semantic reduction, or bleaching, occurs as a morpheme loses its intention: From describing a narrow set of ideas, it comes to describe an ever broader range of them, and eventually may lose its meaning altogether". He saw this as one of the two kinds of change that are always associated with grammaticalization (the other being phonetic reduction).Morphological reduction
Once a linguisticNatural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...
expression has changed from a lexical to a grammatical meaning (bleaching), it is likely to lose morphological
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
and syntactic elements that were characteristic of its initial category, but which are not relevant to the grammatical function
Grammatical function
In linguistics, grammatical functions refer to functional relationships between participants in a proposition...
. This is called decategorialization
De-categorialization
De-categorialization in linguistics, refers to one of the five principles by which you can detect grammaticalization while it is taking place...
, or morphological reduction.
For example, the demonstrative
Demonstrative
In linguistics, demonstratives are deictic words that indicate which entities a speaker refers to and distinguishes those entities from others...
'that' as in "that book" comes to be used as a relative clause
Relative clause
A relative clause is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun phrase, most commonly a noun. For example, the phrase "the man who wasn't there" contains the noun man, which is modified by the relative clause who wasn't there...
marker, as in "the book that I know", or the change from category or number
Grammatical number
In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
('that' singular vs. 'those' plural) to the loss of number in "The things that I know".
Phonetic erosion
Phonetic erosion (also called phonological attrition or phonological reduction), is another process that is often linked to grammaticalization. It implies that a linguistic expression loses phonetic substance when it has undergone grammaticalization. Heine writes that "once a lexemeLexeme
A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word. For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, conventionally written as RUN...
is conventionalized as a grammatical marker, it tends to undergo erosion
Erosion
Erosion is when materials are removed from the surface and changed into something else. It only works by hydraulic actions and transport of solids in the natural environment, and leads to the deposition of these materials elsewhere...
; that is, the phonological substance is likely to be reduced in some way and to become more dependent on surrounding phonetic material". Heine
Heine
Heine is a German family name. The name comes from "Heinrich" or the Hebrew "Chayyim" . When mentioned without a first name it usually refers ti the poet Heinrich Heine...
and Kuteva have also described different kinds of phonetic erosion:
1. Loss of phonetic segments, including loss of full syllables.
2. Loss of suprasegmental properties, such as stress, tone, or intonation.
3. Loss of phonetic autonomy and adaptation to adjacent phonetic units.
4. Phonetic simplification
'Going to' → 'gonna' and 'because' → 'coz' are examples of erosion in English. Another example is the change of the phrase "by the side of" to the preposition "beside". Some linguists retrace erosion to the speaker's tendency to follow the principle of least effort, while others think that erosion is a sign of changes taking place. However, phonetic erosion is not a necessary property of grammaticalization. It is a common process of language change in general, and occurs outside of grammaticalization as well.
Obligatorification
Obligatorification occurs when the use of linguistic structures becomes increasingly more obligatory in the process of grammaticalization. Lehmann describes it as a reduction in transparadigmatic variability, by which he means that "the freedom of the language user with regard to the paradigm as a whole" is reduced. Examples of obligatoriness can be found in the category of number, which can be obligatory in some languages or in specific contexts, in the development of articles, and in the development of personal pronouns of some languages. Some linguists, like Heine and Kuteva, stress the fact that even though obligatorification can be seen as an important process, it is not necessary for grammaticalization to take place, and it also occurs in other types of language changeLanguage change
Language change is the phenomenon whereby phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features of language vary over time. The effect on language over time is known as diachronic change. Two linguistic disciplines in particular concern themselves with studying language change:...
.
