What’s wrong with grammaticalization?

Abstract

Claims about grammaticalization, and especially about “grammaticalization theory,” are assessed. It is argued that grammaticalization is derivative, that is, that it has no independent status of its own, but rather relies on other processes and mechanisms of linguistic change which are independent of grammaticalization but which provide the explanations for the phenomena involved in grammaticalization. This raises the question of whether grammaticalization has any value at all. The position taken here is that it does, that while the phenomenon of grammaticalization is interesting and attention on it has provided a range of valuable information, there are serious problems with so-called “grammaticalization theory.”