Abstract
Most current views on grammaticalisation consider reanalysis to be the basic mechanism underlying grammaticalisation. A comparison of subject doubling data from West Germanic and Romance varieties shows that this view faces problems. The grammaticalisation of pronouns into clitics and agreement markers is less likely to proceed into the final stages in West Germanic than in Romance dialects. This difference can be related to the fact that some of the obvious analogical extensions for the use of clitics in Romance are not or to a lesser extent available in West Germanic. Hence, the grammaticalisation pathway of a certain pattern is crucially determined by the pattern’s potential for paradigmatic extensions rather than by its liability to reanalysis.
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