Grammaticalization
Grammaticalization is
a linguistic process in which words change from representing objects or actions to serving grammatical functions. Grammaticalization can involve content words, such as nouns and verbs, developing into new function words that express grammatical relationships among other words in a sentence. This may happen rather than speakers deriving such new function words from existing bound, inflectional constructions. For example, the Old English verb willan 'to want', 'to wish' has become the Modern English auxiliary verb will, which expresses intention or simply futurity. Some concepts are often grammaticalized; others, such as evidentiality, less frequently.
In explaining this process, linguistics distinguishes between two types of linguistic items:
- lexical items or content words, which carry specific lexical meaning
- grammatical items or function words, which serve mainly to express grammatical relationships between the different words in an utterance
Where grammaticalization takes place, nouns and verbs which carry certain lexical meaning develop over time into grammatical items such as auxiliaries, case markers, inflections, and sentence connectives.
A well-known example of grammaticalization is that of the process in which the lexical cluster let us, for example in "let us eat", is reduced to let's as in "let's you and me fight". Here, the phrase has lost its lexical meaning of "allow us" and has become an auxiliary introducing a suggestion, the pronoun 'us' reduced first to a suffix and then to an unanalyzed phoneme.
In other areas of linguistics, the term grammaticalization has taken on a much broader meaning. These other senses of the term are discussed [|below].
History
The concept was developed in the works of Bopp, Schlegel, Humboldt and Gabelentz. 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 term "grammaticalization" in the modern sense was coined by the French linguist Antoine Meillet in his L'évolution des formes grammaticales. Meillet's definition was "the attribution of a grammatical nature to a formerly autonomous word". 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, the field of linguistics was strongly concerned with synchronic studies of language change, with less emphasis on 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 linguistic universals, that the interest for grammaticalization in linguistic studies began to grow again. A greatly influential work in the domain was 's Thoughts on Grammaticalization. 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. Lehmann also invented a set of 'parameters', a method along which grammaticality could be measured both synchronically and diachronically.
Another important work was Heine and 's Grammaticalization and Reanalysis in African Languages. 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.
Mechanisms
It is difficult to capture the term "grammaticalization" in one clear definition. However, there are some processes that are often linked to grammaticalization. These are semantic bleaching, morphological reduction, phonetic erosion, 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 lexical content of an entity while only its grammatical content is retained. For example, James 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". John Haiman 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.For example, both English suffixes -ly, and -like ultimately come from an earlier Proto-Germanic etymon, *līką, which meant body or corpse. There is no salient trace of that original meaning in the present suffixes for the native speaker, but speakers instead treat the more newly formed suffixes as bits of grammar that help them form new words. One could make the connection between the body or shape of a physical being and the abstract property of likeness or similarity, but only through metonymic reasoning, after one is explicitly made aware of this connection.
Morphological reduction
Once a linguistic expression has changed from a lexical to a grammatical meaning, 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" came to be used as a relative clause marker, and lost the grammatical category of number, as in "the book that I know" versus "the things that I know".
Phonetic erosion
Phonetic erosion, 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 lexeme 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".Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva have described different kinds of phonetic erosion for applicable cases:
- Loss of phonetic segments, including loss of full syllables.
- Loss of suprasegmental properties, such as stress, tone, or intonation.
- Loss of phonetic autonomy and adaptation to adjacent phonetic units.
- Phonetic simplification
However, phonetic erosion, a common process of language change that can take place with no connection to grammaticalization, is not a necessary property of grammaticalization. For example, the Latin construction of the type clarā mente, meaning 'with a clear mind' is the source of modern Romance productive adverb formation, as in Italian chiaramente, and Spanish claramente 'clearly'. In both of those languages, -mente in this usage is interpretable by today's native speakers only as a morpheme signaling 'adverb' and it has undergone no phonological erosion from the Latin source, mente. This example also illustrates that semantic bleaching of a form in its grammaticalized morphemic role does not necessarily imply bleaching of its lexical source, and that the two can separate neatly in spite of maintaining identical phonological form: the noun mente is alive and well today in both Italian and Spanish with its meaning 'mind', yet native speakers do not recognize the noun 'mind' in the suffix -mente.
The phonetic erosion may bring a brand-new look to the phonological system of a language, by changing the inventory of phones and phonemes, making new arrangements in the phonotactic patterns of a syllable, etc. Special treatise on the phonological consequences of grammaticalization and lexicalization in the Chinese languages can be found in Wei-Heng Chen, which provides evidence that a morphophonological change can later change into a purely phonological change, and evidence that there is a typological difference in the phonetic and phonological consequences of grammaticalization between monosyllabic languages vs non-monosyllabic languages, a difference mostly initiated by the German linguist W. Humboldt, putting Sino-Tibetan languages in a sharp contrast to the other languages in the world in typology.