The purpose of this article is a brief description of how Ukrainian linguists and philologists received through nineteenth- and twentieth-century European theories. These scholars worked in the condition of the Russian Empire, early Soviet Union, or exile; however, they can be used approaches and motifs that make it possible to talk about a coherent (albeit usually implicit) Ukrainian tradition. Within this tradition, the initial influence belonged to the ideas of Humboldt and German idealism, although ‘balanced’ by positivism, a special kind of historicism, and then especially by the approaches of Saussure.

The article contrasts Roman Jakobson’s and Boris Yarkho’s approaches to evolutionary theories used to explain linguistic and literary development. Jakobson’s work, grounded in nomogenetic principles, linked language and organic life through metaphor, emphasizing the universal patterns of evolution in both domains. By contrast, Yarkho, a follower of Darwin and Mendel, treated literature metonymically—as a homological extension of life. Yarkho’s approach sought order on the large scale, as in population biology, relying on a comparative-statistical method, in which he anticipated Digital Humanities. Meanwhile, Jakobson’s approach, despite being based on scientifically outdated Nomogenesis, aligned with Schrödinger’s work in What Is Life?, which explored the regularities of living systems. Schrödinger’s predictions about the molecular basis of life, including the aperiodic crystal structure, foreshadowed the discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure, a breakthrough that Jakobson celebrated as a confirmation of his biological metaphors for language.

This paper deals with the “modern” notion of grammaticalization as it has been developed in the 1980s. It is since the programmatic study by Christian Lehmann that the research on grammaticalization has received increasing interest and resulted in a large body of work. However, for the last two or three decades the interest in research on grammaticalization seems to be rather fading. Even more, the concept of grammaticalization is being gradually ousted by alternative notions such as constructionalization and constructional change. I will focus on the relevant paradigmatic changes which have occurred within the framework of grammaticalization research dating from the 1980s. At least two significant shifts occurred during this time, mainly due to the steadily increasing amount of extensive empirical studies on grammaticalization and due to the shift of interest from formal to functional aspects of diachronic processes. First, a shift occurred from the loss aspect towards the rearrangement aspect. Second, the conceptualization of the locus of change has been widened from single elements to constructions. With respect to the latter aspect, the growing interest in constructionist approaches to language structure has decisively influenced this shift of perspective. In light of these recent changes, the ultimate question will be whether the concept of grammaticalization as it has been originally introduced is still needed or whether it would be better to abandon it altogether and to use instead other concepts proposed in the most recent literature.

L’article fait l’inventaire d’une série de travaux sur la diversité linguistique du portugais parlé dans l’État de Paraná (Brésil), afin de montrer comment un long processus de construction d’un savoir sur le(s) dialecte(s) du Paraná s’est déroulé à travers l’histoire.

Le futur et le conditionnel français sont souvent présentés comme des cas exemplaires de grammaticalisation. La périphrase à l’origine de leur formation est signalée au début du xixe siècle par les romanistes. Jusqu’à cette date, les grammaires du français, en dépit d’une analyse assez juste de la morphologie, et de l’intuition précoce de phénomènes de grammaticalisation en français (y compris dans le cas du verbe) ne lient pas genèse temporelle et genèse formelle et ne proposent pas d’hypothèse sur la formation du futur et du conditionnel. Cet article se propose d’étudier comment s’articulent ces deux histoires : histoire du concept de grammaticalisation et histoire du discours sur le futur, et comment s’opère le passage d’une vision achronique vers une interprétation historique des données linguistiques disponibles.