Abstract
The notion of ‘grammaticalization’ — the embedding of once non- (or less-) grammatical phenomena into the grammar of a language — has enjoyed broad acceptance over the past 30 years as a new paradigm for describing and accounting for linguistic change. Despite its appeal, my contention is that there are some issues with ‘grammaticalization’ as it is conventionally described and discussed in the literature. My goal here is to explore what some of those problems are and to focus on what grammaticalization has to offer as a methodology for studying language change. Drawing on case studies from the history of English and the history of Greek, I reach a characterization of how much of grammatical change can legitimately be called “grammaticalization” and how much is something else. In this way, I work to achieve a sense of what grammaticalization is and what it is not.
Highlights
The notion of ‘grammaticalization’ — the embedding of once non-(or less) grammatical phenomena into the grammar of a language — has enjoyed broad acceptance over the past 30 or so years as a new paradigm for describing and accounting for linguistic change
I start with a fairly neutral characterization of grammaticalization, focusing on what happens in such developments, that is, on grammaticalization as a linguistic effect:3 the embedding into grammar, i.e., the taking on of grammatical status, of once-non-(or less-) grammatical phenomena
This rota- example from Greek poses an even more significant problem since it is often claimed that counter-examples such as those recognized by Haspelmath exhibit no pattern and are sporadic and unsystematic; there are numerous Watkins’ Law examples that have been discussed in the literature and each one could lend itself to the same sort of morphological analysis as with rotá, so that this particular instance of degrammaticalization is one token of a more general — and systematic — type of counter-example to unidirectionality
Summary
The notion of grammaticalization can be seen as a guide to a methodology for understanding certain types of grammatical change. It is straightforward to segment the genitive forms as: onómat-os mélit-os poimén-os and working with an alternation between the stem form with -t and the nominative form without a -t to internally reconstruct the paradigms as having *mélit and *ónomat as the historical NOM.SG forms, with a final stop-deletion sound change giving the attested forms At this point, it is appropriate to turn to external data in the form of comparisons from other Indo-European languages, the word for ‘honey’ in Hittite and Gothic: Hittite Gothic milit miliθ. Grammaticalization as a methodology in reconstructing linguistic history must be viewed as generating hypotheses, not necessarily giving definitive answers
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