Although these 'parameters of grammaticalization' are often linked to the theory, linguists such as Bybee
Joan Bybee
Joan L. Bybee is an American linguist. She is a Distinguished Professor at the University of New Mexico. She served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2004. Much of her work concerns grammaticalisation, stochastics, modality, phonology and morphology.- Bibliography :*Hooper, Joan...
et al. (1994) have acknowledged that independently, they are not essential to grammaticalization. In addition, most are not limited to grammaticalization but can be applied in the wider context of language change. Critics of the theory of grammaticalization have used these difficulties to claim that grammaticalization has no independent status of its own, that all processes involved can be described separately from the theory of grammaticalization. Janda, for example, wrote that "given that even writers on grammaticalization themselves freely acknowledge the involvement of several distinct processes in the larger set of phenomena, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the notion of grammaticalization, too, tends to represent an epiphenomenal telescoping. That is, it may involve certain typical "path(way)s", but the latter seem to be built out of separate stepping-stones which can often be seen in isolation and whose individual outlines are always distinctly recognizable".
Clines
The process of a word moving out of its original word class into another is not a sudden development, but rather a slowly occurring series of individual shifts. It is generally understood that the process of grammaticalization starts with an uninflected lexical word (or a content word), which transforms into a grammatical (or a function wordFunction word
Function words are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker...
), or more grammatical one. The overlapping stages of grammaticalization form a chain, or more often called a cline
Cline (linguistics)
In linguistics, a cline is a scale of continuous gradation. While cline is most frequently invoked as a general concept, it has also developed specialized uses in various linguistic sub-disciplines.-Cline of grammaticalisation:...
. These shifts generally follow similar patterns in different languages. Linguists do not agree on the precise definition of a cline or on its precise characteristics in a given instance. It is believed that the exact points on the cline do not always have a fixed position, but may vary. However, Hopper and Traugott's famous pattern for the cline of grammaticalization is commonly accepted as a model in which the different stages of the form is shown:
- content word → grammatical word → cliticCliticIn morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that is grammatically independent, but phonologically dependent on another word or phrase. It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level...
→ inflectional affix
This particular cline is called 'the cline of grammaticality', and it is a common one. In this cline every item to the right represents a more grammatical and less lexical form than the one to its left. It is very common that full verbs become auxiliaries
Auxiliaries
An auxiliary force is a group affiliated with, but not part of, a military or police organization. In some cases, auxiliaries are armed forces operating in the same manner as regular soldiers...
and eventually inflexional endings. An example of this phenomenon can be seen in the change from the Old English (OE) verb
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
willan ('to want/to wish') to an auxiliary
Auxiliary verb
In linguistics, an auxiliary verb is a verb that gives further semantic or syntactic information about a main or full verb. In English, the extra meaning provided by an auxiliary verb alters the basic meaning of the main verb to make it have one or more of the following functions: passive voice,...
verb signifying intention in Middle English
Middle English
Middle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....
(ME): In Present Day English (PDE) this form is even shortened to 'll. The PDE verb 'will' can be said to have less lexical meaning than its preceding form in OE.
An illustrative example of this cline is in the orthography of Japanese compound verb
Compound verb
In linguistics, a compound verb or complex predicate is a multi-word compound that acts as a single verb. One component of the compound is a light verb or vector, which carries any inflections, indicating tense, mood, or aspect, but provides only fine shades of meaning...
s. Many Japanese words are formed by connecting two verbs, as in , and in Japanese orthography lexical items are generally written with kanji
Kanji
Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...
(here 行く and 聞く), while grammatical items are written with hiragana
Hiragana
is a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet . Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora...
(as in the connecting て). Compound verbs are thus generally written with a kanji for each constituent verb, but some suffixes have become grammaticalized, and are written in hiragana, such as , from , as in .
In Grammaticalization (2003) Hopper and Traugott state that the cline of grammaticalization has both diachronic and synchronic implications. Diachronically (i.e. looking at changes over time), clines represent a natural path along which forms or words change over time. However, synchronically (i.e. looking at a single point in time), clines can be seen as an arrangement of forms along imaginary lines, with at one end a 'fuller' or lexical form and at the other a more 'reduced' or grammatical form. What Hopper and Traugott mean is that from a diachronic or historical point of view, changes of word forms is seen as a natural process, whereas synchronically, this process can be seen as inevitable instead of historical.
