Formal Evidence in Grammaticalization Research

This collective volume focuses on the crucial role of formal evidence in recognizing and explaining instances of grammaticalization. It addresses the hitherto neglected issue of system-internal factors steering grammaticalization and also revisits formal recognition criteria such as Lehmann and Hopper’s parameters of grammaticalization. The articles investigate developments of such phenomena as modal auxiliaries, attitudinal markers, V1-conditionals, nominalizers, and pronouns, using data from a wide range of languages and (in some cases) from diachronic corpora. In the process, they explore finer mechanisms of grammaticalization such as modification of coding means, structural and semantic analogy, changes in frequency and prosody, and shifts in collocational and grammatical distribution. The volume is of particular interest to historical linguists working on grammaticalization, and general linguists working on the interface between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, as well as that between synchrony and diachrony.

József Andor, University of Pécs, in Journal of Pragmatics Vol. 75 (2015) Pag. 69--72:
Formal Evidence in Grammaticalization Research provides recent research -- including corpus-based approaches in most of its chapters -- of the processes of delexicalization and grammaticalization, taking into consideration a large range of data, from the morphology, semantics, and syntax of various languages, and interpreting the usage-based, pragmatic factors that underly the identified linguistic changes. The strict and systematic typological perspective in the analyses presented in the chapters is of vital importance. The book should be a must to be read by all those researchers and students who are interested in studying language change at various levels of linguistic representation, both diachronically and synchronically. The book offers itself as an invaluable source for researchers of linguistic pragmatics via a rich body of pragmatically relevant analyses that are carried out with an emphasis on the interaction and interfacing of the pragmatic component of linguistic description with other modules of the functional operation of language.