Volume 48, Issue 2 - REFINING GRAMMATICALIZATION

So. . . what is it then, this grammaticalization? Probably every linguist who is interested in language change will have raised this question at some point. And many of them will also have some answer more or less at hand. The problem is that these answers may all differ in one detail or other. A likely reason for this is the great success (or, for that matter, popularity) that the concept of grammaticalization has enjoyed in historical linguistics to date. Therefore, maybe inevitably, the proliferation of analyses within the domain of grammaticalization studies has also led to a proliferation of terms and notions, not all of them sharply defined. This, in turn, has produced a certain dissatisfaction with the state of the field among many more sceptical (or maybe just more cautious) linguists. Hence, the most important aim of the present collection of articles (which presents a selection of the papers presented at the workshop “Refining Grammaticalization” at Freie Universität Berlin in February 2012) is to try to come to grips with the notion of grammaticalization and related concepts in the light of recent theorizing in historical linguistics.

I discuss here various ways in which one might devise a counting heuristic for grammaticalization with an eye to testing the quantificational claims that have been made against specific implementations of such a heuristic. More specifically, I address the question of grammaticalization as a phenomenon of individuals versus a phenomenon of speech communities versus a phenomenon of languages. Similarly, I hope to show, once the individual versus group issue is dealt with, that by adopting Haspelmath’s (2004) definition of grammaticalization as the tightening of internal dependencies, and thus a weakening of boundaries, between elements, we are in a better position to undertake a census since linguists have developed a reasonable idea of the sort of grammatical boundaries that need to be posited (word boundaries, clitic boundaries, morpheme boundaries, phoneme-to-phoneme transitions, etc.). Further, this view generalizes to offer a solution to the problematic notion of gradience in grammaticalization - cf. Kuryłowicz’s famous definition of grammaticalization as taking in movement from “less” to “more” grammatical - since linguists have long posited a hierarchy of boundary strength that can be appealed to.

It has long been recognized that many instances of change that have been discussed within the framework of grammaticalization studies notoriously defy categorization, for instance because they share properties of grammaticalization and lexicalization (Brinton & Traugott 2005), or because they share some properties of grammaticalization, but not all of them, as in the case of discourse markers (e.g. Ocampo 2006). In order to avoid these classification issues, we will argue that it is more useful to reduce grammaticalization and related changes to their “main mechanisms” (formal reanalysis and semantic reinterpretation), “primitive changes” (micro-changes on the levels of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and/or discourse), and “side effects” (e.g. obligatorification or layering). In grammaticalization and related changes, formal reanalysis and semantic reinterpretation tend to coincide with different sets of primitive changes. Primitive changes will be defined as ternary parameters with the values reduction, expansion, or zero, and it will be seen that they tend to cluster in different ways. Some of these clusters may coincide with changes traditionally labeled “grammaticalization”, “degrammaticalization”, or “lexicalization”, but changes may also cluster in alternative ways. This novel approach to composite changes we term the “clustering approach”, and we aim to show that this model of analysis allows for a more fine-grained account of composite changes than definition-based taxonomies.

The article addresses structural aspects of language change which have been ascribed to grammaticalization and have tacitly been presupposed by diverse accounts (i) of the motives of complex changes, (ii) of the role of language contact, and (iii) by attempts to create areal profiles of language types and zones of convergence. We discuss some of the preconditions for a comprehensive and yet unified treatment of changes in which grammaticalization would not become an anythinggoes concept of grammatical change. Starting from a reconsideration of Lehmann’s parameters and their treatment in the literature, we first address problems connected to accounts based on prototypes (or checklists). Parameters belonging to the syntagmatic axis are analyzed in more detail. Even though parameters may be ranked within prototype-based approaches, such an approach is shown to be insufficient in articulating a coherent theory. An alternative might consist in the application of a superordinate principle based on relative discourse prominence (together with conventionalization). The advantages and drawbacks of both approaches are investigated, and it is argued that they should be employed as complementary parts of a coherent grammaticalization theory that is yet to be detailed.

Over the years, several studies on grammaticalization have used the contrasting terms primary and secondary grammaticalization for, roughly speaking, changes from lexical to grammatical and from grammatical to (more) grammatical. Primary grammaticalization has been treated as instantiating prototypical grammaticalization. This article scrutinizes the concept of secondary grammaticalization with the goal of assessing whether it has explanatory power and encompasses processes of grammaticalization that are sufficiently different from primary grammaticalization to justify distinct terminology. In the first part of the article, I take stock of the different definitions and interpretations of the concept of secondary grammaticalization in the literature. I conclude from this review that there is no unified definition and that the concept has in fact been applied to an array of widely differing changes. In the second part, I take a closer look at five distinct interpretations, which together cover the spectrum of phenomena featuring in the literature, in order to assess their explanatory power and relevance. The conclusion from this exercise is that the changes identified in each of the five definitions can be captured within a general definition of grammaticalization, and neither of them necessitates the addition of secondary grammaticalization as a separate notion.

The article explores the possibilities of re(de)fining grammaticalization from a usage-based perspective. Since definitions of grammaticalization remain controversial and current approaches differ in various important respects, some terminological clarification seems necessary. I will show that in spite of their close relation to usage-based approaches to language and language change, current approaches to grammaticalization and related phenomena do not consistently follow a usagebased perspective when defining the basic theoretical concepts and analyzing individual changes. I argue that a usage-based approach may propose new answers to controversial issues in grammaticalization research and suggest new pathways of analysis, focusing on the micro-steps of evolution. Finally, I present a case study of the French indefinite pronoun on which shows that innovations may occur and be diffused in distinct pragmatic settings. The notion of discursive ambiguity provides a detailed description of these potential innovation scenarios. In this sense, the study illustrates the potential of fine-grained analyses of the micro-events within grammaticalization from a usage-based perspective.

Some recent approaches to language change within a constructional framework have been concerned with the development of procedural and of contentful constructions. This article considers how work in the tradition of grammaticalization has informed such approaches and points out some of the differences between the two research traditions. It highlights some of the problems around adopting key features of the grammaticalization tradition into a model of language structure which sees the language system as a network of conventionalized pairings of form and meaning, in which specific micro-constructions inherit properties from more general schemas. It also considers key issues in language change, such as directionality, the relationship between reanalysis and analogy, and the status of clines and parameters.

The rise of new derivational affixes can be analyzed adequately as a case of “constructionalization” within the framework of Construction Morphology as developed by Booij (2010). We review some aspects and problems of previous accounts that view the emergence of derivational affixes as a case of grammaticalization or as a case of lexicalization, respectively. In line with recent developments in grammaticalization research, not the isolated element (word or affix) is viewed as the locus of change, but the complex word as a whole - seen as a “construction” in the sense of Construction Grammar - and its relation with other constructions. Morphological change can be conceived as constructional change at the word level.