The studying and documentation of recurrent cline
Cline (linguistics)
In linguistics, a cline is a scale of continuous gradation. While cline is most frequently invoked as a general concept, it has also developed specialized uses in various linguistic sub-disciplines.-Cline of grammaticalisation:...
s enable linguists to form general laws of grammaticalization and language change in general. It plays an important role in the reconstruction of older states of a language. Moreover, the documenting of changes can help to reveal the lines along which a language is likely to develop in the future.
Unidirectionality hypothesis
The unidirectionality hypothesisUnidirectionality hypothesis
In linguistics, the unidirectionality hypothesis proposes that grammaticalisation works in a single direction. That is, pronouns may fuse with verbs, or prepositions may fuse with nouns, to create new inflectional systems, but inflectional endings do not break off to create new pronouns or...
is the idea that grammaticalization, the development of lexical elements into grammatical ones, or less grammatical into more grammatical, is the preferred direction of linguistic change, that a grammatical item is much less likely to move backwards rather than forwards on Hopper & Traugott's cline of grammaticalization.
In the words of Bernd Heine
Bernd Heine
Bernd Heine is a German linguist and specialist in African studies.From 1978 to 2004 Heine held the chair for African Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany. His main focal points in research and teaching are African linguistics, language sociology, grammaticalization theory and language...
, "grammaticalization is a unidirectional process, that is, it leads from less grammatical to more grammatical forms and constructions". This is one of the strongest claims about grammaticalization, and is often cited as one of its basic principles. In addition, unidirectionality refers to a general developmental orientation which all (or the large majority) of the cases of grammaticalization have in common, and which can be paraphrased in abstract, general terms, independent of any specific case.
The idea of unidirectionality is an important one when trying to predict language change
Language change
Language change is the phenomenon whereby phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features of language vary over time. The effect on language over time is known as diachronic change. Two linguistic disciplines in particular concern themselves with studying language change:...
through grammaticalization (and for making the claim that grammaticalization can be predicted). Lessau notes that "unidirectionality in itself is a predictive assertion in that it selects the general type of possible development (it predicts the direction of any given incipient case)," and unidirectionality also rules out an entire range of development types that do not follow this principle, hereby limiting the amount of possible paths of development.
Counterexamples
Although unidirectionality is a key element of grammaticalization, it is not absolute. Indeed, the possibility of counterexamples, coupled with their rarity, is given as evidence for the general operating principle of unidirectionality. According to Lyle CampbellLyle Campbell
Lyle Richard Campbell is a linguist and leading expert on indigenous American languages—especially those of Mesoamerica—and on historical linguistics in general. He also has expertise in Uralic languages. He is presently Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.-Life and...
, however, advocates often minimize the counterexamples or redefine them as not being part of the grammaticalization cline. He gives the example of Hopper
Paul Hopper
Paul J. Hopper is an American linguist of British birth. In 1973, he proposed the glottalic theory regarding the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European consonant inventory, in parallel with the Georgian linguist Tamaz Gamkrelidze and the Russian linguist Vyacheslav V. Ivanov...
and Traugott (1993) who treat some putative counterexamples as cases of lexicalization, where a grammatical form is incorporated into a lexical item but does not itself become a lexical item. An example is the phrase to up the ante, which incorporates the preposition up (a function word) in a verb (a content word), though without up becoming a verb outside of this lexical item. Since it is the entire phrase to up the ante which is the verb, Hopper and Traugott argue that the word up itself cannot be said to have degrammaticalized.
Examples which are not confined to a specific lexical item are less common. One is the English genitive -'s, which in Old English was a suffix but in Modern English
Modern English
Modern English is the form of the English language spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in England, completed in roughly 1550.Despite some differences in vocabulary, texts from the early 17th century, such as the works of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible, are considered to be in Modern...
is a clitic. As Jespersen (1894) put it,
Traugott cites a counterexample from function to content word proposed by Kate Burridge
Kate Burridge
Professor Kate Burridge, BA , PhD , FAHA, is a prominent Australian linguist specialising in the Germanic languages. Burridge currently occupies the Chair of Linguistics in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University.Burridge completed her undergraduate training in...
