Grammaticalization

Abstract

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. The Latin demonstrative ille ‘that,’ with strong deictic function (: ille homo ‘that man,’ homo ille ‘that notorious, famous man’) gave rise to the obligatory article of the Romance languages (French l'homme, Spanish el hombre), where its function is simply to mark the noun phrase. Grammaticalization is thus a process leading from lexemes to grammatical formatives: the more a form is grammaticalized the more it will be syntagmatically constrained. In a short history of the studies on grammaticalization and a discussion of the present state of the art, attention is paid to the internal mechanisms, which govern linguistic structures, and the external psychological/cognitive causes of grammaticalization. Several linguists have hinted at the fact that grammaticalization very often originates in discourse strategies (i.e., in pragmatics), evolving to syntactic structures and later obligatory morphological markers. Grammaticalization is a pervasive phenomenon whose effects may be seen at all linguistic levels. In this article the following topics will be dealt with: the grammaticalization process as a continuum; is grammaticalization unidirectional? The dynamic of the process: degrammaticalization and transcategorization.