Abstract
Abstract The present paper investigates language change in the categories of Number, Gender, Case and Definiteness from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. On the basis of data from Germanic and Slavic, as well as from Greek, Breton, Spanish and Persian, it is claimed that the observed changes are constrained by the Animacy Hierarchy and what we call the Relevance Constraint, which says that language change targets the part of the lexicon where the categories in question are most relevant for human experience and the changes do not make any ‘leaps’ along the Hierarchy. It is suggested that animacy and relevance presuppose a linguistic theory based on embodiment and construal, such as cognitive linguistics.
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