(1998): the development in Pennsylvania German of the auxiliary wotte of the preterite subjunctive modal
Modal
Modal may refer to:* Modal , a textile made from spun Beechwood cellulose fiber* Modal analysis, the study of the dynamic properties of structures under vibrational excitation...
welle 'would' (from 'wanted') into a full verb 'to wish, to desire'.
There are very few counterexamples that proceed further, and they required special circumstances to occur. One is found in the development of Irish Gaelic with the origin of the first-person-plural pronoun muid (a function word) from the inflectional suffix -mid (as in táimid "we are"), due to a reanalysis based on the verb–pronoun order of the other persons of the verb.
Views on grammaticalization
Linguists have come up with different interpretation of the term 'grammaticalization', and there are many alternatives to the definition given in the introduction. The following will be a non-exhaustive list of authors who have written about the subject with their individual approaches to the nature of the term 'grammaticalization'.- Antoine MeilletAntoine MeilletPaul Jules Antoine Meillet was one of the most important French linguists of the early 20th century. Meillet began his studies at the Sorbonne, where he was influenced by Michel Bréal, Ferdinand de Saussure, and the members of the Année Sociologique. In 1890 he was part of a research trip to the...
(1912): "Tandis que l'analogie peut renouveler le détail des formes, mais laisse le plus souvent intact le plan d'ensemble du système grammatical, la "grammaticalisation" de certains mots crée des formes neuves, introduit des catégories qui n'avaient pas d'expression linguistique, transforme l'ensemble du système." ("While the analogy can renew the detail of the forms, but often leaves untouched the overall plan of the grammatical system, the 'grammacticalization' of certain words creates new forms, introduces categories for which there was no linguistical expression, and transforms the whole of the system.")
- Jerzy KurylowiczJerzy KurylowiczJerzy Kuryłowicz was a Polish linguist who studied Indo-European languages. He was the brother of Włodzimierz Kuryłowicz and his son is also called Jerzy Kuryłowicz.-Life:...
(1965): His "classical" definition is probably the one most often referred to: "Grammaticalization consists in the increase of the range of a morpheme advancing from a lexical to a grammatical or from a less grammatical to a more grammatical status, e.g. from a derivative formant to an inflectional one".
Since then, the study of grammaticalization has become broader, and linguists have extended the term into various directions.
- Christian Lehmann (1982): Writer of Thoughts on Grammaticalization and New Reflections on Grammaticalization and Lexicalization, wrote that "Grammaticalization is a process leading from lexemeLexemeA lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word. For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, conventionally written as RUN...
s to grammaticalGrammarIn linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
formatives. A number of semanticSemanticsSemantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
, syntacticSyntaxIn linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
and phonologicalPhonologyPhonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
processes interact in the grammaticalization of morphemes and of whole constructions. A sign is grammaticalized to the extent that it is devoid of concrete lexicalLexiconIn linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut...
meaning and takes part in obligatory grammatical rules".
- Paul HopperPaul HopperPaul J. Hopper is an American linguist of British birth. In 1973, he proposed the glottalic theory regarding the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European consonant inventory, in parallel with the Georgian linguist Tamaz Gamkrelidze and the Russian linguist Vyacheslav V. Ivanov...
(1991): Hopper defined the five 'principles' by which you can detect grammaticalization while it is taking place: layeringLayering (linguistics)Layering in linguistics refers to one of the five principles by which you can detect grammaticalisation while it is taking place. The other four are: divergence, specialisation, persistence, and de-categorialisation....
, divergenceDivergence (linguistics)Divergence in linguistics refers to one of the five principles by which you can detect grammaticalisation while it is taking place. The other four are: layering, specialisation, persistence, and de-categorialisation....
, specializationSpecialization (linguistics)In linguistics, the term specialization , refers to one of the five principles by which grammaticalization can be detected while it is taking place...
, persistencePersistence (linguistics)Persistence in linguistics refers to one of the five principles by which you can detect grammaticalisation while it is taking place. The other four are: layering, divergence, specialisation, and de-categorialisation....
, and decategorizationDe-categorializationDe-categorialization in linguistics, refers to one of the five principles by which you can detect grammaticalization while it is taking place...
.
- František Lichtenberk (1991): In his article on "The Gradualness of Grammaticalization", he defined grammaticalization as "a historical process, a kind of change that has certain consequences for the morphosyntactic categories of a language and thus for the grammar of the language.
- James A. Matisoff (1991): Matisoff used the term 'metaphorMetaphorA metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
' to describe grammaticalization when he wrote: "Grammatization may also be viewed as a subtype of metaphor (etymologically "carrying beyond"), our most general term for a meaning shift. […] Grammaticalization is a metaphorical shift toward the abstract, "metaphor" being defined as an originally conscious or voluntary shift in a word's meaning because of some perceived similarity.
- Elizabeth Traugott & Bernd HeineBernd HeineBernd Heine is a German linguist and specialist in African studies.From 1978 to 2004 Heine held the chair for African Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany. His main focal points in research and teaching are African linguistics, language sociology, grammaticalization theory and language...
(1991): Together, they edited a two-volume collection of papers from a 1988 conference organized by Talmy Givón under the title Approaches to Grammaticaliztion. They defined grammaticalization as "a linguistic process, both through time and synchronically, of organization of categories and of codingCodingCoding may refer to:* Channel coding in coding theory* Line coding* Computer programming, the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging / troubleshooting, and maintaining the source code of computer programs...
. The study of grammaticalization therefore highlights the tension between relatively unconstrained lexical expression and more constrained morphosyntactic coding, and points to relative indeterminacy in language and to the basic non-discreteness of categories".
- Olga Fischer & Anette Rosenbach (2000): In the introduction of their book Pathways of Change, a summary is given of recent approaches to grammaticalization. "The term 'grammaticalization' is today used in various ways. In a fairly loose sense, 'grammaticalized' often simply refers to the fact that a form or construction has become fixed and obligatory. (…) In a stricter sense, however, (…) the notion of 'grammaticalization' is first and foremost a diachronicDiachronicDiachronic or Diachronous,from the Greek word Διαχρονικός , is a term for something happening over time. It is used in several fields of research.*Diachronic linguistics : see Historical linguistics...
process with certain typical mechanisms."
- Lyle CampbellLyle CampbellLyle Richard Campbell is a linguist and leading expert on indigenous American languages—especially those of Mesoamerica—and on historical linguistics in general. He also has expertise in Uralic languages. He is presently Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.-Life and...
lists proposed counterexamples in his article "What's wrong with grammaticalization?". In the same issue of Language SciencesLanguage SciencesLanguage Sciences is a peer-reviewed journal published six times a year by Elsevier. The editor is Nigel Love of the University of Cape Town.- External links :* — official journal page at publisher's website...
, Richard D. Janda cites over 70 works critical of the unidirectionality hypothesis in his article "Beyond 'pathways' and 'unidirectionality'".
Citations
Grammaticalization at BrazilFrom 90 years, studies on grammaticalization became incorporated in the Brazilian universities. Two exponents of Brazilian southeastern are: Maria Luiza Braga, in Rio de Janeiro, and Teixeira Ataliba Castilho, in Sao Paulo. Both graduate young researchers, who became active in this line of research. In all parts of Brazil, studies advanced and today, the interaction between grammar and cognition has become increasingly evident stronger even involving interdisciplinary work between psychology and linguistics. Related works:
Gonçalves, Carlos Sebastian et al. Introduction to grammaticalization, Publisher: Parabola, 2007.
Lima-Hernandes, Maria Célia. Interface Sociolinguistics grammaticalization, Publisher: Edusp, 2011.